Secondary Cities of Argentina: The Social History of Corrientes, Salta, and Mendoza, 1850-1910 9780804766623

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Secondary Cities of Argentina

Secondary Cities of

ARGENTINA The Social History of Corrientes, Salta, and Mendoza, I 8 5o- I 9 I o

JAMES R. SCOBIE Completed and Edited by Samuel L. Baily with a Foreword by Ingrid Winther Scobie

Stanford University Press, Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1988 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data appear at the end of the book Published with the assistance of the Pinon Charitable Trust.

Contents

Foreword, by Ingrid Winther Scobie

Vll

Editor's Preface

XI

Author's Preface

XV

ONE

Setting the Stage

I

TWO

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

r6

Corrientes: A Study in Stagnation

48

Salta: The Sleeping Beauty

75

THREE FOUR

Mendoza: Challenge and Response

103

The People

125

SEVEN

The Upper Class and Immigration

139

EIGHT

Houses and Shacks: Residential Patterns

154

Work

r86

Amusements

209

Editor's Conclusion

225

Notes

237

Index

269

FIVE SIX

NINE TEN

I 2

pages of photographs follow p.

I I

8

Foreword

The idea for Secondary Cities of Argentina emerged from Jim's longterm interest in the urbanization process in Argentina. His research in the late 19 so's on wheat in Argentina (Revolution on the Pampas: A Social History of Argentine Wheat, r86o-I9IO) and the writing of a general political and economic history of Argentina in the 196o's (Argentina: A City and a Nation) convinced him that one could not understand Argentina without understanding its capital, the city of Buenos Aires. This conviction led to an in-depth study of that city. As he said in his preface to Buenos Aires: From Plaza to Suburb (1974), the evolution of Buenos Aires "symbolizes and explains much of Argentine development." The economic prosperity in Argentina during the late nineteenth century benefited Buenos Aires, not the rest of the country. "The city dominated the nation." As Jim neared completion of the Buenos Aires book, he looked ahead to his next project-a cross-national study comparing the commercial-bureaucratic Buenos Aires to two other economically similar cities, one in the United States and one in Australia. He read a considerable amount of Australian and U.S. urban history and began corresponding with historians in Australia. Eventually, however, he decided instead to investigate Argentine secondary cities. He increasingly believed that the story of the giant metropolis of Buenos Aires did not explain the whole of the urbanization process in Argentina. Other cities, though they depended on Buenos Aires to a large degree, had led an independent life of their own. Thus began the Secondary Cities study. For this research, Jim was interested in exploring the use of the computer, despite the fact that he considered himself almost too old (at age 4 I !) to undertake retraining as a historian. Initially he relied on the

viii

Foreword

expertise of his Latin Americanist colleague at Indiana University, John Lombardi. After Jim moved to the University of California, San Diego, in r 977, his colleague Tom Dublin assisted Jim. Jim looked to Dublin's approach to researching and writing social history as a model for Secondary Cities. Jim completed the archival research for this book in Argentina during 1975-76. During our stay in Buenos Aires he made several long trips to each city. He most enjoyed Corrientes, perhaps because it had changed the least. Jim relished the slow pace of life and the informal, friendly atmosphere of the few neighborhood restaurants. While I appreciated his enthusiasm about Corrientes I did not share it; I enjoyed much more the brisker pace of life in Salta and Mendoza. In the process of writing Secondary Cities, Jim became convinced that exploration into the Argentine pattern might prove helpful in analyzing similar urban development throughout Latin America and possibly in other parts of the world. He also realized that little literature on secondary cities existed. In 1980, therefore, he took time off from his book to examine patterns of primary and secondary cities throughout Latin America, work that appeared as "The Growth of Latin American Cities, 1870-1930" in The Cambridge History of Latin America (vol. 4, 1986). By the time he died in June 19 8 1, Jim had essentially completed the first half of the book, the narrative chapters of each city's development. But he had only drafted the final five chapters, those that drew most heavily from the statistical material where he was testing dozens of hypotheses including the interrelationships between class, living conditions, work patterns, immigrants, and economic growth in secondary city life. He never completed the analytical process or analyzed fully the material at hand. Thus the task of completing the book was a substantial one. The job required a noted Argentinist with computer fluency, the ability to understand Jim's historical imagination, and the skill to revise half a book in a style reflecting Jim's polished work. Fortunately Sam Baily, the ideal scholar for this major undertaking who also had the needed emotional commitment to see the book in print, offered to help. Little did he realize how time-consuming the project would ultimately become. All this he proposed when he was working diligently to complete various projects including a major study of comparative Italian immigration patterns in Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. In the end,

Foreword

1x

he gave up close to two years of time from his own research and writing, a most uncommon and generous gift. Sam's manuscript more than measures up to my most optimistic expectations. I think the published version is substantially as Jim would have produced it. While there might have been a few additional conclusions, and God forbid, more tables, the essence of Jim's work is here. My hope now is that this book-and the research materials that are available to scholars at the University of California, San Diego, Library-will provide a starting point for those interested in pursuing the role of secondary cities in the overall urbanization process in Argentina, Latin America, and Third World countries.

Denton, Texas Summer 1987

Ingrid Winther Scobie

Editor's Preface

It has been a special honor for me to complete, edit, and guide through publication the manuscript that Jim Scobie was working on at the time of his death in r98r. Jim was one of the finest scholars of Latin American history in our generation. He was widely respected for his meticulous research, his careful analysis, his strong narrative style, and his attention to new areas and approaches to history. Each of his previous books opened up important new aspects of history. The present manuscript continues this fine tradition; it explores the critical but almost completely neglected subject of the growth of secondary cities in Argentina. The hypotheses that inform the study provide the basis for future comparative analyses of secondary cities in other parts of Latin America and in the rest of the world. This book thus makes a major contribution not only to Argentine urban history but also to the general field of urban studies. Undoubtedly its appearance will stimulate interest in the nature of secondary cities within a wide variety of national urban structures and give conceptual direction to scholars who wish to explore the topic historically in these other settings. It is difficult to pick up someone else's unfinished manuscript and complete it. My principal concern was to make the book as close as possible to the one Jim would have written had he lived. There were, however, some gaps in the manuscript, and the author's intentions were not always clear. In these cases, I relied on my knowledge of Argentine history and my best judgment. I have done no additional research, and I have been careful to add nothing of substance that was not already in the manuscript in some form. Where introductions and conclusions to chapters and sections were missing, I supplied them. I also cut or expanded parts and rearranged the sequence of some sections in order to clarify and make consistent the line of argument. The interpretation

xu

Editor's Preface

is Jim's, and I believe I have maintained the conceptual integrity of his work. When I received the manuscript, the first two chapters were complete and needed only minor revisions. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 were nearly complete; I needed only to rewrite small sections and to rearrange some parts within each. The last five chapters were unfinished and, like all early drafts, needed considerable attention. Much in this part of the book, especially Chapters 6, 7, and 9, has been rearranged and rewritten. I also wrote the conclusion and redid most of the tables and maps. Jim had planned to include a statement on sources and methodology, but he never got to it. This statement therefore presents the information I have on the sources and methodology used in this book. Jim left many boxes of notes, xeroxes of articles and statistical data, reels of microfilm of censuses, copies of maps, and hundreds of pages of computer printouts, among other materials. This collection, which currently occupies an entire wall of my study in the Rutgers Library, will be housed permanently in the library of the University of California, San Diego. Anyone who is interested in consulting it should contact UCSD. Jim provided the best statement on his sources in Chapter I (pp. I 3I 5) and in the detailed notes to each chapter. As the notes make clear, the information contained in this study comes from a wide variety of sources: local newspapers, travel accounts, municipal and provincial records, federal published and manuscript censuses, maps, photographs, manuscript collections, and a wide range of secondary literature. The notes to Chapter 3 provide the best guide to the specific sources on Corrientes, those to Chapter 4 on Salta, and those to Chapter 5 on Mendoza. The manuscript schedules of Argentina's first two national censuses, taken in I869 and r895, were a major source for the last half of the book, and they call for a brief additional comment. Jim sampled these schedules in order to use information not included in the published censuses and to use the raw data in new combinations. How he used this material is set forth in the text and notes of the relevant chapters. However, how he sampled the material is not. We know the size of the samples, but we do not know where he began, how he chose the names, or what the precise nature of the sample was. I have some working notes and maps that are helpful as far as they go, but much remained in Jim's head and was lost when he died. I have no doubts about the samples'

Editor's Preface

xm

validity. Jim was always a meticulous scholar. I am raising the issue here only because I cannot provide all of the information on sources and methodology that, had Jim lived, would have been part of the work. As the notes make clear, the book is based on a solid foundation of documentation. There are, nevertheless, some inevitable omissions in citations of sources and in the explanation of methodology. Since I am most familiar with the documents upon which the study is based, I would be happy to discuss the specific contents with interested scholars. The honor in being associated with this book is twofold; Jim Scobie was not only a distinguished scholar but also a loyal and supportive friend. My wife Joan and I became close friends of Jim and Ingrid when our families spent a year together in Buenos Aires in 1969. We shared the writing of history, parenting, bifes vuelta y vuelta, the first man walking on the moon, and above all, a close and enduring friendship. I have finished this book as a small tribute to our very special friendship. I wish to thank the following persons and institutions for supporting my effort to complete the book. Ingrid Winther Scobie deserves special mention. She has been wonderfully encouraging and supportive throughout. Her comments on several different drafts of the manuscript have enabled me to strengthen it considerably. Tom Dublin read an early draft of two chapters and made important suggestions for revision. He as well as John Lombardi, Brian Loveman, and Richard Morse read all or parts of the revised manuscript and gave me the benefit of their comments. Michael Adas, Michael Gasster, and especially Allen Howard provided important material and insights on the comparative significance of secondary cities throughout the Third World that made easier the writing of the Conclusion. Peter J. Kahn, Associate Editor at Stanford University Press, and Betsey Scheiner, the copy editor, both made important suggestions for strengthening the manuscript, and I am grateful to them for the extra effort they devoted to it. Jose Moya worked hard as my research assistant and helped with the translations. I want to express my appreciation to the University of California, San Diego, and to the late Mary Galey Winther for the financial assistance they provided for the project. David Ringrose, Chairman of the Department of History at UCSD, went out of his way to get Jim's notes from San Diego to Rutgers and to arrange for financial support from the university. S.L.B.

Author's Preface

Secondary Cities of Argentina defines and develops a new concept in Latin American urban studies: the historical role of secondary cities. In Latin America around 1900, such cities contained between 5 and 10 percent of the national populations in settlements that generally ranged in size from 1o,ooo to 40,000. They occupied a critical position in their countries' development, between the enormous national capitals and a few other major cities with over so,ooo inhabitants that had dominated Latin America's urban growth during the nineteenth century, and the rural countryside where 70 to 90 percent of the national populations still resided in 1900. Case material from three Argentine provincial capitals, similar in their initial background and size but markedly different in their late-nineteenth-century evolution, provide the basis for generalizations concerning the importance of the secondary city in Latin America. The conclusions suggest that secondary cities linked rural economies and inhabitants with the outside world while insulating the traditional rural environment from the changing character of large urban centers. In this intermediate position, economic relationships and social structure changed slowly, only in response to outside innovations such as railroads. Continuity within the secondary centers thus reinforced conservatism, accentuated the gap between the major cities and the rest of the country, and contributed to the resistance to change that characterizes much of Latin America today. This study has depended on extensive support and encouragement. Research was made possible by a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, in 1974-75 and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1975-76 for field

xv1

Author's Preface

work. I also received computer and typing funds from the Academic Senate of the University of California, San Diego, and sabbatical leave from the same university in fall 1980. Scores of persons have helped me in various stages of the preparation of this book. I express deep gratitude to the staff and directors of the Princeton University Library, the Indiana University Library, and the Library of the University of California, San Diego, and to the computer centers at these three universities; the three provincial historical archives of Corrientes, Salta, and Mendoza; the Biblioteca PUblica of Salta; the Biblioteca San Martin, the Biblioteca de Los Andes, and the Junta de Estudios Hist6ricos, all of Mendoza; the Biblioteca PUblica of La Plata; and in Buenos Aires, the Biblioteca del Banco Tornquist, the Biblioteca Nacional, the Biblioteca del Jockey Club, the Biblioteca del Museo Mitre, the Biblioteca de la Sociedad Cientifica Argentina, the Instituto Geognifico Militar, the Archivo General de la Naci6n, and the Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales del Institute Torcuato di Tella. I owe particular gratitude to those who guided and assisted me in field research: in Corrientes, Federico Palma and Alberto Rivera; in Salta, Atilio Cornejo, Luis Oscar Colmenares, Lily Figueroa de Freites, Lilia Perez de Arevalo, Carlos Visentini, and Mario San Roman; in Mendoza, Edmundo Correas, Edberto 0. Acevedo, Pedro Santos Martinez, Maria Esther Martinez, Luis Campoy, German Cespedes, and Enrique Zuleta Alvarez; and in Buenos Aires, Jorge Enrique Hardoy, Aurora Ravina de Luzzi, Cesar Garda Belsunce, Cesar A. Vapiiarsky, Felix Luna, and Gregorio Weinberg. Finally, my deepest debt is to Ingrid Winther Scobie, for the hours robbed from her own research and writing on recent U.S. history and for constant support and encouragement ever since I first envisaged this project in 1972. Spring I98I

J.R.S.

Secondary Cities of Argentina

ONE

Setting the Stage

This study of three Argentine provincial capitals contributes casestudy material on Latin America's smaller cities, as well as expands our understanding of Argentine urban and socioeconomic development during the second half of the nineteenth century. Historians have largely neglected both subjects. Part of this neglect springs from the lack of apparent significant change and the absence of readily available data, which have discouraged analysis of smaller centers by students of the Latin America city. Furthermore, in Argentina, the tendency has been to focus on the coastal region and, in particular, on the city of Buenos Aires to explain that country's astonishing late-nineteenthcentury growth. Finally, Argentine historiography has traditionally emphasized pre-r 8 so events and political, institutional, and biographical subjects to the neglect of socioeconomic themes. During the last two decades, the second half of the nineteenth century has gained respectability in Argentina as a period for serious investigation, although it still presents aspects of a historiographical frontier. In the early 196o's, when the Academia Nacional de Ia Historia began to publish Historia contemporanea argentina, 1 it broke a traditional barrier by beginning at r 862, the date of the so-called reorganization of the Argentine nation under the guidance of Buenos Aires' former governor, Bartolome Mitre. These volumes, covering the years from r862 to 1930, built on the established strengths of Argentine historians and presented the period within a political and institutional framework. Most of the historical publications that appeared then and since have dealt in a similar fashion with the second half of the nineteenth century.2

2

Setting the Stage

A relatively small number of studies have attempted to delineate the social and economic structure for those years and thus provide the much-needed background for urban history. Jose Luis Romero's A History of Argentine Political Thought, 3 first published in 1946 and covering the entire sweep of Argentine history, has stood as a landmark in intellectual and cultural synthesis. Yet for the nineteenth century, no one has taken up the challenge to revise or supplement his "alluvialera" interpretation, which stressed immigration's enormous impact on Argentina. The broader socioeconomic studies that have appeared, 4 as well as the more specialized monographs that deal with particular aspects of socioeconomic development/ overwhelmingly emphasize coastal Argentina, above all the city and province of Buenos Aires. The history of the interior of Argentina thus remains largely untouched. This same bias of coastal focus has affected the study of Argentine urban history. 6 The few urban studies that have managed to break away from the attraction of Buenos Aires have still focused on the coastal region? This tendency to neglect the urban aspects of history goes beyond Argentine historiography and springs in large measure from the relatively recent emergence of the city as a viable unit for analysis. In the last several decades, the overwhelming presence of the megalopolis, the critical problems raised by rapid urbanization in Latin America, and the addition of the computer as a useful tool for sophisticated analysis have increasingly drawn sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, economists, and geographers-as well as city planners and politicians-to concentrate their attention on the city. From this contemporary focus has develped some concern with the historical antecedents. Until the publication in r 9 58 of Richard M. Morse's pioneering study of Sao Paulo, Brazil, 8 the history of cities had attracted primarily local antiquarians who recovered isolated aspects of the urban past, chroniclers who recorded detailed political and constitutional changes, or literary writers who attempted to capture city development in essays and novels. Within this recently developing field of urban history, the most neglected area is that of the secondary city, the settlement large enough to possess all the elements commonly associated with urban areasdefined since the 195o's as having at least 2o,ooo inhabitants-and yet too small to figure among a country's major cities. A number of anthropologists and a rare historian have studied villages. 9 At the other extreme lies most recent urban research, concerned with typologies or,

Setting the Stage

3

more commonly, with the examination of the most striking or largest centers. 10 Secondary centers, consequently, provided subject matter for only a handful of works, largely written by anthropologists. 11 Regardless of the size of the urban center to be studied, scholars seeking to generalize about the historical experience in Latin American cities or to discover patterns that characterize urban developments within nations or regions face additional handicaps beyond those represented by the relatively recent development of their field of study. Basic definitions of urban areas do not exist. Quantifiable data have proved either unreliable or extremely hard to uncover. And the tremendous range of urban experiences in Latin America presents a bewildering panorama. Nowhere are these handicaps more evident than in what one would suppose a simple matter of definition: what constitutes a city or an urban area? For students of the contemporary city, the dividing line between urban and nonurban has generally been established at 2o,ooo inhabitants. But the historian, even of late-nineteenth-century Latin America, must deal with settlements of only several thousand inhabitants that possess functions and environments characteristic of much larger centers. For example, the provincial capital of Santiago del Estero, established in I 55 3 as the first permanent Spanish settlement in the Argentine area, had a population of slightly under 8,ooo in I869; Talcahuano, a port and department capital in southern Chile, had only 2,500 inhabitants in I875; Trujillo, a major port and district capital on Peru's north coast, had 8,ooo inhabitants in I876; Veracruz, Mexico's major outlet to the Caribbean, had an estimated Io,ooo in the I 87o's, as did Santos, the principal port for the coffee-producing state of Sao Paulo in Brazil. At the same time, agglomerations of small rural settlements, made up almost entirely of farmers, could be found throughout much of Latin America, with populations ranging between 5,ooo and Io,ooo but without any of the commercial or administrative functions or environmental qualities commonly associated with an urban area. Further complications emerge from the census data themselves. Mexico's first census dates from I895, Bolivia's from I9oo, the Dominican Republic's from I92o. Paraguay, Ecuador, and Haiti never completed or published a census before I 940. Peru took no census between I 876 and I940, Uruguay none between I908 and I963, and Argentina none between I9I4 and I947· Until I940, Brazilian censuses made no

4

Setting the Stage

attempt to separate urban areas from the surrounding countryside but merely listed population according to municipality, with areas that often covered hundreds of square miles of wilderness or farmland. In Colombia, Venezuela, and Peru, municipal boundaries also enclosed sizable farming areas, and censuses did not indicate where compact housing ended and isolated farm homes or hamlets began. Furthermore, errors of ro and 20 percent in under- or overenumeration affect all censuses before I 940, with the possible exceptions of the Chilean and Mexican censuses of I 9 30, the Cuban censuses of I 899 and I 9 3 r, the Argentine census of 1914, and the Venezuelan census of 1936. Limitations such as these, when added to the enormous variety in urban experiences in Latin America, have introduced subjective qualities and particularism into the study of urban history that have hampered generalization and synthesis. These handicaps have encouraged historians and other social scientists to select major cities, where data were more available, for their initial analyses and to avoid the smaller, apparently less important urban centers. Despite the lack of literature on secondary cities, these centers played increasingly important roles in Latin America during the nineteenth century. They served as the major merchandising and administrative centers for their regions and housed a local elite that dominated that commercial-bureaucratic machinery. They had become the principal, often only, urbanized and modernized areas with which the great bulk of the population-the 70 to 90 percent that lived outside cities in I 900-had any contact. These cities also enjoyed close links to the national elites, to credit and markets, and to the nation and the outside world via each country's capital. The role of the secondary cities as regional centers and as variations on the patterns developing in national capitals thus becomes critical for understanding each country's history. Historical analysis must contend, however, with the imprecise definition used above-a secondary city is a center possessing the characteristics of present-day cities of at least 2o,ooo inhabitants and yet not included among the country's major cities. For the second half of the nineteenth century, this definition embraces most of the provincial or state capitals in Latin America, as well as several ports, but excludes the national capital and the country's second-ranked city of the eight largest Latin American countries; in the case of Argentina, the exclusion reaches down to the third city, and in Mexico and Brazil to the fourth-ranked cities.

Setting the Stage

5

TABLE I.I

The Percentage of Population Living in Principal Cities and Secondary Cities of Major Latin American Countries Around r9oo Principal cities

Country

Census year

Total population

No.

Argentina Brazil Chile Colombia Cuba Mexico Peru Venezuela

1895 1890 1895 1905 1899 1900 1876 1891

3,955,000 14,334,000 2,696,000 4,144,000 1,573,000 13,607,000 2,700,000 2,222,000

3 4 2 2 2 4 2 2

Pet.

Secondary cities No. Pet.

20.3% 5.8 14.0 3.9 18.0 4.4 4.8 5.7

23 31 16 11 11 54 12 25

8.7% 5.2 9.2 6.5 12.7 8.3 6.9 17.1

souRcE: National censuses.

With this rough measure, the size and importance of Latin America's cities can be estimated. By the end of the nineteenth century, as Table r. I shows, an impressive proportion of the national populations lived in secondary cities. In countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Cuba, where 14 to 20 percent of the total population was concentrated in the national capital and the next largest city or cities, the proportion in secondary cities was close to IO percent. The heavily rural Brazilian environment registered 6 percent in principal cities and 5 percent in secondary cities. Elsewhere the percentage of the national population in secondary cities outranked that in the major cities: by a factor of nearly two in Mexico and Colombia, and by three in Venezuela. Yet among these secondary cities, only Brazil's Porto Alegre (52,ooo) and Belem (5o,ooo) had reached the 5o,ooo mark by I9oo. Elsewhere the upper limits were registered by La Plata (45,ooo), Tucuman (34,ooo), and Mendoza (28,ooo) in Argentina; Concepcion (4o,ooo), lquique (33,000), and Taka (33,000) in Chile; Barranquilla (4o,ooo) and Cali (3 I ,ooo) in Colombia; Matanzas (3 7 ,ooo) and Aguascalientes (35,ooo) in Mexico; Cuzco (2o,ooo) in Peru; and Maracaibo (35,ooo) and Barquisimeto (27,000) in Venezuela. The lower level for these cities ranged down to Io,ooo inhabitants, although the inclusion of local capitals brought in a few smaller centers in the outlying zones of all the countries. The use of these figures thus adds some precision to the previously somewhat vague definition of secondary cities. For Latin America at the beginning of the twentieth century, "secondary city" refers to slightly more than 200 urban centers that were not national

6

Setting the Stage

capitals and whose populations normally ranged between ro,ooo and 40,000.

The present work seeks to redress some of the imbalance in both Latin American urban studies and Argentine historiography by studying three provincial capitals that meet the criteria as secondary cities and fall outside the immediate orbit of Buenos Aires and coastal Argentina. Argentina's scattered urban centers, which in the early nineteenth century became provincial capitals of an independent nation, had been laid out as a vital part of Spain's conquest of an American empire. ,~-hese commercial and administrative outposts served largely rural hinterlands that stretched out 50 to 200 miles from each center. Several, located on main trade routes or sites that were particularly crucial for Spanish strategic control of the area, grew more rapidly than the others. But for the first 300 years, all constituted bastions of a Spanish way of life and focal points for the area's development. The turmoil of the independence period momentarily enhanced the power of rural landowner-caudillos at the expense of the urban settlements. But local political control soon reverted to the traditional landowning elites in the provincial centers. These centers thus continued to provide the best reflection of events and changes in their immediate regions. The rapidly expanding agricultural production of the pampas, which dominated the second half of the nineteenth century, went largely to fuel Buenos Aires' extraordinary growth. But each region of Argentina responded to the changing environment in ways that were mirrored in the history of the individual provincial capitals. The principal contribution of this study, therefore, is to explain how and why smaller cities grew, both as examples of the secondary-city phenomenon and more specifically as entities within the framework of the Argentine environment. What determined and shaped their growth? How did the local inhabitants, and especially the dominant local elites, react to internal and external influences? To what extent were they able to control growth? What relationships developed with the surrounding regions and the outside world? These concerns, organized as hypotheses, provide three central themes that run through the ensuing chapters. First, secondary cities in Latin America in general and these provincial capitals in particular served as "oases of modernity" for their

Setting the Stage

7

regions and, at the same time, helped to insulate the countryside from outside influences. Here were concentrated the commercial exchanges, government activities, and financial transactions between the local region and the national entities or the outside world. These centers contained the region's religious, administrative, trading, and production infrastructure. They received a constant flow of goods and ideas from the outside world and, as a result, were closely connected with events and changes on national and international levels. But, at least in Argentina, the "oases" only received these benefits; they did not generally transmit new ideas, technologies, and conveniences to their hinterlands. Merchants took agricultural products, such as hides, cattle, or tobacco, from the rural villages and sent them on to the outside world. In return they shipped consumer goodstextiles, foodstuffs, and hardwares-to the countryside. But the telephone or the newspaper had no place in a rural farm. Roads needed to accommodate only the horseman, the mule train, the ox cart, or the Indian on foot. Thus, the rural way of life and the means of production changed very slowly, if at all. By the end of the nineteenth century, much of what it was like to live in the seventeenth century could be recaptured by merely stepping outside the provincial capital. Part of the gap separating urban from rural sprang naturally enough from the absence of other urban centers nearby. As has been suggested by recent research in Chile, the diffusion of innovations such as fire brigades or newspapers generally required a level of ro,ooo inhabitants or more, and much other technology necessitated similar levels of population. 12 The effective expansion of technology or new ideas beyond the limits of secondary cities would seem, therefore, to depend on the presence of additional secondary cities or larger towns. In the case of the three Argentine provincial capitals, no other secondary cities existed within their provinces, and few other villages or towns even reached the level of 5,ooo inhabitants. These secondary cities contributed to stability in Argentina and in Latin America not only by short-circuiting the distribution of ideas and technology to the countryside-a blockage that the absence of supporting urban centers capable of receiving these influences merely reinforced. They also reduced potential frustrations by satisfying needs and appetites for new ideas and technology on a modest scale within their individual regions. Most of these small centers boasted the conveniences and even the appearances of the national capital and thus

8

Setting the Stage

provided upper-class groups "modernized" environments in their own localities. Furthermore, since nothing discouraged the flow of ideas, resources, capital, or talent outward, people who found their ambitions or abilities stifled within the region could move on to a larger city or the national capital. Second, the growth of these secondary cities came about primarily as a result of external influences. In this sense, they became links in a relationship that often stretched from major European or U.S. cities through national capitals to secondary cities and, in turn, to the rawmaterial-producing areas of the countryside. Economic production tended to follow time-honored patterns, with cattle providing the mainstay for each province's and city's economy. The major innovation, the railroad, was built with foreign capital, and its utilization depended on continued investments and market-demand coming from outside the local region. The railroad initially destroyed much local high-cost household and artisanal production, but it increased the profitability of the cattle trade. It also opened new horizons for other agricultural products, producing most notably the grape and wine boom of Mendoza, which thrived on the basis of further investments, technology, and market-demand from outside the local region. In addition, municipal authorities depended on outside funds. Public primary education, hospitals, charities, and public works-the core of municipal responsibilities-constantly had to be bailed out by provincial or national treasuries. Outlays for bridges, roads, and water and sewer lines came from the national treasury. Finally, these cities drew their upper class from the local province, the neighboring provinces, and from abroad. Members of the landed elite were drawn to the cities to take advantage of the profitable linkage functions they could perform and to increase their control over the countryside in the changing economic and political context. Foreigners were also attracted by the new economic and political opportunities. This hypothesis, which emphasizes the dependent position of secondary cities, applies primarily to areas largely developed by European settlement-most of Brazil, southern South America, Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia. Recent research by Bryan Roberts on the important secondary center of Huancayo in Peru suggests, in contrast, that at least this secondary center developed considerable independence as a local market and production center during the late nineteenth century. u Its case, therefore, falls somewhere between the economic integration

Setting the Stage

9

characteristic of much of U.S. and European urban development and the purely dependent relationships often described for Latin America by social scientists such as Anfbal Quijano and Rodolfo Stavenhagen. 14 One explanation for such a difference could be that in areas of longestablished Indian cultures, the village pattern of settlement possessed its own economic and social vitality quite independent of the outside world. In this environment, secondary cities also assumed more independent roles, since they served as consumers and producers for the surrounding countryside and not merely as transmitters of raw material produced in the rural areas to the outside world. The case of Salta in Argentina, at least before the coming of the railroad, bore some resemblance to the Huancayo experience. Significantly, the northwest was the only region of Argentina into which the Inca Empire had reached. Elsewhere in Argentina, as in other areas of European colonization, no such independent role for either villages or secondary cities emerged, since settlement and growth depended largely on production for outside markets-a pattern further accentuated by the impact of the Industrial Revolution. Third, growth in secondary cities produced few changes in urban ecology or social structures. In the Argentine case studies, the physical structure showed considerable stability, possibly because it was largely determined by upper-class residential preferences. This pattern seemed to hold for many types of Latin American cities and in many different time periods. Within the traditional gridwork outline of the Hispanic city, elite residences had always been located close to a central plaza, along with the institutions of power and authority, such as the cathedral and government house. 15 But even though proximity to the plaza continued to connote prestige and wealth in the nineteenth century, the upper class also encountered other factors that influenced residential preferences. The presence of a public market, with its accompanying smells, noise, and lower-class elements, or of a military garrison could affect choices. As population, size, and crowding increased, higher ground became an essential ingredient for health and pleasant living, especially when sewage was discarded in the streets and drinking water came from shallow wells or drainage ditches. As a result, residencesdespite the assumptions frequently made about the overwhelming influence of the plaza-had never been arranged in neat concentric circles centered on the plaza and ranging outward according to the decreasing wealth of their inhabitants. Rather, the upper class tended to locate

ro

Setting the Stage

along one or two sides of the plaza and to expand slowly from that area outward. At Mendoza, the destructive earthquake of r 86r introduced another variant. Since much of old Mendoza became uninhabitable, at least for the upper class, commerce and the elite tended to rebuild along the north-south avenue, or trade route, that had formerly run along the city's western edge. Nevertheless, in the three cities of this study, the continued emphasis by the elite on a central focal point and its residential proximity to that center served to maintain a remarkable stability in the urban physical structure. 16 Furthermore, the upper class maintained and encouraged a stable, almost static social structure in these cities. Since family origins determined social status in secondary cities, this stability proved virtually inevitable. The upper class might readily accept outsiders, from other provinces or from abroad, who displayed proper credentials in education, profession, and wealth. But the assumption remained that they had come from an upper-class family. Locally it was impossible to escape one's antecedents and, therefore, the status conferred by one's family. Growth and expansion, within the levels defined as those of secondary cities, thus resulted in little social change. Within the Argentine provincial cities, society remained divided into "haves" and "have-nots" throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Wide gaps, in terms of lineage, education, occupation, wealth, and housing, separated the upper class from those below them. Although the two classes lived in close proximity in these small cities, indeed often on the terms of intimacy that exist between masters and servants in wealthy households, all maintained and supported these divisions. Subtle distinctions, largely unwritten and unspoken, reinforced the separation. In this environment, the self-made man or woman who moved from the lower class into the upper class was unknown. Mobility existed not between classes but within classes, and the lower class in particular was subdivided into many strata. Within the upper group, some commentators have seen a prototype of a middle or white-collar class in the more modest level of professionals and merchantsP But the large gap separating the two major groups makes a two-class structure more appropriate to secondary cities. The control exercised by the local elite over both physical form and social structure thus insured a continuity in these small cities that the introduction of new ideas and technology or increases in wealth and population did little to change. Despite the copying of fashions from

Setting the Stage

I I

Buenos Aires or from London and Paris or the rapid adoption of the physical trappings of paving, electric lights, running water, streetcars, and sewers, social attitudes and class structure remained largely untouched. Even more significant forces for economic change, such as the railroad with its effect on artisanal and agricultural production, the increase in immigration, or the lowering of infant mortality after the installation of waterworks and sewers, had remarkably little social impact. These hypotheses, with their emphasis on the simultaneous diffusion of new ideas and technology on the one hand and the continuation of isolation, dependence, and stability on the other, point the direction for the role of secondary cities. The hypotheses also go far in explaining certain twentieth-century problems in Latin America, such as the backwardness of the countryside, the economic vulnerability of the area to outside developments, and the unchanging social structure in many of the small countries and in the smaller cities. Historically these secondary cities expanded and prospered. They served as way stations for commerce and administration controlled from the national capital and from abroad, and they attempted to replicate the environment found in the national capital and in the larger cities. By serving as "oases" of modernity, they satisfied regional demands for new ideas and technology. The countryside, however, remained largely unchanged. Local urban growth depended on outside injections of ideas, technology, investment, and people, and expansion became increasingly tied to outside markets. Modest demographic and economic expansion favored the local upper class and permitted increased mobility within but not between the two major social classes. Stability and continuity thus became the principal contributions of these provincial capitals and, it is suggested, of secondary cities in general in Latin America. This study focuses on three cities during the second half of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century: Corrientes in the northeast, Salta in the northwest, and Mendoza in the west. Its objective is an in-depth analysis of diversified cases that can be used to delineate the common elements of the urban experience of secondary cities in Argentina and Latin America. The specific cities were chosen for a number of features that make them useful for comparative analysis. First, all three took shape in the late sixteenth century as centers of Spanish conquest and administration. Second, they each exercised

I 2

Setting the Stage

political control over their area throughout the colonial period and, at the time of independence from Spain, became capitals of their provinces. Third, the three cities had long played a secondary role; they were not among Argentina's leading population centers but always served as the principal city for trade and administration in their regions. Fourth, around r85o, they possessed virtually identical populations of 7,ooo to 8,ooo. This common starting point makes subsequent demographic, social, and economic comparisons both feasible and significant. Fifth, their populations in r895-with Corrientes and Salta at I6,ooo and Mendoza at 28,ooo-along with their other characteristics, place these cities within the previously stated definition of secondary centers. And sixth, the three cities experienced different rates of growth during the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century; Mendoza grew rapidly, Corrientes stagnated, and Salta fell somewhere in between. The principal questions to be answered involve the how and why as well as the effect of secondary-city growth. How do we account for the different rates of growth of these three cities during the half century preceding the First World War? Why did Mendoza grow rapidly while Corrientes stagnated? What effect did the respective growth patterns have on the composition of the population, social structures, residential patterns, work, and social activity? And how did the experiences of these three cities compare to those of other secondary cities in Latin America? The time span selected for study satisfies both an Argentine framework and a larger Latin American comparative view. Since the principal questions to be answered relate to secondary-city growth, the optimum years in the Argentine context are those when the nation as a whole was growing most rapidly, namely, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By taking the I 8 so's as its starting point, this study can examine Corrientes and Mendoza before their respective traumas of war and earthquake and all three cities when they had the same number of inhabitants. The choice of the end point is equally appropriate. The first decade of the twentieth century marked the climax of Argentina's most intense period of growth, and the third national census, in I 9 q, provided for convenient accumulation of data. From the broader Latin American perspective, these years encompass a significant shift in population, resources, power, and development toward the urban centers. In most of the major Latin American

Setting the Stage

r3

countries, the second half of the nineteenth century was an era of prosperity and progress, in which the export of raw materials flourished, major urban centers expanded, and stable oligarchical regimes emerged. These case studies rest on a solid base of historical documentation, supplemented by residence in each of the three cities. Although the details on these sources appear in the footnotes, a few observations on their utilization will facilitate an understanding of the scope of this study. Newspapers provided substantial narrative and considerable data. In Argentina, newspapers often constitute the only source for urban history, but the utilization of such materials, as all researchers know, is time-consuming. Furthermore, newspapers have limitations because of their biased and fragmentary nature. Since there is no habit of preserving newspapers or providing easy access to collections in Argentina, continuous runs are rare and collections remain widely scattered. Despite such problems, the contemporary glimpses taken from newspaper articles and notices afford invaluable insights into the urban environment. The logical and seemingly crucial sources usually located in municipal and provincial archives and in published government documents raised different problems. For Corrientes, no municipal archives exist for the period under consideration. In Mendoza, these archives were flooded in 1972 and the remains, none the better for soaking, are piled in heaps while a few poorly paid workers sort through them and put them back on shelves; they cannot be consulted in the foreseeable future. In Salta, intervention has barred the investigation of municipal archives since I973· Provincial archives, on the other hand, contain an abundance of materials; here problems proved to be of a different nature. Few indexes or guides exist to the contents of these repositories, and materials are merely ordered chronologically. As a result, property registers, voter lists, and tax lists are scattered among receipts, police blotters, and routine communications between agents of the provincial governments. Few collections of published municipal or provincial documents exist. The minutes of municipal council meetings, which concentrated heavily on minutiae, occasionally appeared in local newspapers. Annual reports from the president of the municipal council were compiled only infrequently, and few copies, even of the ones that were printed, have survived. Similar gaps appear in the annual messages of the governor to the legislature as well as in the annual reports

I4

Setting the Stage

of the provincial minister of government, both of which occasionally referred to municipal matters. More complete is the documentation on provincial legislation and municipal ordinances, where several compendiums served administrators and politicians. Maps, essential for any type of urban investigation, proved to be in extremely short supply for the years from I 8 5o to I 9 I o. Mendoza possesses the best resources: two detailed plans, including street names and public buildings, from the I 8 so's, followed by a city map from I873 and new maps every decade thereafter. The first known map for Corrientes, on the other hand, dates from I868-made by a visiting Brazilian priest serving with his country's navy-and provides only the sketchiest outline of the city. Not until the I 89o's were detailed maps for the city published. In Salta, the gap is even more glaring, with the first map for this period made in I 8 8 r. Travel accounts provided useful supplementary information. The very volume of travelers-French, German, English, and North American, in particular-underlines the importance of these data: 58 travelers touched at one or more of these cities between I85o and I9I4. Furthermore, what struck foreign eyes often went unrecorded in local accounts. Photographs, another important source for the urban historian in these years, added useful insights to the physical and social structures of the city. In addition to the excellent resources of the Archivo Grafico de Ia Naci6n, housed in the national archives at Buenos Aires, both Salta and Mendoza possess outstanding public photographic collections: the first located in the provincial archives and the second in the Junta de Estudios Hist6ricos de Mendoza. The private collection of Federico Palma, director of the provincial archives of Corrientes, fills a major gap for that city. Finally, manuscript materials from Argentina's first two national censuses, of I869 and I895, contain extensive comparative and quantitative data about cities. 18 This source, uncovered for the first time in the mid-I96o's, offers extensive and, as yet, relatively unexplored documentation for urban studies and historical investigation in general. 19 In these manuscripts appear the name, sex, marital status, age, Argentine province or foreign country where born, occupation, religion, literacy, and physical defects of each person reported by census takers. In r 89 5, further questions were added concerning the ownership of real property and the number of children. By tracing individuals through informa-

Setting the Stage

r5

tion found in newspapers, provincial archives, and maps, it was also possible to locate, at least approximately, specific persons within the city. The use of the computer to process and analyze subgroups or samples from these populations facilitated the development of a far more accurate picture of settlement patterns and ethnic and class composition than ever before possible. In addition to the standard sources for historical investigation, the researcher in Latin America's secondary cities can find great rewards in environments small enough to facilitate capturing the flavor of the past and the personality of the people. Anthropologists formally incorporate into their methodology this type of contact with their subject matter; historians often achieve similar results in less self-conscious and more informal fashion. 20 Because much remains today that reflects the past, it is not only possible but also highly useful for the historian to recapture vicariously much of that past by residing in and interacting with the local environment. Often that past, which cannot easily be found in huge sprawling metropolises such as Lima, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, or Buenos Aires, can be sensed firsthand and in clearly recognizable form in Huancayo, Queretaro, Ouro Preto, or Corrientes. The warmth and extent of local support and interest can also provide much needed encouragement. These advantages help to supplement and expand traditional historical documentation, which often is widely scattered, fragmented, or unavailable. Residence, personal observation, and friendships thus played vital roles in this study and contributed many of the most enjoyable moments of that research. This discussion of the historical literature, hypotheses, and resources sets the stage for the social history of the three secondary cities of Corrientes, Salta, and Mendoza. The next chapter examines the dynamics of urban growth seen in the relationship of each region to the nation as well as in the adjustment of each city to its physical environment. The ensuing three chapters provide histories of each city's development. The remaining half of the work develops on a comparative basis five major aspects of the urban setting: the makeup of the population and the class structure; the upper class and immigration; residential patterns; the work experience; and social activities. Throughout, the emphasis is on understanding the role of secondary cities as well as the peculiarities of the Argentine situation.

TWO

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

This chapter introduces the experience of Corrientes, Salta, and Mendoza before I 8 so, first as outposts of Spanish imperial administration and then as capitals of nearly autonomous provinces. The ensuing sections focus on two elements, transport and terrain, that proved critical in shaping the growth of secondary cities in Argentina. In the context of a national framework, steamships and railroads strongly influenced each province's relationship to the nation and the outside world and consequently largely determined the extent of each capital's growth. Equally important for the direction and type of expansion were more immediate factors: the changing role of the central plaza on residential preferences and the increasing tendency of the upper class in these secondary cities to seek higher ground away from that plaza for their home sites. A principal concern of the Spanish Crown and its officers in the New World had been to scatter outposts of Spanish settlers throughout the vast kingdom in order to insure control (Map 2. I). Each of these "cities," from its first establishment by Spanish conquistadores in the second half of the sixteenth century, served as an administrative center over a gradually expanding area. Because of scarce resources and manpower, Spain had to spread such settlements out at considerable distances from each other, even when building communication lines in northwest Argentina or along the Parana River system. In most cases, intervals of more than I 50 miles separated these cities. Initially, their military role predominated. Their founders invariably laid out the outline of a plaza and surrounding lots with principal concern for defense. They paid particular attention to the terrain, especially to

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Viceroyalty

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Santiago

•San Luis

Trade Routes ......... Viceroyalty of the Rio de Ia Plata boundary

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Map z.I. Principal urban centers and trade routes m the Argentine area, I6oo-18oo.

r8

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

obstacles provided by swamps and watercourses, to the availability of dependable water supplies, and to the presence of grazing land. Within the sixteenth-century context, they chose exceedingly well. Several sites had to be moved, one or two miles at Mendoza or Corrientes and greater distances elsewhere. But within the Argentine area only one of these cities, Concepcion del Bermejo, proved a failure and had to be abandoned. Such an outpost was usually made up of less than roo settlers. Once its military security had been assured, its continued existence and its growth depended on how successfully it controlled the surrounding hinterland and served as a link in communications between other Spanish cities. What had been at first a military force thus became a settlement. The officers of the expedition, no more than a dozen in number, secured choice lots adjacent to the plaza; all cavalrymen and infantrymen-many of whom in later expeditions were of mixed blood-received somewhat smaller plots, still no more than a block or two from the plaza. Such an expedition brought with it indian allies, Indian servants, and often a few black slaves. It soon secured additional laborers from Indian populations in the immediate vicinity. After laying out five or six streets and constructing a rudimentary fort on the plaza, the laborers began to construct huts on each lot. Made from the nearest, most available materials such as branches, sticks, reeds, bark, sod, mud, or stones, these shelters served for several months or even years while acreage immediately beyond the house lots was cleared and planted with corn, squash, beans, or sometimes wheat. By the third or fourth year, the settlement began to take on a more established appearance. The production of sun-dried adobe bricks everywhere supplemented cheaper materials. Inhabitants began to outline a church on the plaza and build more substantial one- or tworoom homes for the principal settlers. Women now joined the settlement on a more regular basis. Some of the leaders brought their families from other established Spanish centers. Others sent back to these centers for Spanish or mixed-blood wives, while a number formed households with Indian concubines. A standard pattern took shape, with several dozen buildings distributed in the ten or twelve blocks adjoining the plaza, a fringe of garden plots, and outlying grazing land for half-wild horses and cattle. Relations with nearby Indian communities were stabilized: their inhabitants nominally accepted the Catholic faith and Spanish control and provided intermittent

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

19

tribute in labor and food to their new masters. And products began to trickle into and out of the new outpost: an occasional mule train with food, cloth, and hardware from a more established center; local products or animals bound for distant markets; and goods and persons destined for yet another outpost in Spain's urban scheme of conquest. Functions such as these governed the development of cities in the Argentine area until well into the nineteenth century. These outposts grew slowly. Differences in administrative or commercial importance contributed to some variation in population expansion. Salta, which started with the largest military force of the three-nearly roo menmaintained an advantage because of its critical position as the principal supply center in the northwest for animals, food, and household goods needed by the silver-mining region around Potosi. The seventeenth century marked the high point in the exploitation of this mineral wealth in Upper Peru. As the mining camps demanded more grains, fruits, cattle, and leather, the cultivated fields and pastures spread out across the Lerma Valley and into adjoining mountain basins. A few other small Spanish towns that were established in this hinterland gained control over adjacent Indian villages, but all these settlements brought their produce to Salta and secured goods in its market. Throughout the seventeenth century, the annual mule and horse fair at Salta, involving thousands of animals from coastal Argentina, was one of the most important commercial events of the Americas, with bullion exchanged not only for mules but also for European merchandise and fineries. In the eighteenth century, as silver production and the stimulus of trade declined, Salta's expansion slowed. The population, which had reached the 2,ooo mark by r 700, only doubled during the ensuing century. Mendoza, in contrast, started slowly as a military outpost on a route that initially went nowhere. Its establishment had extended a tentacle of Spanish authority across the Andes from Santiago. Distance and hostile Indian tribes, however, largely blocked any trade across the pampas to and from Buenos Aires. And the products from this foothill oasis proved too similar to those grown in Chile's central valley to foster much exchange across difficult mountain passes. Mendoza stagnated until Spain's efforts to modernize and open its economic system to world trade in the eighteenth century reached Santiago and Buenos Aires. Mendoza then began to expand modestly as a way station for trade between these two southern centers of the Spanish Empire. No impor-

20

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

tant local products destined for export encouraged the growth of satellite villages around Mendoza, however, and the city maintained nominal political supervision over a far-flung, arid frontier with only a few adjacent post-stops where couriers changed horses or mule trains halted for the night. Mendoza itself prospered mainly from its role as a glorified post-stop. Here weary travelers, caravans, or herds of cattle could rest, regroup, or be fattened for the strenuous fortnight's climb across the Andes or the even longer and more dangerous trek across the unmarked expanses of dry desert and pampas. This stimulus proved sufficient to push Mendoza's population, which had not quite reached r,ooo by 1700, to s,ooo by r8oo. Corrientes' experience fell somewhere between those of Salta and Mendoza. The city had first been established as a way station on the route between Asuncion and the outlet at Buenos Aires to the South Atlantic. But the route between these two centers never became a main thoroughfare for the Spanish Empire, even though Asuncion had been the first permanent settlement in the southeast corner of the continent. Instead the principal flow of commerce had been drawn away toward the northwest by the expanding silver production of Upper Peru. Even along the Parana River, Corrientes held no monopoly on commercial activities. Several hamlets sprang up, especially along the right bank, to exchange forest products, animal furs, and hides for products shipped directly upriver from Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, Corrientes possessed modest advantages in agriculture and location. Its hinterland, although laced with streams, lakes, and swamps, produced large numbers of semi-wild cattle and horses, and fruits and vegetables grew abundantly in the subtropical environment. And its position near the juncture of the Parana and Paraguay rivers made it a logical stopping place for river trade. Thus the city grew slowly but steadily, and by the end of the eighteenth century its population had reached the 4,ooo to 5,ooo recorded at Mendoza and Salta. Independence from Spain in the decade of the r8ro's slightly accentuated the port or outlet function for each city. Mendoza thus became Argentina's point of entry from and exit to Chile, as Salta did with Bolivia and Corrientes with Paraguay. But in the absence of strong control from an Argentine national government during the first half of the nineteenth century, this new role on the frontier did not modify greatly their previous activity on trade routes between Buenos Aires and Santiago, Lima, or Asuncion. More important, during the independence period each city acquired

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

2I

a certain territorial hegemony over a vaguely defined provincial area. In the northwest, because of the existence of a number of rural Indian villages and more intensive cultivation of the land, boundaries were more precise. Elsewhere, ill-defined Indian frontiers lay at short distances to the south of Mendoza or to the east of Corrientes. In all three regions, the capital city exercised nominal control through a resident governor over territory that eventually measured approximately 5,ooo square miles. Furthermore, commercial and population predominance over other provincial capitals sometimes extended this influence still more. In the west, Mendoza dominated the most important passes to Chile; thus the adjacent capitals of San Juan to the north and San Luis to the east tended to accept both economic and political leadership from Mendoza. Salta as early as the seventeenth century had demonstrated its preeminence over nearby Jujuy. Corrientes, meanwhile, reigned in lonely splendor over the northeast as the only city in the nearly 500 miles that stretched between Asuncion and Buenos Aires. The parallels also continued in population figures. Each city had reached the 4,ooo--5 ,ooo mark around I 8oo. By the I 8 5o's, each numbered roughly 8,ooo inhabitants. The only variation from slow, steady growth in the first half of the nineteenth century occurred at Corrientes, which had spurted ahead to nearly 8,ooo inhabitants in the I 82o's on the basis of a temporary increase in commerce along the Parana River and then had failed to maintain this growth rate. The flow of commerce thus determined the rate and type of expansion experienced by these cities during their first three hundred years. The low levels of technology, especially in transportation, the absence of strong national units and divisions, the relatively sparse population, and the absence of unique or unusual local products contributed to the self-sufficiency and isolation of these communities. As a result, these cities had not changed significantly in functions and even in relative size since their establishment in the second half of the sixteenth century. They served the surrounding countryside in a radius of several hundred miles with commercial, governmental, and urban facilities. They provided markets where European manufactures or imports from other cities could be traded for the limited production of local agricultural goods. They became convenient rest stops for animals and humans on the extended trade routes that crossed the continent. Improved transportation facilities during the second half of the nineteenth century substantially changed the relationship of secondary

22

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

cities with their regions and with the outside world. Steamships and railroads drastically reduced freight costs, greatly increased the volume and kinds of exports and imports, and stimulated the flow of people and ideas as well as of goods. As the ensuing discussion shows, however, the introduction of such technology did not always benefit local development. Although all secondary centers continued to grow in population, some, such as Corrientes, lost much of their economic sphere of influence to the expanding commercial preeminence of Buenos Aires and Rosario. Others, such as Salta, suffered a decline in local artisanal activity as well as trade with neighboring regions when cheaper, often superior goods arrived from the coast. Only at Mendoza did improved transport greatly stimulate local production, as the grape and wine industries boomed in response to rising demand in coastal cities and towns. The shift from sail to steam between Europe and South Atlantic ports was well under way by I 8 50. In the next twenty years, the average tonnage of ships entering the Rio de Ia Plata estuary doubled, to reach the 400-ton figure. The time required for passage from Liverpool to Buenos Aires, meanwhile, dropped from two months to 30 days. These improvements fostered a great increase in both the volume and the kinds of goods Argentina was able to export and import. During the I 8 so's and I86o's, the production of wool and hides, in particular, rose sharply. Belgium carpet looms used ever-larger quantities of low-grade, short-staple Argentine wool, while British and French shoe factories absorbed increasing numbers of Argentine hides. This rising export trade enabled Argentine consumers to buy a wide variety of products from abroad, in many cases replacing the output of local artisanal and household industries with superior and cheaper European imports. The wealthy, not just in Buenos Aires but in secondary cities as well, became accustomed to demanding gowns and fine wines from France, cutlery and shoes from England, tapestries and rugs from Belgium, butter and cheeses from Denmark or Holland, tiles and paintings from Italy. At the same time, kerosene, matches, dried codfish, olive oil, barbed wire, cotton shirts and pants, woolen blankets and ponchos flowed in to meet new demands from the countryside and from the working class in the cities. The still relatively small volume of this trade, combined with the rising capacity of individual steamships, encouraged collection and loading or unloading and distribution at a single major port. Trade at

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

23

Buenos Aires faced increasing inconveniences from several miles of mud flats that separated the port from the main channel of the estuary. But because of the city's early establishment and its political and economic preeminence on the coast, it managed to cling to its virtual monopoly of Argentine trade with Europe. Political conflict between the city of Buenos Aires and the rest of the Argentine provinces in the r8 so's initially stimulated the expansion of Rosario, 200 miles up the Parana River, as an outlet for those provinces. During the next decade, however, few transatlantic steamers, even when their draft permitted it, found it profitable to journey upriver to Rosario to unload the small allotments of European products that local merchants could absorb or to pick up consignments of hides and wool. The conversion to steam by the coasting trade along the Parana and Uruguay rivers further strengthened Buenos Aires' hold on overseas trade. With the start of regular steam-launch service between Asuncion and Buenos Aires in r 8 53, it became clear that the smaller ships could negotiate the shifting currents, channels, and depths far better and faster than transatlantic vessels. 1 This, in turn, meant greater economy in handling the relatively small shipments at San Nicolas, Villa Constitucion, Parana, and Corrientes on the Parana River or at Gualeguaychu, Concepcion del Uruguay, and Concordia on the Uruguay River. The completion of Argentina's first major railroad in r87o, bridging the 250 miles between the inland provincial capital of Cordoba and the river port of Rosario, renewed the latter's commercial expansion, especially for exports. With the spread of wheat cultivation across the pampas, increasing numbers of oceangoing steamers anchored in the deep channel off Rosario to take on bulk grain. But throughout these years, Buenos Aires remained the only major emporium for European imports and most Argentine exports. Although changes in transatlantic trade affected all three provincial capitals, Corrientes, because of its location on the Parana River, most directly experienced the effect of steam navigation. On the surface, it would seem that Corrientes should have benefited considerably from the cheaper, more rapid communications with the coast and with Buenos Aires. In this case, however, technology's assistance seems to have been canceled out by the historic and economic peculiarities of the city's location. Corrientes lay at the terminus of a water route that had little potential for expansion. The Parana River, which at this point turned east to flow through unpopulated zones of Paraguay and Misio-

24

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

nes and into the as-yet-undeveloped interior of Brazil, held little promise of tapping resources or products needed in Europe or in the coastal cities. Furthermore, its navigability was repeatedly broken by rapids and cataracts. Likewise, the Paraguay River, which flowed past Asuncion and joined the Parana near Corrientes, faced severe limitations in navigability, largely because the amount of rainfall in the interior of Paraguay and Brazil created dramatic changes in water levels. Far more than navigational hazards, however, kept Corrientes from becoming a booming entrepot for northeastern Argentina. As national boundaries took shape, the city found itself not only at a remote corner of the country but also in one of its poorest agricultural zones. Its grassy savannas supported large numbers of half-wild horses and cattle and a broad variety of vegetables and fruits. But the apparently lush semitropical vegetation, the thin cover of surface humus and loam, and the rolling countryside laced with innumerable streams and swamps could not compete with the fertile, flat pampas that seemed to stretch south interminably on the other side of the Parana River. Any expansion of its role as core for a burgeoning hinterland thus encountered serious obstacles. National loyalties, heightened by the Paraguayan War in the r86o's, placed the undeveloped region to the north largely within the economic orbit of Asuncion. To the west, as well as to the east, hostile Indians and a forbidding environment of meandering watercourses and swamps· discouraged effective occupation. The province's potential for growth lay to the south along the Parana River. But Corrientes possessed no advantages or peculiarities that might enable it to monopolize the commerce of this area. As settlement, crop cultivation, and increased livestock production pushed inland from the Parana's right bank, it proved easy for riverboats to make brief stops, either to anchor for an hour or two in the main channel and transfer goods and passengers to and from launches or, for an even shorter period, to tie up at a wooden jetty. Corrientes thus saw its economic hinterland to the south steadily shrink, as little riverbank villages staked out their own spheres of influence connected directly to Buenos Aires and the outside world and dependent on Corrientes for little more than politics. By the r 88o's, Corrientes even faced a potential political rival in the form of the river port of Goya, which had grown to a population of nearly 5,ooo and now spoke economically, culturally, and even politically for the more prosperous and developing southern half of the province.

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

25

The Parana River, therefore, rather than drawing Corrientes closer to Buenos Aires, actually facilitated the escape of large areas of the province from Corrientes' orbit and thereby reduced the city's potential for growth. By I 914, under the impact of cheaper and faster river transport, towns along the Parana River that lay closer to Buenos Aires than Corrientes-Goya, now with I 2,ooo inhabitants, and Esquina and Bella Vista with 5,ooo each-forged their principal commercial links downriver, received goods and credit from houses in Parana, Rosario, or Buenos Aires, and shipped their consignments of lumber, tannin bark, yerba mate, hides, corn, and oranges directly south rather than first to Corrientes. Across the province, the same pattern held true along the Uruguay River where the ports of Paso de los Libres and Santo Tome with 6,ooo inhabitants, Monte Caseros with 5,ooo, and Alvear with 3,ooo traded principally with the downriver ports of Concordia (2o,ooo inhabitants) and Concepcion del Uruguay (I4,ooo), located still farther to the south in neighboring Entre Rfos. Instead of creating broad commercial arteries between the provincial capital and Buenos Aires, the rivers and their steamers effectively reduced Corrientes' commercial sphere to a small, relatively poor zone at the extreme northwest corner of the province. The addition of railroads to a transport system so dominated by water routes reduced still further Corrientes' sphere of influence. The final railroad link to Buenos Aires (with a ferryboat connection across the Parana River) was not completed until 1908: its long-haul service was primarily limited to a few perishable freight items and to moving passengers to and from the provincial capital. The major portion of the Northeastern Railroad, slanting southeast across the province from Corrientes, had been completed a decade earlier, in I898. Rather than linking the interior of the province more closely with Corrientes, however, this railroad tended to reinforce the effect of the river system by drawing these sparsely populated pasturelands more toward the Uruguay River. By I9J4, the two principal inland towns, Mercedes and Curuzu Cuatfa, both with I I,ooo inhabitants, had forged their main commercial links via the railroad with the Entre Rfos ports of Concordia and Concepcion del Uruguay on the Uruguay River and, beyond them, with Buenos Aires. Only four of the province's sixteen urban settlements-with populations over 2,ooo-could be considered still within the commercial orbit of the capital, and these were also the smallest: Empedrado (4,000 inhabitants) and Saladas (3,ooo), roughly

26

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

40 and 6o miles by railroad to the south; and General Paz (2,ooo) and Mburucuya (2,ooo), 6o miles to the east. The railroad, arriving late and only as a supplement to river transport, served primarily, therefore, to reinforce patterns already established by water routes. (See Map 2.2.) During the final decades of the nineteenth century, Buenos Aires drew towns and cities throughout Argentina into its commercial orbit. In the case of Corrientes, however, this was not always beneficial for the local provincial capital. For the vast interior of Argentina, the train served the same function as the river steamers did on the Rfo de Ia Plata system. Projected onto a land where freight and passengers had moved slowly and at high cost by horse, mule train, ox cart, wagon, or carriage, the locomotive revolutionized transportation. By conservative estimate, the railroad reduced freight changes to one-twelfth those charged by the ox cart, while moving goods 30 times as fast. 2 Products that had not been raised or traded because of their bulk or perishability could now enter national and world markets. And European goodsclothing, hardware, furnishings, food-could reach most urban dwellers in the provinces at an affordable price. At the outset, Buenos Aires had not exerted the same domination over the railroad system as it had held over river transportation by virtue of its position as the major city at the mouth of the estuary. It boasted the first tracks-a short stretch of six miles laid in r 8 57 that ran from the city's center due west to a nearby suburb. By r 870, the traditional trade route out of the city, worn down by ox carts since the seventeenth century, had been taken over by the railroad. One line ran north along the estuary for 20 miles; another continued the initial westward thrust into the pampas for a distance of roo miles; and a third reached south for 70 miles. But a second important system had emerged out of the same political rivalry between Buenos Aires and the provinces that had fueled the initial development of Rosario as a port for transatlantic shipping. Conceived in the 18 so's and built during the following decade, the 250 miles of the Central Argentine Railroad between Rosario and Cordoba seemed to counterbalance the Buenos Aires domination of the river system while extending the promise of export-agriculture prosperity to all of Argentina. For another decade, these two railroad systems grew independently of each other. Extensions reached further inland from Cordoba, northwest to Tucuman by r876 and west toward San Luis and Mendoza, while the three lines out

...... ·. .... ······· ·.·. ..

..·...

..

---Railroads

.. ..... ......

Rivers

.. ··(i..Asuncion :\.•

·.

~· ~ ~~

~~·· ~\ CORRIENTES .f.~!.l!.n.!l.••.: Q: \)

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~.· ..).•

. .·.

~>·

..

.·. 0

Map

2.2.

Miles

100

Plata

Principal transportation routes in the late nineteenth century.

28

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

of Buenos Aires continued to expand more slowly to the north, west, and south. At the end of the booming r88o's, the two systems finally merged, and Buenos Aires quickly gained control over a railroad network that more and more resembled the spokes of a half-wheel centered on the city. The trend toward centralization received important reinforcements at the same time. At the beginning of the r 88o's, the long-standing conflict over the location of a national capital was resolved by making Buenos Aires the federal district, thus furthering porteiio (meaning the city of Buenos Aires) political domination over the provinces. By middecade, work had also begun on modern port facilities, which would largely overcome the handicaps of mud banks and uncertain channels for oceangoing vessels. Not surprisingly, therefore, in r889-90 the British directors of the Central Argentine Railroad sought and secured access to Buenos Aires by purchases and concessions along the northern and western spokes. At the same time, other companies pushed new lines out of Buenos Aires north to Rosario and west toward Mendoza, and the Southern Railroad spread out toward Bahia Blanca and the southwest. This surge in railroad building began because of an increase in wheat farming, as well as greatly improved and expanded livestock ranching on the pampas. It had the effect of siphoning off much of Rosario's potential as an export-import center and consolidating Buenos Aires as Argentina's dominant port. These developments in railroad construction and consolidation created the framework that determined Mendoza's and Salta's relationship with the nation's commercial center at Buenos Aires. The railroad reached Mendoza in r884, just as the control of the whole railroad system was starting to shift to Buenos Aires. The history of the westward construction dramatically underlines the process by which both the Argentine national government and British railroad companies strengthened porteiio dominance over Argentine commerce. 3 Mendoza's initial rail link to the Argentine coast lay via Central Argentine track to Rosario. When the British-owned Central Argentine Railroad bought a government-built section of track stretching from Mendoza to Villa Mercedes (in San Luis) in r887, it began to draw much of Mendoza's trade to this more direct and cheaper route to the coast. As noted above, only a few years later, the Central Argentine Railroad also became subordinate to Buenos Aires' dominance. The completion of the commercially less significant connection to Chile

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

29

had to wait until I9IO, when British enterprise, after innumerable delays and failures, bridged the Andes through the Uspallata Pass, above Mendoza. In the case of Mendoza, the railroad proved to be a major catalyst in facilitating the region's economic growth and the city's expansion. Mendoza, both before and after the disastrous I86I earthquake, had served primarily as a resting point for trade across the pampas or the Andes. Cattle, brought from the pampas, fattened on alfalfa on nearby irrigated pastures before being driven across the mountain passes to Chile. The surrounding farmland not only yielded an adequate food supply for the local population but also produced a small surplus in the form of brandies, dried fruit, wheat, and hides for shipment to other provinces. As prospects for rapid, cheap rail transport began to percolate through Mendoza, especially after I87o, speculators, landowners, and agriculturists seized on the popularly accepted belief that this province and its neighbor San Juan, to the north, enjoyed peculiar advantages for the growing of grapes, olives, nuts, and fruits in general. It seemed clear that such products as wine could find ready marketsonce the barrier of high ox-cart freight charges had been overcome-in Argentina's growing coastal cities and towns. This region could thus thrive and expand in direct relation with the increasingly prosperous agriculture-export economy of the pampas. Although grapes had always done well in the province, the rush to plant vineyards that resulted from the approach of the railroad was staggering; acreage rose from 2,ooo hectares in I883 to 8,700 hectares two years later.4 The linking of this region's economy with that of the pampas proved to require more, however, than the hasty and often careless planting of vines. Even when the railroad was still on the horizon, the region had begun increasingly to turn away from Chile and toward Buenos Aires for imports. After I 87 5, when the railroad reached Villa Mercedes, provincial imports from Chile declined precipitously: in less than ten years, those shipments dropped from an annual value of 40o,ooo pesos fuertes to nearly zero. The readjustment in the outward flow of the region's products came more slowly, although here too the shift was to markets on the Argentine coast. Live cattle exports to Chile and increased livestock raising in the southern part of the province continued to play a major role in the regional economy, despite protective Chilean tariffs and border tension between the two nations, which sharply curtailed the movement of herds during the years between I 898

30

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

and 1903. Certain other export items sent to adjoining provinces, such as wheat, corn, alfalfa seed, and hides, also increased in absolute terms. But on the irrigated land around Mendoza, grapes and wine spelled the wave of the future. Although inferior grapes, an absence of controls and standards, and poor preparation characterized the output of most of the city's wineries in the 188o's and 189o's, the barrels of raw, cheap wine found ready markets in the coastal cities. Railroad registers indicate, for example, that in I 894 the federal capital and Rosario took 41 percent and 21 percent respectively of total wine shipments out of Mendoza. 5 Mendoza wine did not appear on the tables of the wealthy in Buenos Aires. But tens of thousands of newly arrived Italian and Spanish day laborers on the coast fueled an ever-increasing demand for cheap Argentine wine, reflected in the shipments from Mendoza, which rose from an annual2,ooo tons in r883 to q,ooo tons in r894, to 68,ooo tons by 1902. 6 Financial crisis and overproduction in the grape and wine industry from 1900 to 1903, further aggravated by the temporary collapse of the cattle-export market to Chile, halted the region's booming economic development for a few years. But by 1905, the province, along with the pampas' export-agriculture economy, once again embarked on unprecedented growth. During this second boom, which lasted until just before the First World War, vineyards expanded to cover 7o,ooo hectares, or I73,ooo acres, and wine shipments in 1913 set a record of 35o,ooo tons? The railroad not only linked two natural markets-the grape- and wine-producing oases of the west with the grain- and livestock-exporting heartland of the pampas. It also- greatly expanded the city's commercial influence over the three provinces of Mendoza, San Juan, and San Luis, generally referred to as the region of Cuyo. Within the province itself, the city of Mendoza had always been the only important cluster of population, although until the end of the nineteenth century one could wonder if it really deserved to be called a city. The number of its inhabitants had now increased from the 28,ooo recorded by the 1895 national census to 59,000 in 1914, although it fell in rank from fifth to seventh among Argentine cities. 8 Nearby were the suburbs that today form the urban area of Greater Mendoza-Godoy Cruz with nearly ro,ooo inhabitants, Lujan with 4,ooo, and Rodeo del Medio, Chacras de Coria, and Rodeo de Ia Cruz, each with slightly over 2,ooo. The only other settlements in 1914 to achieve township status by having a population of 2,ooo-which meant in reality a cluster of a

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

3I

hundred or so houses spaced along three or four dirt streets-were San Rafael with 6,ooo inhabitants, a subcenter for a new agricultural frontier developing I20 miles south of Mendoza, and Rivadavia, 30 miles to the southeast, which had barely 2,ooo inhabitants. In the larger region known as Cuyo, Mendoza also clearly predominated as the major urban center, providing services in credit and banking, wholesale and retail outlets, and cultural institutions to a few widely scattered cities. San Luis, located I 6o miles to the east in a relatively unpopulated livestock-grazing frontier, had only a population of I 5,ooo by I 914, an increase of slightly over 4,ooo since I 89 5. Although the capital of its province, it actually had fallen behind the railroad center of Mercedes more than 50 miles farther east, which claimed r8,ooo inhabitants by I914. So spread out were this province's II6,ooo residents that no other population cluster reached the 2,ooo mark in I9I4. The other provincial capital that fell into Mendoza's commercial sphere was San Juan, roo miles to the north and supported by a livestock and grape-growing economy that was very similar to Mendoza's. With I7,ooo inhabitants in 1914, an increase of nearly 7,ooo from r 89 5, it also required the storage and credit facilities of a larger entrepot. In addition, its main railroad link to the coast remained, as first constructed in I 8 8 5, through Mendoza. A narrow-gauge line toward Cordoba, completed in I9IO, and even a bypass around the northeast edge of Mendoza, added in I903, in no way broke San Juan's dependency on its larger neighbor. In the province of San Juan only two centers, both close to the capital, could claim town status: Concepcion with 4,ooo inhabitants and Albard6n with 2,ooo. Because Mendoza had consolidated its commercial sphere, lay adjacent to excellent grape-producing lands, and sheltered the province's major wineries, it achieved an extraordinary growth rate in the early twentieth century that closely paralleled Buenos Aires' development. The railroad's impact on Salta proved to be quite different. Long before a locomotive reached Salta in r 89r, that city possessed a thriving economy built on artisanal and agricultural production and on its position as a major trade center in the northwest with Bolivia and northern Chile. As a secondary city, it combined the economic integration and independence sometimes found in heavily Indian areas of Latin America. But the arrival of the railroads, rather than strengthening the city's commercial influence over its surrounding region and

32

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

stimulating local productivity, served to destroy centuries-old patterns of trade with and production of foodstuffs and household goods for adjoining markets in Bolivia and Chile and replace these with subordination to the Buenos Aires marketplace. Furthermore, at the beginning of the twentieth century, northwestern Argentina did not yet produce the natural gas and oil or the large quantities of tobacco and sugar that would later stimulate economic expansion in the region. Salta had served as a port and local industrial center ever since its founding. Its vessels consisted of mule trains that brought cacao, coca, coffee, and silver from Bolivia or imported European goods from seaports in northern Chile and returned with hides, dried meat, food supplies, and coarse homespun as well as troops of cattle and mules. Its factories were the artisanal and household shops that made shoes, carts, confectionaries, wines, ponchos, hats, and saddles. With Buenos Aires, Salta's trade consisted predominantly of hides and silver exchanged for goods imported from Europe and for mules from the provinces of Santa Fe and Cordoba. In this situation, where commerce played such a vital role, the prospect of railroad communication captivated everyone's imagination. As early as r865, when construction on Argentina's first major railroad between Rosario and Cordoba was just getting under way, the provincial government enthusiastically accepted a proposal-subsequently abandoned-for a railroad line from Salta to the Tucuman border. 9 With the completion of the link between Cordoba and Tucuman in r876 and the beginning of the first studies for the prolongation of the North Central Railroad toward Salta, editorials in the city ecstatically hailed the opening of a new era. 10 A lengthy petition, signed by all the important merchants and landowners of Salta, exhorted President Nicholas Avellaneda to press the building of this line. 11 Significantly, the theme that pervaded the clamor was the advantages to Salta if the Bolivian and north Chilean markets could be captured by such a railroad. The initial years of the r 8 8o's were largely given over to a struggle among various groups in Argentina to determine the actual route to be followed in this northward construction. The principal alternatives were to build a line first to Salta and then extend it to Jujuy and northward to the Bolivian border, or to take a slightly more direct route from Tucuman to Jujuy and build a branch line to Salta. Ultimately, the latter route won out and, by placing Salta at the end of a

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

33

spur line, negated much of the potential stimulus to the province's richest agricultural zone, the Lerma Valley. More seriously, however, the wrangling over routes and the delays in construction caused Argentina to lose the race with Chile to reach Bolivia first with a railroad and capture the transport of that country's potentially rich mineral exports. The War of the Pacific (1879-83), in which Chile overwhelmed the Peruvian-Bolivian alliance, temporarily thrust much of Bolivia's commerce into Argentine hands. But the conclusion of the conflict, accompanied by energetic Chilean railroad construction from Antofagasta to the Bolivian frontier, reversed the situation and resulted in Chilean absorption of much of Bolivia's commerce. 12 The arrival of the railroad in Salta, rather than fanning economic development, actually aggravated the province's already full-blown economic crisis of the early r89o's. Despite the promises, no efforts were made to extend the North Central Railroad beyond Salta and Jujuy toward Bolivia and Chile. Salta's traditional trade by mule train via Atacama with Chile and via Humahuaca with Bolivia thus suffered drastically from cheaper, faster Chilean railroad competition. 13 At the same time, the new railroad link to the Argentine littoral stimulated purchases from Buenos Aires. But since the province had no new products to offer the coastal cities, there was no commensurate increase in Salta's exports to the coast. The changes brought by the railroad thus linked Salta's commerce and development closely with the credit and prosperity of Buenos Aires and European commerce and development closely with the credit and prosperity of Buenos Aires and European commercial houses. Salta's earlier connections with Chile and Bolivia, if not broken, were at least severely reduced in importance. By turning the lines of communication, finance, and trade toward coastal Argentina, Salta lost much of its former autonomy and also its dream of using the railroad to reinforce and expand its traditional economic role as the center of production and trade for northwest Argentina, northern Chile, and much of Bolivia. 14 Thereafter, because the extension of the railroad might well have renewed Salta's economic independence, the national government in Buenos Aires repeatedly obstructed or delayed projects to connect that city with either Chile or Bolivia. 15 The railroad finally reached La Quiaca on the Bolivian border in 1920. But no substantial expansion

34

The Dynamics ol Urban Growth

of trade could take place until Bolivia itself completed the connectmg links with Chuquisaca, Potosf, La Paz, Cochabamba, and Oruro. Porteiio obstructionism, meanwhile, delayed the inauguration of the Chilean connection via Huaytiquina to Antofagasta until I 94 5. By then, it was too late to reconquer Salta's former preeminence in the Bolivia-Chile-Argentina trade triangle; Salta had turned irrevocably toward Buenos Aires and the coast. People in Salta were painfully aware of what was happening, but they proved unable to counteract the growing political and economic power exerted from Buenos Aires, which increasingly subjected the northwest of Argentina to porteiio commercial hegemony. Salta's governor, in his I 9 I 3 message to the provincial legislature, clearly assessed what only partially completed railroad construction meant to the northwestpostponed dreams and a destiny that left the province and the city with only one outlet and forced its reorientation toward Buenos Aires via Tucuman and Cordoba: The most critical problem facing the province is that of communications. In order to understand its importance and the causes that have delayed Salta's progress, one needs only to study a map of the republic. Only one rail line, the North Central, crosses our territory in its most exploited but perhaps least rich section, and this railroad consists of a single track without any of the feeder or branch lines that might bring economic activity and prosperity to adjacent areas. As long as we are not connected to the Pacific by way of Huaytiquina to Antofagasta in Chile and the railroad is not completed to Bolivia-projects that would open those markets for our agricultural and livestock production that because of its nature cannot todav he sent to the littoral-we are seriouslv limited in our potential for econo~ic expansion. 1" • With the construction of the railroad, Salta seemed to have traded its isolated and modest self-sufficiency of the nineteenth century for a position as yet another provincial capital-emporium dependent on the commercial-bureaucratic might of Buenos Aires and the fortunes of the agricultural-export economy of the pampas. The reorientation of Salta toward Buenos Aires not only reduced traditional markets for Salta's agricultural and artisanal production. It also encouraged the region's rural villages-settlements numbering several hundred individuals and composed largely of Indians or mestizos-to remain small. Since Salta produced little needed by coastal Argentina, the railroad could stimulate little increased flow of products in that direction, and the parallel loss of trade with Bolivia and

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

35

northern Chile merely reduced the region's potential for expansion still further. Urban growth outside the provincial capital thus effectively stopped. With a population of 28,ooo in I9I4, only a few hundred less than Corrientes, Salta ranked thirteenth among Argentine cities. But within its own province, it stood completely alone. Only one other settlement, Guemes, located where the spur line to Salta left the Tucuman-to-Jujuy track, made it into the list of towns and cities in the I9I4 census-and only by a margin of eleven persons over the 2,ooo required for an urban classification. Jujuy, with its nearly 8,ooo inhabitants, and three other towns in that province, each with slightly more than 2,ooo residents, might-it could be argued-still fall into Salta's orbit in terms of proximity and road communication. But the manner in which the railroad had been built in the northwest exerted a counterpull on Jujuy toward the facilities of much larger Tucuman, with 9 I ,ooo inhabitants. The railroad's location thus helped to rob Salta even of its former influence over the adjoining province of Jujuy and to destroy further its position of independence and hegemony in the northwest. Transatlantic steamers, riverboats, and trains dramatically lowered transport costs during the second half of the nineteenth century. The pampas region, above all, could now place its wool and hides, then its grains, and finally its meats in European markets on highly advantageous terms. As the cheaper transport methods spread to the other provinces, the gap that separated these areas from the coast and especially from Buenos Aires narrowed notably, and the largest city in each region expanded its commercial and economic predominance. Wherever goods were produced that were needed by consumers abroad or by the rapidly growing population in the cities and farms of the pampas, the growth of that region's major secondary city was as spectacular as in Buenos Aires or Rosario. Mendoza, with its wine and grape industry, consequently flourished remarkably after I 8 84 and emerged as the principal city for the whole Cuyo region. Elsewhere, expansion responded primarily to the effectiveness of each secondary city in serving its immediate region in a commercial exchange oriented toward and dominated by Buenos Aires. Both Salta and Corrientes, lacking products needed in coastal Argentina and unable even to maintain their earlier commercial spheres of influence, saw their local economies increasingly subjected to the agricultural-export interests of Buenos Aires.

36

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

The development of each local region's relations with Buenos Aires and the rapidly expanding pampas economy in the late nineteenth century largely determined the rate of growth of Argentina's secondary cities. The shape that growth took, however, responded to factors closer to home. For secondary cities in Argentina and in Latin America in general, the previously overwhelming influence exerted by the central plaza on residential preferences of the upper class began to give way, with improved paving and the use of carriages and streetcars, to considerations associated with higher terrain, such as spaciousness and a healthier environment. As noted at the outset of this chapter, the modest households of the original settlements built their residences around a plaza. The conquistadores' concern with defense and their desire to reestablish some semblance of Spanish towns in tl:ese alien surroundings led them to keep house lots small and to group dwellings along the four dirt streets that bordered the central block or plaza. There was no thought of dispersing settlers to individual crop or grazing lands or allocating holdings spread out along a single street or avenue. Rather, garden plots were assigned to each household just outside the cluster of eight to fourteen blocks that formed the city's initial outline. Still farther out, more extensive grazing lands were either held in common tenancy or gradually assigned to or purchased by the most influential and wealthy households. Military rank largely determined the assignment of house lots, with the most powerful households facing on the plaza-along with the church, cabildo, and fort-or located in the blocks immediately adjoining the plaza. As many as 20 to 24 house lots could be carved from the standard city block measuring I 14 varas (roughly equivalent to I I4 yards) on a side, although each of the principal officers might often take a quarter block. At the four corners of the block, lots could measure 20, 30, or even 40 varas on a side. Rectangular shapes took over toward the middle of each block, with frontage on the street measuring 20 or 30 varas and a depth that could reach 70 varas. Because of the direct equation between size of house lots and proximity to the plaza on one hand and military and social position on the other, the typical recently established settlement followed the pattern shown in Fig. 2. r. The military force that established the settlement formed the first households and gave the city its initial social hierarchy. The introduction of wives from other cities or Indian concubines from nearby tribes,

Location of house plots

D

Location of garden plots

Fig. 2.1. Outline of a typical Hispanic city with plaza, cabildo, fort, and church surrounded by house lots and ringed by garden plots.

38

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

the rapid addition of legitimate and illegitimate children, along with the arrival of imported African slaves and the incorporation of Indian servants and laborers, added social substance to the bare bones of military structure and rank. This expansion resulted in complicated social distinctions. According to Spanish definitions developed during the conquest period, society was organized first and foremost along racial lines, starting at the top with Spaniards born in the peninsula, Spaniards born in the New World, and other Europeans, and then proceeding downward to mestizos, Indians, various mixtures of Europeans and Indians with blacks, mulattoes, and finally black Africans. Economic or occupational distinctions added another dimension, with manual labor serving as the major watershed between workers and leaders. According to these classifications, at the top stood the nobles, military commanders, Crown officers, major landowners, lawyers, members of the clergy, and, finally in the eighteenth century, the principal merchants dealing in import-export trade. On the other side of the division were a few professions that would soon acquire elite status. Foremost were physicians, who, by the late eighteenth century, were using educational and guild efforts to move out of the status of mere barbers. At this level also were some of the retail merchants. Below them ranked the smaller shopkeepers and the artisans, including skilled construction workers. Then came the household servants and unskilled day laborers, and at the bottom, the slaves. The combination of racial and occupation differentiations yielded a societal system that does not relate well with present-day concepts of upper, middle, and lower class. Gradations of wealth and blood combined in complex patterns to determine an individual's status. To belong to the upper occupational echelons, for example, required pure Spanish lineage. During the sixteenth century, however, when Spanish women in America were still somewhat a rarity, a number of leading families got their start with an Indian or mixed-blood mother. During ensuing decades, that ancestor was either forgotten or given respectability as an "Indian princess." At the same time, despite the enormous importance of racial distinctions, people of any race could be and were manual laborers. In this apparently complex structure, the family ultimately determined each individual's place in society. Family background defined wealth, occupation, and racial origins and these in turn controlled other distinctions such as dress, housing, education, speech, and

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

39

cultural attitudes. The conquest era had yielded two main categories of families: the leading families, which eventually evolved into the upper class, and the humbler households that made up the working class. The original expedition's principal officers sired the first leading families. As the settlement gradually moved from frontier military functions to subsistence agriculture and then to trade, these families made the transition easily because they controlled others, possessed access to more servants, and had assigned to themselves more and better land and thus could acquire capital and credit. Command did not, however, invariably endow its possessors with continued prestige. Violence and strife-engendered by ambition and accentuated by factional jealousies that extended back to the viceregal base in Lima or even across the Atlantic to Madrid-eliminated many a leader before he could create a stable family out of his small household. An unusually fecund wife could cause a family's modest store of resources to spread out among too many offspring. These children, in turn, left with little more than an illustrious name, either sank into genteel poverty and attempted to eke out a living in nonmanual pursuits as seamstresses or tutors or, more likely, moved on to seek their fortunes elsewhere. And some families showed a disinclination or inability to transfer their skills to agricultural-commercial pursuits and soon faded from the scene. For several generations, this hierarchy of families remained flexible, if not fluid. Although the present-day concept of a middle group has occasionally been applied to the original expedition's lesser officers and cavalrymen who, because of their investment in horses, equipment, and armament, usually had some capital, most of them, along with a number of newcomers, soon sank into the mass of the working classes. A few newcomers, often merchants or agents from a commercial house in Lima, Santiago, or Buenos Aires, brought capital, skills, or contacts that enabled them to prosper in these remote cities. With their gains, they solidified their commercial position, bought real estate, married a daughter from an established local family, and thus added another name to the handful of families that dominated the city. Once in a great while, an offspring from the rank and file of the original expedition or a new arrival without connections used his skill, audacity, and luck to build an economic base for subsequent absorption into this small group of families. Throughout the city's development, roughly ro percent of the urban

40

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

population belonged to these leading families. 17 The principal households gradually increased from three or four at the end of the sixteenth century to IS or 20 by the early eighteenth century, to around 50 by independence, and to 6o or 6 5 by the I 8 so's. Most of the leading family names had been established by I700. Thereafter, increases in the number of households represented variations in some twenty basic family names because of births and marriages. Within each leading family, the economic position of individual members or even of households with similar family names varied considerably: from that of a principal merchant and his immediate family; to those of recently established households; to those of impecunious cousins, distant ne'erdo-well relatives, or spinster aunts or nieces who survived as members of some extended family. But name, as well as residence in a household unit located near the main plaza, endowed all those family members with accepted position near the top of the social ladder. Below the leading families extended the remaining 90 percent of the urban populace-individuals, households, and families that constituted the working classes. Since class structure will be examined in more detail in Chapters 6 and 7, the present preview primarily seeks to relate the complexities of class to terrain and thus to clarify the city's spacial structure. According to a simple but often accepted model, the leading families congregated around the central plaza while working-class families spread out from this core, with the poorest households located at the greatest distance from the center. Variations and contradictions to this pattern, however, immediately present themselves. Servants also lived at the core in 't;he homes of the leading families. Corner sites of centrally located blocks tended, by the subdivision of estates and sales, to be reduced in size and to become locations for shops or artisans adjacent to the plaza. Artisans themselves tended to congregate as they had in the medieval city. Although a settlement of several thousand inhabitants supported only a handful of shoemakers, tailors, smiths, or bakers, these established themselves in clusters a block or two from the plaza. The area around the public market, usually installed close to the plaza and characterized by unwelcome noise and smells, soon developed the small house lots associated with artisans and tradesmen. Because troops ranked near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and often were made up of persons who had chosen military service as an alternative to jail, the area around the fort-also located near the

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

41

plaza-had an unsavory reputation and possessed a fringe of workingclass housing. At the same time, the general pattern prevailed, even in the smallest settlements, with the color of inhabitants shading from light to dark as one walked away from the plaza, the occupations progressing from managerial and administrative to artisanal to unskilled manual, and the houses changing from substantial brick, stucco, and wood to flimsy reed, straw, and mud. Indians, unless enslaved or held as household servants, lived at some distance from the city in their own communities and did not form part of the urban population. The few urban blacks in the first decades served and lived in the leading households. As African imports increased, some slaves began to work as artisans or skilled laborers and to live outside their owner's house, while others, who had purchased their freedom, existed independently as free blacks. This black population, along with mestizo and mulatto mixtures, inhabited the poorest housing and lived at the greatest distance from the plaza. Increasingly, these people shared the urban periphery with the unhealthy or noisome activities of hospitals, slaughterhouses, brick factories, and cemeteries. At first the terrain on which these cities were established did not substantially affect settlement and class patterns. The first conquistadores had chosen sites that met military needs, not the needs of generations and growth still centuries distant. According to sixteenthcentury concepts of warfare, high ground held little attraction. Both infantrymen with pikes and harquebuses and heavily armored cavalrymen found level or slightly sloping terrain advantageous. Often the best defensive positions would be located in low-lying land to take advantage of natural obstacles such as swamps, marshes, or rivers. Furthermore, because a good defense site required a dependable water supply for men and animals, the conquistadores sought out streams or broad natural depressions where the water table could be found within a few feet of the surface. As the population expanded and settlement spread, higher land still possessed no intrinsic advantages and indeed suggested handicaps. Elevation, even if only 20 or 30 feet above its surroundings, implied rocky, dry, less fertile land. Houses built on heights were more exposed to the elements. Regular streets and lots, so dear to Spanish urban concepts, could not be as easily laid out and maintained across hills, swells, or ridges. The list of nonadvantages was even longer. Homes of

42

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

the well-to-do, in particular, continued to be oriented inward around interior patios, so that considerations of view, fresh breezes, or surrounding gardens held little attraction. Proximity to one's fellow, even after the defensive needs of the sixteenth century had waned, still outstripped in the Spanish mind any desire for spaciousness or ostentation that building on heights might have implied. And the urban population was neither large enough nor resident on the site long enough to cause easily identifiable problems. Sewage and garbage were regularly deposited in back patios, on vacant lots, or in the street. In wet climates, rains periodically flushed clean the land's surface; in drier areas, the sun and wind did similar service; and everywhere, pigs, dogs, and other scavengers could be counted on to hasten the process. Man did not live too long anyway, especially in the laboring classes, and the volume of deaths from influenza, pneumonia, and the periodic scourges of yellow fever, malaria, smallpox, and diphtheria masked the effect of a polluted environment on public health. The high number of infant deaths from gastrointestinal infections was accepted as divinely ordained. The wealthy, meanwhile, could and did protect themselves from the worst effects by living in less crowded conditions, eating better, working less strenuously, and drinking water from cisterns or wells rather than the runoff surface water of streams and ditches. As a result, few of the Spanish settlements in the Argentine area occupied the hills, ridges, or high ground that could be found close to most sites. Furthermore, in the physicial expansion of the city, no incentive existed to build upward; indeed the level of technology and the accompanying high costs prohibited it. Only at the end of the eighteenth century, with improved bricks, mortar, and carpentry, did some of the wealthy add a second tier of rooms and those usually only over the front portion of their house. The one-story household dwelling thus overwhelmingly predominated and with it the tendency for urban settlement to sprawl outward. By the mid-eighteenth century, nearly three centuries after their establishment, these cities had largely filled in the conquistadores' original town plans. But everywhere lay land for expansion, a process that merely demanded the subdivision and sale of adjoining garden plots and the pushing out of croplands a little farther from the center. In a few cases, a hill, a river, or a swamp blocked growth in a particular direction. Otherwise, cities tended to flow outward in all directions,

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

43

with some slight tendency to favor blocks along main roads that led out of the main plaza. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the roles of both plaza and terrain in guiding expansion changed dramatically. As the upper class began to move away from the blocks immediately surrounding the central plaza, that core lost its predominance in residential location in secondary cities in Argentina and in Latin America in general. In its place, high ground increasingly became the principal factor controlling the residential preferences of the upper class and orienting the physical shape of the city in its expansion. As secondary cities expanded in size, the importance of the plaza declined steadily, almost in direct relation to the rate of population growth. The larger the city, therefore, the less predominant the central plaza. That is not to say that the main plaza did not continue to play a role in Argentine cities. In Argentina, as throughout the Spanish world, the plaza maintained its significant influence on urban forms, as well as on the urban way of life, and continued to provide the social, economic, and political core for the city. Countless travelers, writers, painters, and photographers all seized on the plaza as something characteristically Spanish, and their interpretations have been echoed by analysts and students of the Hispanic city ever since. The plaza clearly provided a feature that distinguished these cities from other European cities or from cities in Asia, Africa, or the United States. But in contrast to the colonial era, in the late nineteenth century the plaza no longer gave principal orientation and direction to residential patterns. The first sign of the central plaza's loss of predominance was the creation of other plazas. Spanish urban practice dictated that open spaces periodically relieve the pattern of square blocks enclosed by narrow streets. Although no absolute rules existed, practical considerations-and government decree-often required a new plaza or plazas whenever the built-up area had expanded outward six to eight blocks from the principal plaza. New needs frequently provided the political seed for these plazas and fostered their subsequent growth. In some cases, local merchants, especially in the larger cities, wanted a wholesale market or exchange area where products from the surrounding countryside could be gathered and sold. In such a plaza, a barren, dusty square on the

44

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

outskirts, ox carts or mule trains unloaded; usually a few warehouses or large storage buildings faced onto it. The homes of the poorer classes occupied the adjoining blocks, and the environment generally reflected the habitat, amusements, and customs of drivers, peons, and carters and created a rough and sometimes dangerous neighborhood. Often, by the time the railroad arrived, commercial habits and routes had hardened to the point that it was here the rails ended, a station was built, and more prestigious businesses and residences sprang up. More often, the basis for a new plaza arose from socioreligious causes rather than from commerce. Population growth fueled the need for more priests, and soon a new parish took shape. An entrepreneurial priest frequently organized his parishioners for the task of constructing a church on a secondary plaza. Gradually the surrounding area took on a character of its own, forming its own nucleus of well-to-do homes around the plaza. Such secondary plazas not only served as trade terminals for the surrounding countryside or as an additional or even a preferred residential area for the upper class. They also became the location for government offices as they moved outward, a center around which particular artisanal or industrial activities might be clustered along with the residences of their workers, or even a part of the city given over to marginal elements in society and avoided by so-called respectable persons. In any of these cases, the station in life of the inhabitants of adjoining houses and blocks gave f1 character and color to a plaza quite often independent of its distance from the main plaza. Along with the development of new and competing plazas came the convenience and facilities of paved streets, streetcars, and eventually buses and cars. Although the city's traditional upper class continued for some time to live near the central plaza, many of the newer upperclass families and increasing numbers of white-collar employees in government and business sought residences along transport axes that could bring them quickly to the downtown core. At the same time, they could live in better homes on cheaper lands outside the built-up area. The growth of suburbs had begun. Transport helped to determine the desirable sites for groups that in the twentieth century would form the middle class: the more substantial residences surrounded the paved avenue, the station, or the streetcar line. At a distance of two or three blocks, the shacks and rutted dirt streets of the poor reappeared. Some areas of the city gradually became associated predominantly with man-

The Dynamics ol Urban Growth

45

ual-labor, white-collar, or upper-class residents, but clear segregation patterns tended to be blurred, as in the plaza-oriented city, by the longstanding intermingling in each area of household servants, artisans, and tradesmen with merchants, government officials, and landowners. As the secondary cities gradually spread out toward new plazas and along principal transport lines, higher ground increasingly guided residential preferences. Previously, when low-lying areas were considered desirable, they were relegated to squatters or the very poor only when subject to frequent floods. But in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the low lands, so frequently chosen by conquistadores as the base for these cities, became increasingly unpleasant and even dangerous. The former desire to avoid dryness or exposure to elements and to lay out regular streets now gave way to needs for drainage and space. Improved transport, even if only in the form of paved streets and sidewalks, made it unnecessary for the well-to-do to cluster near one another or in close proximity to places of work and recreation, in other words, around the central plaza. Horses, carriages, and a variety of wheeled vehicles could carry more individuals with ever-increasing speed, convenience, and comfort. Housing preferences had also begun to change. Homes started to turn outward, with less emphasis on the enclosed world of interior patios, barred windows, and heavy doors shutting off the world at the sidewalk. Builders took advantage of cheaper land on the outskirts to set houses back from the street and to build on larger lots. In constructing for the wealthy, more effort and money were expended on adornments-balconies, balustrades, window casements, marble and tile trim, and occasionally ornate carvings in wood or plaster as well as statuary and formal gardens. And the expanding white-collar groups quickly imitated these upper-class tastes with bungalows and modest chalets. A fence, a gate, bushes, and grass often provided the access to a front door embellished with trim and a few raised steps. These changing styles, however, responded more to the dangers at the core than to the attractions of the periphery. In a few cities, where excessive water in the form of overflowing rivers or heavy rainfall had long affected settlement patterns, the upper class soon began to move toward higher terrain. In Corrientes, outward settlement started as early as the 185o's along almost imperceptible ridges that led toward the new cathedral being built several blocks southeast of the main plaza. Elsewhere, as dramatically illustrated in several contemporary

46

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

sanitation studies of Salta, the foundation for the built-up center of many an Argentine city gradually became little more than an imperfectly disguised cesspool. With a water supply that largely depended on wells sunk on each house lot or water collected from nearby ditches or streams, with the disposal of human wastes in shallow latrines, on vacant lots, or in gutters, and with the casual discarding of garbage around the city, it is amazing that these low-lying settlements survived as long and as well as they did. The expansion of the urban population in the late nineteenth century, however, created intolerable conditions for those who could not afford to escape. As a result, the upper class, usually imitated by and intermingled with white-collar groups, sought higher ground: in a northward direction at Salta, accentuated in the 19oo's by the building of a new government house six blocks north of the main plaza; to the south in Mendoza, and then, after the 1861 earthquake, increasingly toward rising ground on the city's western edge. Despite individual peculiarities of environment, Argentine secondary cities changed along similar lines in the late nineteenth century. Commerce, which had always bulked large in the formation and development of these cities, now became their principal function. The areas that grew the most rapidly and consequently changed the most attached themselves profitably by means of new transport facilities to Buenos Aires and the burgeoning agricultural-export economy of the coast, either supplying needs of that urban populace or feeding the export flow with their own local products. The size and nature of the surrounding region that a given city could serve and dominate likewise contributed to its rate of development. But even those cities that did not expand at the rate of the porteno-dominated centers or lacked large commercial hinterlands experienced similar changes on a smaller scale. Both Corrientes and Salta tripled in population in the second half of the nineteenth century and then doubled in size during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The actual physical shape of these cities also changed. Demographic growth encouraged the formation of additional plazas, and improved transportation facilitated movement between the periphery and the core. No longer did the well-to-do have to reside at the city's center in order to enjoy the city's advantages. Indeed, changing styles of life, new architectural preferences, and increasing crowding and pollution at the

The Dynamics of Urban Growth

47

core encouraged the wealthy to develop residential clusters away from the main plaza. Although the area around the central plaza remained the social, cultural, political, and economic focus for the city, the upper class increasingly led residential expansion outward in search of healthier, more pleasant environments on higher ground.

THREE

Corrientes: A Study in Stagnation

In order to capture the environment and flavor of small-city life and to provide the background needed for exploring the how and why of secondary-city growth, the next three chapters stress the major physical characteristics and ecological developments for each provincial capital. The first case is Corrientes, which, despite its proximity and river communication to Buenos Aires, showed the least amount of change between 1850 and 1910. This region produced little that was needed by the expanding agricultural-export economy of the pampas, and nothing-not even a major war or new modes of transport-shook the city's stability or, indeed, the complacency of its inhabitants. The second case, Salta, has customarily been portrayed as a typical colonial or traditional society. Located at the greatest distance of the three from the coast, this region's long-standing economic integration with the mining areas of Bolivia and northern Chile was finally upset with the arrival of the railroad connecting Salta to Buenos Aires and the Argentine coast. The city only slowly and reluctantly readjusted to the new economic conditions and consequently, by 1910, had changed but little and then primarily in response to internal threats posed by disease and flooding. The final case is Mendoza, which, in part because of the challenge from its arid, earthquake-prone environment and even more because of its successful accommodation to the burgeoning pampas prosperity of the late nineteenth century, underwent substantial transformation during these six decades. The city, totally rebuilt after the disastrous 1861 earthquake, made further adjustments with the arrival of the railroad in 1884 and the increasing success of its wine and grape industries.

Corrientes: A Study in Stagnation

49

In the 198o's, Corrientes-now the smallest of the three cities, with r5o,ooo inhabitants-still radiates a sensation of pleasant repose. Despite decades of tumultuous change and growth for much of Argentina, seemingly nothing has happened here to change the deliberate pace of life set centuries earlier. Men and women move unhurriedly about their daily routine and lighten their activities with gossip and pleasantries. This low, flat city, reaching back from the broad, brown Parana River, appears content under its semitropical cover of orange trees and jasmine, pierced only occasionally by church spires or by the rare highrise office or apartment building. Indeed, the weight of heat and humidity that persists even into the winter months forces the most eager newcomer to seek repose after the heavy noonday meal, and the long afternoon siesta maintains its grasp unchallenged by work schedules or business pressures. This lack of activity and stimulus is not new to Corrientes. A leading Argentine statesman on his way back from a visit to Paraguay in r896 reflected on how little had changed since he had been stationed in the city thirty years earlier as a young lieutenant: "Corrientes was then a city sleeping in the shade of its orange trees .... Almost isolated at one extreme of the country, it enjoyed a state of perpetual tranquillity, free from the constant demands of our urgent and feverish race toward progress." 1 Many aspects of the mid-nineteenth-century city can still be seen today. The city has spread outward, particularly toward the east where the built-up areas stretch a distance of three to four miles from the main Plaza 25 de Mayo. Although only a few houses from the r85o's remain standing, the sense of lowness and flatness remains. Stores, banks, and cafes have taken over much of the downtown area that occupies the ridge between the Plaza 25 de Mayo and the Plaza Juan Bautista (now Sargento Cabral), but to a remarkable degree the upper class continues to live in one- and two-story residences in the center. Few industries have developed, and although there has been some diversification and intensification of agriculture, the province still depends largely on its cattle and horses for income. Even in the twentieth century, which has brought dramatic changes to many Argentine cities, Corrientes lies dormant. This lack of change contrasts most sharply with the experience of Resistencia, capital of the province of the Chaco, several miles inland on the other side of the Parana River from Corrientes. Today, this bustling city, first established in the r 8 8o's, vibrates with the

50

Corrientes: A Study in Stagnation

movement and enthusiasm of a new frontier, while its agricultural hinterland produces cotton, lumber, and tannin needed in the coastal cities and factories of Argentina. Yet Corrientes' history has hardly been uneventful or remote. From a number of vantage points this city, which serves as the capital of a province of the same name, had experienced many of the same forces and enjoyed many of the same advantages that swelled the population of the downriver port of Rosario from Io,ooo to more than 2oo,ooo between I869 and I9I4 or pushed Buenos Aires from the status of a large village to that of a world metropolis in a period of 40 years. 2 The city also developed from the beginning along lines common to many Argentine provincial capitals-within Spain's late-sixteenth-century strategy to sprinkle outposts along the frontier area represented by the Rfo de Ia Plata's estuary. The city dated from I 58 8. It was established as part of the same expansion from Asuncion that founded Santa Fe in I 57 3 and developed a permanent settlement at Buenos Aires in I 5 8o. Today correntinos, the inhabitants of Corrientes, still fondly recall the legend of their city's dramatic origins and venerate a charred wooden cross that represents the struggle of the first year. At the beginning of April I 58 8, So Spaniards and mestizos landed on the left bank of the Parana, just south of the river's sharp bend to the east and its confluence with the Paraguay River. They had come to establish formally an outline for a city, although a work party charged with clearing the land had preceded them by several weeks. The site had been selected because in the sixteenth century several rocky promontories along the coast at this bend caused bays suitable to shelter the small river craft of the time. 3 The members of the expedition threw together a makeshift fort on a ridge to the southwest of the present-day city and in front of the breastworks put up a cross fashioned from a recently fallen sapling. The conquistadores clearly needed as much spiritual assistance as possible against the gathering bands of hostile Indians. In the ensuing struggle, the tiny Spanish force-as so often happened elsewhere in the New World-stood off the numerically superior natives, evidently aided in no little measure by a "miracle." The cross, made of a remarkably hard and green wood, could not be destroyed, no matter how much brush the Indians ignited around it. From such an auspicious though troubled start, the settlement began to serve Spain as a frontier bastion, first against Indians and later against Portuguese incursions from Brazil and as a way station for trade

Corrientes: A Study in Stagnation

5I

along the interior waterways to Paraguay. As in Paraguay, the environment favored the settlers. The rich soil and subtropical climate easily yielded a subsistence of squash, beans, manioc, and corn. With little effort, fish and fruit could be gathered. In the well-watered forests and grasslands toward the south and east, cattle and horses multiplied rapidly. The initial clashes with native tribes soon gave way to domination by the Spaniards and mestizos and the further interbreeding of the conquistadores with the Guarani women. The early settlers soon found the terrain, so hastily seized by the initial expedition, ill suited to the standard urban grid of streets and lots set around a central plaza. Providing an adequate shelter for ships along the riverbank became an even more urgent need. As a result, the settlement shortly moved from the original fort to a new site slightly more than a mile to the northeast, where the currents had formed a small bay and where a fairly broad tongue of higher land, in an otherwise apparently flat shoreline, reached out toward this natural harbor. The erection of a new fort just to the right of the harbor stressed the defense concerns of the emerging settlement. By I 590, the outline for the present-day city thus had taken form: the cabildo, or municipal building, and two churches facing on the main plaza; and a grid made up of six streets ten yards wide, running north and south, and three running east and west. By I8 50, after two and a half centuries of unspectacular development, Corrientes seemed hardly to deserve the title of city. Independence from Spain at the beginning of the century had confirmed Corrientes' far-flung jurisdiction by making it the capital of a sprawling and little-populated province at Argentina's northeast corner, fronting on Paraguay, Brazil, and Uruguay. To the east, Corrientes' claim reached nearly 400 miles into the jungles of Misiones. 4 Southward, the province extended for 3 50 miles, covering a fertile mesopotamia bordered by the Parana and Uruguay rivers. But such jurisdiction existed more on paper than in fact. Corrientes, located at the extreme northwest corner of the province, faced enormous difficulties in communicating readily with distant towns and rural districts. Streams, swamps, and lakes, often swollen by heavy rains, interposed constant obstacles for travelers and trade. The population, initially at least, tended to cling to the banks of the Parana and Uruguay rivers, leaving an uninhabited interior nearly ISO miles wide. In addition, the livestock production and communication lines of the southern half of the province had begun to respond by midcentury

52

Corrientes: A Study in Stagnation

more to the province's second city, Goya, than to the capital, forecasting further handicaps to Corrientes' control over its hinterland. The economic development of the province further underlined the relative humbleness of its capital city. Although in the I 8 so's livestock production still constituted Argentina's principal claim to fame, the province of Corrientes produced virtually nothing but horses and cattle. The list of potential products seemed endless. Oranges and lemons literally rotted on the ground; tobacco, indigo, cotton, rice, sugarcane, manioc, corn, squash, beans, sweet potatoes, and melons grew spectacularly whenever planted; and the wealth in lumber and wild animal skins appeared unlimited. Yet from the outset, the settlers had confined agricultural production to subsistence garden plots adjacent to their settlements and towns. The huge land grants, established at the conquest and maintained thereafter in the hands of a few patriarchal families, provided the province's major export-hides. These lands represented wealth estimated in thousands of head of nearly wild cattle and horses. In addition, toward the south along the courses of the Parana and Uruguay rivers, the saladeros, or meat-salting establishments, produced salted meat and tallow. But this livestock production yielded remarkably little in relation to the vast amount of acreage used. Perhaps, as a number of travelers suggested, nature had been too kind to Corrientes: the soil and climate permitted survival with minimal effort. 5 But it also was true that none of the agricultural products mentioned earlier could reach or compete in distant urban centers such as Buenos Aires, to say nothing of European cities. Furthermore, at least in the nineteenth-century context, the virtual absence of transportation facilities, capital, or entrepreneurial abilities militated against the development of a product such as rice or cotton that might have competed on the world market. As a result, the city and the province of Corrientes languished, their existence assured with an easily harvested food supply, with the lightly carried responsibilities of administering a largely uninhabited land, and with a commercial exchange of imported consumer goods bought with the crumbs provided by marginal and inefficient livestock production. The area's demographic growth reflected these economic realities. Thirty years after its founding, the city of Corrientes boasted only a few more heads of household than the original military expedition had created: 9 I vecinos, or householders, for a total of 40 5 inhabitants, along with 89 Indians. 6 By the end of the eighteenth century, 200 years

Corrientes: A Study in Stagnation

s3

later, its population had reached 4,soo, and that of the whole province, ro,ooo. Independence from Spain, the loosening of commercial restrictions, and the corresponding rise in prices for exports such as hides stimulated the commerce of this river port. Population estimates for the r820's neared 8,ooo for the city. By midcentury, the city still registered the same population, but the province, benefiting from the spread of cattle, horses, settlers, and saladeros along the Parana and Uruguay rivers, now claimed 8 s,ooo inhabitants? Visitors in the middle of the nineteenth century uniformly reported their views of the city as first glimpsed from the deck of a riverboat: "Two venerable-looking churches-the Matriz and San Franciscowith the Moorish tower of the Cabildo (where the judicial offices exist), first attracted my attention. Then a number of brown sloping roofs-a very unusual thing in Spanish American cities, where nearly all the housetops are flat-gave quite an air of quaintness to the place." 8 Invariably the orange trees that nearly covered the one-story buildings also drew notice, characterizing Corrientes as "the city of orange groves." 9 But along with the attractiveness of the surroundings perceived from shipboard came disappointment with the rusticity and smallness of the city. One traveler, who made a brief stop en route to Paraguay in r86r, epitomized Corrientes as "a hot, dreary, sandy city." 10 Visitors landed at the same little cove of San Sebastian that had originally provided a port for the relocated settlement in r s9o. The facilities had not improved much since that date. A number of skiffs and rowboats, often manned by husky Neapolitan stevedores, greeted each ship as it anchored in the open river a few hundred yards from shore. Passengers, baggage, and often freight had to endure the delays, expense, and inconveniences involved in such rudimentary conveyance to a short pier built in the r 8 so's. From here one reached the sandy beach, often laced with rivulets from the frequent torrential downpours, and crossed the unpaved street of Sud America (subsequently Placido Martinez) in order to enter the heart of the city. By the r 8 so's, Corrientes had spread out to occupy most of the original roo blocks envisaged in the sixteenth-century city plan and had begun to spill beyond them into the zone of chacras, or small farms. The built-up area, outlined by twelve streets running north and south and eight running east and west, had gradually expanded southeast along the broad tongue of land that rose 20 to 2S feet above the

54

Corrientes: A Study in Stagnation

river's edge and had first attracted the founding fathers in I590. This path of expansion showed up clearly in the location of public buildings and churches and in the selection of house sites by the wealthier families. It followed a line drawn from the central plaza, or Plaza 25 de Mayo, which had been established at the city's founding, to the Plaza Juan Bautista (later Sargento Cabral), created in I 840, and later reached six blocks further east to the Plaza Libertad (later J. E. Martinez), established in I 8 6 3 (Map 3. I). Across a ditch or depression to the south, a similar but slightly lower ridge, characterized by humbler dwellings and a less prestigious plaza, marked a parallel eastward growth from the Plaza de la Cruz (established in I72o) to the Plaza 9 de Enero (created in I874 and subsequently renamed Plaza Torrent). In many ways, Corrientes was still only a village. Street names had first been imposed by decree in I 8 5I, but, for another two decades at least, almost all addresses or locations were identified instead by their relationship to well-known landmarks-two blocks from the main plaza, or a half block south of the San Francisco Church. Street numbers were not commonly used until after I 900. One major landmark stood on the riverfront-the former Jesuit college built in the late seventeenth century, which now served as the government house and contained the offices of the provincial governor and his ministers as well as the customs house and the provincial bank. 11 Two blocks to the east was the city's main plaza, with the cabildo, the traditional municipal building found in all Hispanic cities, located on its north side, close to the river. Although the cabildo's original structure dated from I 6o 5, it had been totally rebuilt in the early nineteenth century as a long, low building with columns and porticos to which in I 8 59 a central tower was added. Within this building also functioned the jail, the provincial legislature, and the supreme court. The plaza itself, despite its role as the city's focal point, appeared remarkably barren. Not until I 8 6 I was the open sandy square, on which horses and cows periodically grazed, even leveled and planted with a few scraggly trees. These efforts at beautification culminated with the building of a stuccoed and whitewashed brick column at the plaza's center, in imitation of a similar monument in the principal plaza of Buenos Aires. 12 But that hardly stilled the critics; one cynical observer wrote, "Among all cultured peoples, great deal of effort goes into beautifying plazas and public places, save in Corrientes where

a

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PLAZAS 1. 25 de Mayo 2. Juan Bautista 3. Libertad 4 . De La Cruz 5. 9 de Enero

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Map 4.I. Principal features of the city of Salta,

1850-1910.

Salta: The Sleeping Beauty

83

ceremony. Crowds of worshipers poured through the cathedral, while the surrounding streets remained congested during the entire week. The climax came on I 5 September, when the images were borne out of the cathedral in the late afternoon and taken on a slow, solemn procession for a distance of ten blocks before being returned to their altars? More profane and even more tumultuous was Carnaval, a midsummer week of riotous celebration that preceded Lent. The throwing of water often seemed to be the predominant activity during those days. Diversions for all classes abounded, and activity in ranchos on the outskirts and in the less respectable bars and cafes toward the west and south sides of the city picked up noticeably. Arrests for drunkenness also increased, as did the toll in dead and wounded from knife fights. But along with the violence came more peaceful entertainment. People often spent weeks in preparing their costumes and masks or in working out an act or dance as a member of a comparsa, or group, that accompanied the Carnaval processions through the central streets in the afternoons or evenings. Often a veritable tent-city sprang up on the broad plain just north of the city, the so-called "Carnaval in tents," which offered refreshments, games, music, and dancing. The Club 20 de Febrero always held a splendid ball, to which public gatherings were added in the I 89o's at one or more of the principal restaurants or hotels. And elite families usually gave a number of private parties in anticipation of the abstentions required by the Lenten season. 8 Other than holidays, only a few events broke the monotony of life in Salta. On particularly hot summer afternoons, much of the population adjourned to the Arias River on the city's south side, a distance of about twelve blocks. The bathing areas were unmarked but separated by sex and class into clearly understood areas: the women bathed covered from neck to feet in long flowing gowns; at least a half-mile away the men sported, often in the nude. As long as the weather remained good, the late afternoon and evening hours brought an increasing flow of persons to the city's traditional focal point at the plaza. The retreta, or stroll around the plaza, constituted an important element, especially in the life of the upper class. Here, young men had a chance to stare passionately at girls; families came to see and be seen; and one could exchange pleasantries and catch up on gossip. The elite always dressed formally for the occasion and tended to concentrate on the east side of the plaza, where the paths had first been paved with flagstones. The poorer classes also frequented the plaza at these hours,

84

Salta: The Sleeping Beauty

especially after the 187o's when the concerts on Sunday afternoon and certain other evenings became featured events. But by unspoken convention the poor used unpaved portions of the plaza. 9 This newfound attraction for the plaza resulted in increasing efforts to beautify that open square, which initially had been decorated with little more than a brick-and-plaster column similar to the one placed in the main plaza of Buenos Aires. In the early I88o's, park benches arrived from Buenos Aires; new reflectors were put on the kerosene lamps to increase illumination and subsequently 6o new lamps were added; from Rosario came a bandstand for the musicians; and the remaining walks were finally paved with flagstones. Around the sides of the plaza, orange trees and a wooden fence gave an established air, while roses, jasmine, and lilies began to flower alongside the walks. 10 Meanwhile, a municipal theater was finally completed on the east side of the plaza in I884. The Teatro Victoria, with its front section occupied by the Club 20 de Febrero, soon became the social focus for the city's upper class. Although few regular theater or opera companies reached Salta until after the completion of the railroad in r89I, amateur performances put on by young men from Salta's better families filled the slack moments of the intervening years. With a seating capacity of 700 and three levels of balconies, the theater afforded excellent facilities for plays, operettas, concerts, and even dances. During the I 89o's, professional companies began to arrive from Buenos Aires. Thereafter, several Spanish companies brought classical theater to Salta, and by I 900 Italian singers of the stature of the soprano Luisa Tetrazzini or the baritone Luis Sagi Barba were regularly performing. Such improvements around the central plaza enhanced the quality of life in this small provincial capital, especially for the well-to-do. But they also suggest that change came slowly, almost reluctantly. Conveniences and technologies percolated into this remote corner of Argentina: park benches or lamp reflectors were shipped from Buenos Aires, and opera stars came from Italy. But what effect did they have on the proud, close-knit families of the upper class or on the illiterate, unaspiring laborers? Salta slept on in tranquillity, quite satisfied with its pace and way of life. To capture the flavor of life in Salta, one must penetrate a few of its households. Jean Palliere, a French artist who visited Salta in September I 8 58, was struck by the simplicity of upper-class life:

Salta: The Sleeping Beauty

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I ate at the house of Don Camilo Uriburu, an invitation that I more than gladly accepted since it provided me with the pleasure of getting to know the interior of one of the first houses in the country. One enters the house through a large carriage-door; to the right there is a hardware store; to the left, a tienda, a sort of inexpensive clothing store. The eldest son, who came out to greet me, and the two others, are in charge of these humble shops, which are, however, the finest in the city. One goes through a patio and enters a large reception room with uncovered ceiling beams and brick floors; the whitewashed walls have, as high as the chairs, a wide paper tapestry wainscot attached with nails. Two tables, some ordinary chairs, and a poorly drawn oil portrait of the owner complete the decor. Were there any carpets? I do not remember well. The dining room is even plainer. 11

The floor plan stressed the traditional patio design found, with modifications, throughout Argentina. The public and private activities of the family focused on separate patios. The first or formal patio, as noted by Palliere, frequently had stores or offices that occupied the street side. Across the patio usually stood the sa/a, or large, bare reception room, while around the other sides might be located a dining room and another, smaller drawing room. Often these homes had a second floor with balconies that overlooked the patio and several rooms; frequently these rooms afforded living quarters for married sons, daughters, or other relatives and their families. The second patio, connected by a passage to the first, provided the center for family activities. Usually much deeper and larger than the first, it might contain a number of fruit trees, a well, some chickens and a couple of goats, even a small garden plot. At the back were the kitchen area, latrines, storage sheds, and cubicles for the servants, while family bedrooms occupied the front and side areas. The architecture continued to be simple and functional: adobe, stone, or brick walls; plastered and whitewashed wooden beams that supported the tiled roofs; and heavy carved doors and iron bars on the windows. House fronts rose directly from the sidewalk. They were largely unadorned save for the "Italian" influence seen in pillars, recessed windows, more ornate grillwork, and molding at the roof line that began to appear in newer homes to the west and north of the plaza in the r 86o's and r 87o's. On the older houses, frequently the only decorations were the long tin drainpipes, finished in the form of a dog's head, that projected several feet from the roof. 12 For these upper-class families, the daily routine was no more luxurious or exciting than their sparsely furnished homes. The day began

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with mate, served by a maid in one's bedroom, at 6:ooA.M. or earlier during the summer or as late as 8:oo A.M. during the winter. By midmorning, the younger children had left for school, often private classes taught in the home of a relative or friend just around the corner. The men were also gone. Often they merely walked across the formal, first patio of their house to the general store, textile or hardware shop, or pharmacy, which had already been opened by a clerk or younger son. Or they walked to an office furnished with a wooden table, several hard-backed chairs, and a few instruments or books that served equally lawyer, doctor, engineer, accountant, or banker. Occasionally the men had to go further afield. Those who owned ranches or farms outside the city made periodic expeditions of several days or weeks to supervise activities. Those engaged in trade frequently were absent for months as they or elder sons accompanied shipments to or from Bolivia, Chile, or Buenos Aires. Those who owned the factories that made bricks or processed hides might have to ride horseback for half a mile to the city's outskirts; those who held positions with the provincial or national government, taught in the colegio nacional, or national preparatory school, or edited a newspaper walked a few blocks to their offices. The women remained largely at home. No lady of the upper class worked, except for the rare primary school teacher; only those who had fallen on hard times might eke out a livelihood with embroidery, lacework, or sewing. Under the watchful eyes of the mistress of the house or of the several maiden or widowed females present in most households, the servants swept the sidewalk in front of the house and deposited the garbage at curbside; they scrubbed the tiles of the formal patio; swept the rooms; washed, ironed, and mended clothes at the back of the second patio; prepared food over an open fire or in a huge iron stove; cared for the infants; and attended to the various personal demands of their mistresses. Firewood arrived in small bundles bought from Indians who drove their donkeys past the front door; the daily supply of milk for infants or the seriously ill was taken fresh at the door from one of several scrawny cows usually accompanied by calves. Fruit, vegetables, and meat also might arrive at the door, hawked by vendors; or they might be bought early in the morning at stalls of the two municipal markets, one three blocks southwest of the main plaza and the other one block to the northwest. Bread had to be secured, also at an early hour, at one of several bakeries scattered around the central streets. By late morning, after extensive preparation, the ladies of the

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house were ready to venture forth, the elder ones dressed in somber colors, often in the black of mourning, and those under 25 affecting lighter hues in the hope of attracting a male eye. Accompanied by servants who carried cushions or stools on which to kneel, their destination was one of the city's principal churches-the cathedral, located on the plaza, or the San Francisco, one block to the east, or the Merced, three blocks to the west. Shortly after noon, the entire family reassembled for an unpretentiously served but heavy meal. The siesta followed, more or less prolonged according to the season. No activity occurred on the streets until at least 4:oo P.M., or even later in the summer. The family reassembled at the dinner table between 6:oo and 7:00 P.M. for a slightly lighter repetition of the noon repast, complete with roast meat, variations of vegetable and corn stews or of Salta's famous empanadas and fruit, either fresh or prepared as a sweet. Many of the stores opened for the evening hours, so the ladies occasionally dressed once again for an outing and either shopped for fineries or strolled in groups around the plaza. The men went to the city's only social club, founded in I 8 57 and named after Salta's famous battle of 20 February, where they could play cards or read several of the Buenos Aires newspapers. Others gathered in groups of a half-dozen or dozen at some designated pharmacy or store for conversation that ranged over politics, the state of crops, reminiscences, and stories. The younger children, meanwhile, played in the street, never far from their doorway, or were cared for in the interior patio by servants. The older boys might roam farther afield in search of adventure-staring at young ladies who were walking in the plaza with their families, or gathering with friends in an impromptu serenade below some chosen girl's balcony, or stealing away to a bordello or cafe on the city's southern outskirts. By II:oo P.M. or at the latest by midnight, the families had withdrawn once more behind their thick walls and doors, and the city was at rest. The remainder of the city's population, roughly 90 percent, was composed of the lower, or working, classes. Unlike the closely knit upper class, which possessed common bonds of race, family, and way of life, the members of the lower classes had little commonality beyond their lack of sufficient wealth, education, and status to belong to the elite. These classes covered a broad range of occupations from small storekeepers, butchers, and skilled artisans at the top to peons, servants, and soldiers at the bottom. In education, these people ranged

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from the few who had attended most of the six years of primary school to the large mass of illiterates. The color of skin became distinctly darker as one descended the social scale. The prejudices of the upper class found reflection in the assignment of the most menial or degrading tasks to blacks, Indians, or darker-skinned mulattoes and mestizos and in a selective process that made it easier for the lighter-skinned to marry Caucasians or light-skinned mestizos or mulattoes. These lighter-skinned unions produced children with less evident Indian or Negroid features who often moved upward by marriage or occupation. Gradations in residence, dress, food, and way of life corresponded to the varying strata of the lower classes. A rough correlation existed between social or occupation level and the distance one lived from the main plaza. In general, those with the lowest standard of living resided on the fringes of the city. But within such gross approximations, there were numerous variations and exceptions. Sprinkled liberally among the wealthy near the plaza were not only the servants who lived there but also artisans and small shopkeepers who lived in modest houses and groups of poorer families clustered in small apartments in deteriorating buildings. Even as one moved toward the outskirts, each block showed a considerable range in the quality of housing and in the status of its inhabitants. The houses of artisans or small storekeepers tended to be more modest editions of those of the wealthy. The width and depth of lots, instead of 3 3 yards by 66 yards, were 5. 5 to I I yards across the front by I6.5 to 22 yards in depth. Often small, square corner lots were occupied by a shop with a garret above or a couple of rooms behind for the storekeeper and his family. Although the custom of taking old deteriorating homes of the wealthy and honeycombing them with small rooms to rent out to lower-class families had not taken hold in the northwest as it had in the coastal cities of Argentina, two or three poorer families often shared the normal single-family dwelling, and a family of six or seven rarely had more than two rooms to itself. House materials varied from the plastered brick walls, brick or stone floors, and tile roofs common to the houses in the central part of the city to the ranchos made of saplings or scraps of wood and roofed with thatch that characterized the outlying or low-lying areas. These latter homes, inhabited by washerwomen, peons, and servants, consisted of a low, rectangular building with a pitched roof and a single room sometimes divided between kitchen and sleeping areas by a hide hung from the

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rafters. The families that lived there had no latrines or wells; they slept on a hide stretched out on the hard-packed dirt floor; a few boxes, adobe bricks, and a rough wooden table completed the furnishings. These members of the lower classes had no chance to leap the gap that separated them from the upper class and no possibility to deceive others about their status. As a result, there was little of the effort, increasingly evident in Buenos Aires, to mimic the upper class in dress and appearances. Shirt, trousers, and sandals for men, and long skirt, blouse, and shawl for women provided the easily recognizable uniform for the working classes. Although a clean, less worn outfit might be put on for special holidays, no one attempted to assume the collar, tie, and coat or dresses of the upper class. Children, women, and not a few men went barefoot most of the year, while the classic homespun woolen poncho provided whatever warmth was needed in winter. The lower classes ate a less nutritious, less voluminous, and more starchy variation of the upper-class diet. Corn provided the basic staple, prepared as unleavened bread, stew, or porridge. Grease and salt constituted the only additions in the poorest households, but for the betteroff, bits of meat and vegetables and especially hot peppers gave flavor and nutrition to corn dishes. The meals of many artisans and shopkeepers more nearly approximated those of the wealthy, and roast meat, empanadas, vegetables, and fruit often combined with corn to produce a well-balanced diet. Poorer people suffered from other handicaps in addition to limited diets. Although the wealthy or even artisans often drank water collected in cisterns in their homes or the river water they bought at their doorways from carts or barrels, most of the lower classes scooped their daily needs from the drainage ditches, the tagaretes, that bordered the central part of the city on its north and south sides at a distance of one and three blocks respectively from the plaza. The prevalence of goiter and the extremely high rate of infant mortality, especially from dysentery and related internal disorders, seems directly attributable to this water supply. If the way of life of Salta's upper class seemed uneventful, so did that of the working classes. In terms of working and living conditions, however, salteiios fared no worse, and possibly somewhat better, than laborers elsewhere in Argentina. The newspapers repeatedly complained at the lack of reliable domestic servants or peons and blamed the situation on the relative ease and cheapness of life that permitted

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workers to quit whenever they had accumulated some money.' 1 The implication was, of course, that such gains went immediately for alcohol. Although the very poor might have to depend on corn and live in hovels, living costs in Salta were always relatively low. 14 A French publication of the late r 8 so's noted the cheapness of meat and the abundance of fish and fruit. Despite the fact that prime real estate on the principal plaza in the early r 87o's sold for as much as r s,ooo pesos, small ranchos on the outskirts went for more accessible sums of roo to 200 pesos, or for correspondingly low rents. 15 By the late r88o's, with a slight rise in wages and living costs during that national economic boom, skilled laborers could earn 3 pesos a day and semiskilled half that wage, while a peon received from so centavos to r peso a day. A servant, who also received room and board, earned 5 pesos a month. Although 300 pesos a month were needed to support a wealthy family in the city and the costs of certain foods were relatively high- 5 centavos apiece for eggs or onions, I o centavos a pound for bread or meat, r6 centavos for a liter of milk-so centavos bought 25 pounds of corn and r 3 pesos a whole barrel of sugarcane liquor. 1" At the same time, a well-constructed house of bricks or stone in the central part of the city cost about ro,ooo pesos, and rent for such a building, with six to eight rooms, amounted to 50 pesos a month. An artisan, however, might secure a few rooms for ro pesos a month, while on the outskirts a rancho could be had for 4 or s pesos, or a quarter of a peon's monthly wage. For approximately 30 pesos a month, therefore, a working-class family could maintain a minimum standard of livingnot a difficult goal, especially if several members contributed their wages. 17 But along with relative ease in securing their minimum necessities, Salta's workers had to contend with highly detrimental health conditions that lasted until the early twentieth century. Although the city's elevation, relatively dry climate, and near-subtropical environs suggested a paradise, the city's actual emplacement, selected with an eye to defense against hostile Indians in the sixteenth century, had become virtually untenable with the increased population of the late nineteenth century. The low-lying ground, set between mountains and protected on all sides by marshy areas and streams, had marked advantages in the eyes of the conquistadores. Three centuries later, however, a provincial official painted a different and distressing picture: "Many of our streets

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are veritable springs where the poor obtain their water supply; and the soil beneath our living quarters is nothing but an immense swamp that seriously threatens the life of the inhabitants. Today, it would not be an exaggeration to compare the city of Salta with a floating asylum of colossal dimensions; such is the number of sick people, and such the amount of water that gushes to the surface." 1g In less dramatic but nonetheless telling language, a medical report in I894 summarized the abysmal sanitary conditions brought on by the accumulating wastes and increasing concentration of population: The surface layer, which has grown thicker and constantly continues to do so, is made up of top soil mixed with an abundance of organic matter accumulated through the years from the refuse of the city's houses, which, until recently, was used to fill in construction sites, or heaped in dunghills, at that time scattered throughout all the wards and almost all the blocks that are now built. Add to this the sewage from the great number of latrines, the offal from stables, stagnant water, waste from some factories, etc., all of which quickly penetrates this permeable and constantly damp soil, and one will have an approximate idea of the makeup of the city's subsoil from a hygienic perspective. 19

The toll exacted by these conditions could be read in the local newspapers. In addition to major epidemics, some of which-the cholera epidemics of I 8 68 and I 8 8 6 and the bubonic plague of I90o-were extensions of national disasters, smallpox remained an endemic problem for the city and the province. Despite periodic efforts to vaccinate the population-finally made mandatory in I902-it was the poor, especially the children born since the last major scare, who remained unprotected. 20 Diphtheria and malaria repeatedly made inroads, occasionally rising to proportions where families began to move out of the city to escape contagionY Influenza, pneumonia, measles, typhoid, gastroenteritis, and various "malignant fevers" seemed to affect most seriously children, particularly in the lowest-lying and consequently poorest neighborhoods. 22 Throughout all these reports flowed the constant message of Salta's abnormally high mortality. The geographer Martin de Moussey had already noted the problem in restrained terms in the I 86o's: "We should state that, according to our research of parish records, mortality is a little higher here than in the other provinces: we already have indicated the cause, which, in our view, is no other than the poor soil and water. A better system will surely reestablish the normal national rate, that is to say, two births for every death." 21 The I 894 medical

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report cited earlier noted that between I 8 90 and I 89 5 the city's population had remained virtually stationary, with the net gain of births over deaths averaging less than I percent per year and counterbalanced by a substantial emigration of able-bodied men. 24 In I9oo, during the first eight days of the new year, 2I babies were born and 22 died; two years later the Civil Registry Office reported for one month a total of 66 births and I47 deaths in the city. The burden of disease and mortality, when added to malnutrition, social stratification, racial prejudices, and the relative cheapness of basic necessities, go far in explaining the disinclination for hard work or frugality among Salta's laboring classes. A newspaper in I903 summed up the local attitude in these terms: "Whether due to the vices engendered by a defective education, or to the continuing effects of malaria, which seem to be exhausting our energy little by little, the fact is that we do not love, and perhaps even hate, work. We enjoy the gentle serenity of a calm life, without bustle or vexations." 25 As a minimal prod designed at least to extract service, the elite had long resorted, as elsewhere in Argentina, to the conchavo, or servitude, system. Despite doubts raised in enlightened circles about the legitimacy or appropriateness of this system, which harbored vestiges of slavery, and despite demands made in the late I 89o's for repeal of the regulations, the upper class continued to sense the need for controls and prods. 26 According to one editor in I9oo: It is easier to find an ounce of gold on the streets than a servant or kitchen maid who knows how to perform her duties properly. The municipality should definitely study the issue and enact an ordinance putting a brake on the excesses of persons engaged in this occupation. The regulation of domestic service would be extremely simple and beneficial to both parties. The government could open a registry and compel domestic workers to sign up listing their name and address; then they could be furnished with a working card where the name of the employing family, the hiring date, the conduct of the servant, and the reasons for termination could be recordedP

The continued remonstrances and complaints about the laboring classes suggest, however, that conditions of work were probably not too onerous and that servants and peons avoided undue exertion in a system that held out few rewards. For the semiskilled and skilled laborers and the small shopkeepers, there were more freedoms and responsibilities. But since the same conditions of stratification and stability applied to these groups, few, beyond the occasional immigrant

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peddler or artisan, could achieve economic or social mobility by hard work or frugality. In general, long hours of work remained, and agricultural workers toiled from sunrise to sundown. But the pace of work never reached that of Buenos Aires or Rosario. Periodic interruptions for mates, for the midday meal, and for the siesta shortened the hours. The agitation for an eight-hour day and other labor safeguards that spread through the coastal cities after 1900 found little echo in Salta. 2 s In addition, the relative absence of factories, the lack of pretension or display on the part of the elite, and the residential mixing of classes fostered considerable personal contact between the upper and the working classes. Upper-class store owners often worked alongside their clerks, while artisans, street vendors, and many others dealt with members of the elite every day. Although such contacts did not breed familiarity or break down the barrier between upper and lower classes, they served to make working conditions easier. The kind of life led by Salta's upper and laboring classes explains much of the city's form and dynamics. But two other critical aspectssanitation and transportation-must be examined in order to comprehend Salta's peculiarities and problems. As suggested earlier, the terrain on which the city was built played an increasingly disastrous role as the nineteenth century drew to a close. The city was placed on fairly level ground in a valley that served as a natural avenue of north-south communication; at the same time, it was well protected by marshes and streams. The Arias River, which descended in several streams from the western and northwestern foothills, skirted the city's southern edge. Its broad, meandering, rocky course flowed nearly a mile from the central plaza, but at an elevation only a few feet below it. During periods of heavy rains or of suddenly melting snow in the Andes, this usually placid river could become a raging torrent, capable of flooding extensive portions of the western and southern city. The pattern of slope from northwest to southeast directed not only the Arias River but also numerous rivulets, gorges, washes, and streams across and through the very center of the city. As population expanded around the plaza in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the inhabitants struggled to contain these erratic and often damaging watercourses into several main channels. The foremost, usually called the Zanja Blanca or Canal Este, gathered a number of rivulets together three miles north of the plaza

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and then outlined the eastern edge of the city at the foot of the San Bernardo hill. Its elevation was actually several yards above that of the plaza. The other streambeds were drawn together into two principal tagaretes, or drainage ditches, that ran west to east across the city. One was located only a block north of the plaza, which eventually would become the Avenida Belgrano. The other, three blocks south of the plaza, flowed along Calle Corrientes, earlier known as "de los Puentes" for its many bridges. These ditches emptied into the Zanja Blanca at the city's eastern edge; in turn, it joined the Arias at the city's extreme southeast corner. By the 185o's, Salta faced a legacy of periodic flooding complicated by the disappearance of a safe supply of drinking water. At the city's northern edge, potable water could be secured from wells sunk to a depth of 25 to 30 feet. Throughout the central and southern parts of the city, the water table, which was only five to six feet from the surface, produced water with a salty, disagreeable taste. More critically, the wells in the heavily populated central portion of the city communicated directly with the pits of household latrines. As noted earlier, manure and urine carted from the stables, garbage dumped on vacant lots, and dirty water thrown into the street further polluted the water supply. 29 In light of the toll in disease and property damage, provincial and municipal governments increasingly turned their attention after r 8 5o to the problems of f1oods, drainage, and water supply. The first two received prompter action, possibly because efforts had already been initiated in the colonial period but also because they affected the welfare and interests of the upper class more directly. The action did not, however, lead to immediate solutions. The city seemed to require the constant presence of impending disaster to pry funds out of penurious legislatures, ministries, or municipal councils. Since much of the city's outskirts lay only a few feet above the riverbed, containing the Arias River meant building or reinforcing breakwaters that could turn away any sudden rise in the water level. Although defenses built during the colonial period sufficed for normal years, the city remained vulnerable to exceptional rainfall or unusually heavy melting of snow. A local newspaper in r86o perceptively underlined the temptation of authorities to forget the city's flood problems: "Nobody remembers the river because it is not yet raining. Once summer comes, it will be another story: everyone will be talking about

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the threat of the river; funds will be thrown away on useless projects to control it; prayers will be made to the Saints of the Miracle; we will tremble with every cloudburst and panic with each storm; and, if all these valiant efforts fail, we will say-Let God's will be done." 3 ° Floods in I856, I858, I86o, and I866 led to demands for cleaning and repairing the tagaretes and to laws providing for the repair of the defense walls. An additional property tax on city dwellers was also enacted, as well as authorization for a loan to deepen the irrigation ditches and the Zanja del Estado, a ditch that gathered water from the city's north side and emptied it into the Zanja Blanca.31 An adequate drainage system-not only to take care of the sudden arrival of large amounts of surface water but also to drain the marshy areas and stagnant pools evident along every street or vacant lot-now became a major objective for the authorities. Following the cholera epidemic of I 868, the provincial government grandiosely appointed a commission to eliminate the infamous tagaretes, "since it is essential, for the cleanliness and health of the city, to clean up these centers of infection." 32 But replacement took time, and not until the late I 87o's was much progress made. In I 8 79, the municipality extended Avenida Belgrano and Calle Corrientes from the western outskirts to the Zanja Blanca. 33 Thereafter, the municipality rapidly paved these streets and lined the canals with stone, and the provincial government recorded with satisfaction in I 8 8 2 that, as a result, health conditions on the city's south side had improved perceptibly.34 During the I 88o's it became apparent, however, that although flooding might be resolved by a system of defenses and drainage ditches, the city faced more basic difficulties with sanitation. Even though not immediately endangered, the upper class could no longer tolerate the all-pervading odors, the contaminated water, the stagnant pools, and the piles of garbage. Myriad regulations had been issued since colonial times, ordering the enclosure of vacant lots to prevent their use as dumping grounds, prohibiting the discarding of garbage and dirty water in the streets, and providing for the inspection of patios and house interiors and the elimination of garbage piles and stagnant water. In recent years, all these orders had been reissued. 35 But they solved nothing since, for most people, the only way to dispose of garbage, human waste, used water, or trash was to dump it in the street or on a vacant lot. Even the municipal carts, which began in I879 to pick up

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garbage from the sidewalk or street outside each door, merely deposited the refuse in an open field three blocks northwest of the main plaza. 36 Gradually the question of how to secure a satisfactory water supply began to merge with the drainage problem. The seepage of all kinds of decomposing materials into the highly porous soil had totally contaminated two major supplies of water, the wells and the irrigation ditches. Until r 890, no controls existed over the construction of latrines, which in most cases were shallow pits, no more than five feet deep, dug toward the back of a house lot and covered with a shed. Often the walls of the pit were not even lined with brick or stone.l 7 In addition, with each passing year and with further additions to the population, the drainage ditches and canals used by most of the poor for their water supply were becoming more polluted. In I 88 5, the southern tagarete was described as "completely filled with floating garbage. " 38 Nevertheless, all proposals advanced during the I88o's, including one to bring potable water from San Lorenzo, a summer retreat for the elite located in the foothills several miles northwest of the city, broke down because of the high costs involved. 39 Despite the major economic boom enjoyed by Argentina during the I 88o's, Salta lacked funds for such projects. The governor, in his annual message to the legislature in I 886, complained that two crucial provincial agencies, the Public Health Commission and the Department of Topography, Statistics, and Irrigation, functioned only on paper; he further noted that the municipality of Salta was in "disastrous financial straits." He bitterly concluded, "Salta is one of the richest provinces, and yet it is the one that has the least revenues, because ~nore than half are never collected."40 At that very moment, the city was suffering from one of its worst epidemics, the cholera outbreak of I 886-87, and these hardships were further accentuated by bad floods at the beginning of I887. The cholera was part of a nationwide epidemic that apparently had arrived in Buenos Aires from Italy via one of the transatlantic steamers and then spread quickly to Rosario and Mendoza. Cholera reached northwestern Argentina in late I 8 86 with the arrival of a new regiment of troops from the coast. By the summer months of January and February r887, six to eight new cases were developing each day in the city of Salta. Of the more than 900 individuals treated in emergency quarantine facilities and the 400 who remained at home, roughly one-third

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died. 41 In addition to applying emergency medical measures, the authorities desperately struggled to establish more permanent relief. They widened and deepened the Zanja Blanca. They removed more than r6o individual garbage dumps from the city. They again ordered the cleanup of the southern tagarete. 42 The ensuing reports and studies once more emphasized "that all the sources for water in the city are bad" and rejected as completely unsafe the water from the Arias River. 4 l The issues of drainage and water continued to reign over the city's evolution throughout the I 89o's and into the early years of the twentieth century. Despite increasing public outcry, local initiative and resources proved inadequate to solve Salta's critical health problems. Ultimately the solution had to come from outside Salta, in the form of assistance from the national government. Salta, in its own way, thus demonstrated the characteristic dependency of secondary cities on outside forces and resources. The city in the r89o's was still hemmed in on all sides by water. To the south, the low-lying zones, often overrun by the Arias River during the summer months, tended to be occupied only by the most flimsy shacks of the poor. Meanwhile, to the north, "the owners of lands beyond Avenida Belgrano toward the Campo de Ia Cruz have left these lots undeveloped because they have never been able to secure from the authorities the long-promised drainage canals that would make building in this area possible. " 44 Except for the blocks surrounding the central plaza, water seemed to be the universal problem. "The moment we leave the center, we cannot move, either on foot, on horseback, or in carriage, without sinking up to our necks in mud, and there are families on the outskirts who, whenever it rains, are literally surrounded by water and cannot venture forth even for daily supplies." 45 The deepening financial crisis that began in r 8 90 reduced the resources of the already penurious provincial treasury and eliminated municipal funds. Gubernatorial messages repeatedly lamented the lack of moneys and authority. 46 No steps were taken to develop new water sources from wells located on the city's northern outskirts or from the San Lorenzo and Castanares rivers several miles further north. 47 Despite warnings concerning the pollution of the Arias River, most of the city's water still came from water carts that took their supply from shallow pits dug at the river's edge. During the rainy summer months, in particular, such water carried large quantities of silt and other

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impurities in suspension. "After taking a drink of this water, one's insides feel as if they were decomposing from some powerful purgative."48 The best that the authorities could do was to widen the Zanja Blanca, pave a few more streets to carry off rainwater from the city's center, and urge property owners to clean out and repair their irrigation ditches. Municipal ordinances vainly repeated earlier injunctions against washing laundry upstream from pools in the Arias River that supplied the city's drinking water, against throwing water and garbage into the streets, and against bakeries using ditch water for making bread dough. 49 Characteristically bad health habits, combined with low-lying lands and swamps, continued to make Salta a veritable pesthole. No attempt was made to burn the city's garbage; it was still taken several blocks from the center and left in an open field. Even the latrine wastes from houses were dumped at the end of one of the streets near the outskirts. Garbage carts improved their collection methods, but only within a circumference of four blocks of the Plaza 9 de Julio; the rest of the city remained virtually unattended. The plazas were filthy. Burros and pigs wandered through the Plaza 9 de Julio even during daylight hours. Plaza Belgrano, two blocks northwest of the main plaza, remained overgrown with weeds and brush, and residents continued to dump garbage and human excreta in the Plaza Giiemes, located in front of the newly constructed legislative chambers, five blocks north of the main plaza. Rotting bodies of dogs and cats still ended up in the southern tagarete, and butchers in the municipal market continued to wash off carcasses with muddy water from the drainage ditches. 50 The city's reputation reflected these conditions. In r 897, the head of the local Sanitary Commission stressed the high death toll, averaging rr4 per month, the inadequacy of the 25o-bed hospital to handle the city's sick, and the nearly constant presence of malaria and other fevers during the summer months. 51 An Italian study stressed the dangerous environment where, in contrast with Buenos Aires' death rate of 17 per r,ooo inhabitants in 1900, the city of Salta registered 40. 51 A few years later, a Salta congressman, emphasizing the need for national assistance to build a city water and sewer system, pointed out that mortality figures in the city had averaged 4 7 per r,ooo during the past decade. Indeed, those figures, which had never fallen below 33, had risen at times to 74.51 Epidemics and scares continued unabated. Cholera threatened again

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at the end of 1894, measles closed the schools for more than a month in the winter of 1896, and bubonic plague appeared in I899-I900. 54 Smallpox returned with a vengeance in I90I-2, resulting in a massive mandatory vaccination campaign that involved 4,ooo individuals in the city alone. During I903, the endemic "chills," or malaria, reportedly struck down four members in each of the poorer families. In November I 904, an undiagnosed disease similar to bubonic plague ran through the population and led the city to close schools and churches, prohibit visits to the cemetery, and poison rats. 55 Compounding these health problems were complications from periodic floods: during the summer months of I897, the Arias River repeatedly threatened the southern districts of the city; once again in 1903, the river broke out of its sandy banks and retaining walls and flooded large areas of the city.56 The wealthy, of course, continued to abandon the city during the months of the worst rains, epidemics, and discomforts. Each year, beginning in December, the social columns of the newspapers began to note: "Families are leaving in all directions for plcasanter places in which to pass the summer. San Lorenzo, considered to be the best spot because of the beauty of its landscape and the healthiness of its mineral baths, already is enjoying a lot of activity.... Other families have gone to La Caldera, Cerrillos, and Rosario de Lerma."57 These families usually remained in summer homes until mid-March. But the conditions of public health had reached such a state that even the wealthy could no longer be satisfied merely with their summer escapes or with access to somewhat better drinking water. Some of the more ambitious proposals received renewed scrutiny. In I 89 s, a local doctor had set forth a major plan to drain the surrounding swamps, clean the latrines regularly, and pipe water to all houses. 58 Shortly thereafter, an engineer from the national public works office proposed an all-inclusive plan to strengthen the defenses along the Arias River and widen and clean the tagaretes, and in r 899 construction began on new defenses.59 The solution to Salta's public health dilemmas thus began to emerge at the end of the century as the national government entered the picture. Preliminary studies ordered in I 896 resulted in Carlos Nystromer's extensive report and recommendation for a water and sewer system presented five years later. 60 In I 902, the national authorities approved a joint agreement with the province for the construction of this system, and the provincial legislature passed the necessary expropriation laws. 61

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Salta: The Sleeping Beauty

The project called for an intake reservoir on the San Lorenzo River three miles north of Salta and a storage tank just west of the city. Sewage was to be collected in a purifying chamber, or vast septic tank, before emptying into the Zanja Blanca. In addition, the city's drainage was to be improved by deepening existing channels and opening a major canal that would complement the Zanja River on the east by curving around the city's west side and emptying into the Arias River. To assist this program, the municipality ordered landowners to fill all low-lying or swampy areas within the city limitsP The execution of such ambitious plans required time, however. Construction actually began on the water and sewer works in mid-1903, but shortages of equipment and the failure of one of the construction companies paralyzed activity during most of 1904. For the next few years, complaints about bad sanitary conditions mingled with objections to the torn-up streets and sidewalks that resulted from laying water and sewer lines. 63 But by 1907, it had become clear that change was taking place within the city. A new company aggressively pushed construction throughout r 90 5, at times with as many as 700 laborers, and at the end of that year the first public water fountain began to function in the central part of the city. By September 1906, households throughout the northwestern section were receiving running water. 64 With considerable surprise, a lead editorial in January r 907 observed that, despite garbage scattered everywhere and almost all the doctors absent at their summer retreats, the death toll had reached a record low; the explanation lay in "the effect of the new water we are drinking, which is sufficient to neutralize everything else." 65 Other improvements followed. Gradually the northern tagarete had been filled in and macadamized to extend the Avenida Belgrano, while water that formerly collected in this channel was carried off by large storm drains. To the south, portions of the southern tagarete along Avenida Venezuela had been covered by cobblestone paving; at its eastern end, the water emerged to flow through the new municipal San Martin Park.66 Gradually the whole scheme envisaged by Nystromer and other planners at the beginning of the twentieth century came into existence. Since water carts and poor families could obtain potable water from public faucets, house connections for running water remained optional. But sewer connections to downtown houses were made mandatory in the interest of eliminating the use of latrines or the even more pernicious habit of dumping excreta in vacant lots. For several years, however,

Salta: The Sleeping Beauty

IOI

municipal and provincial authorities had to experiment with a succession of credit plans, fines, and moratoriums before they could finally complete the installations. 67 Additional funds voted by the national congress helped to enlarge, reline, and connect the four canals, North, West, South, and East, which now completely surrounded the central area of the city. The covering over of the southern tagarete and the addition of more storm drains removed most open ditches. The benefits of running water and flush toilets by now had become evident in the sharply declining death rate and in a pleasanter life for all concerned. The addition of more national funds permitted the further expansion of the system with another reservoir, new septic chambers, more pumps, and the extension of pipelines, especially to the northern and eastern sections of the city.68 During the same years, the national congress launched a major campaign to eradicate malaria in northwestern Argentina, including the province of Salta. The provincial public health service strongly supported this effort. An especially aggressive director in the city of Salta made notable progress in draining the surrounding lakes and swamps that had ringed the city since its first establishment. These measures, combined with the filling of depressions and potholes and the distribution of quinine, led to a 50 percent decline in malaria cases in I909.69 With drainage and sanitation problems well on the way to solution, the city began to expand noticeably, especially north from its main plaza. All previous efforts to attract population toward the north had failed. The building of a railroad station and track in this zone in the early I 89o's and the construction of a new legislative building on the Plaza Giiemes at the start of the twentieth century had not counteracted the threats of floods and disease or brought commercial and residential expansion to these areas. The completion of the North and West canals, the draining of swamps, and the installation of sewers and running water, however, sharply reduced disease and encouraged the now-increasing population to push into these higher and more attractive locations. Salta, despite its isolated, tranquil, and largely self-sufficient development throughout most of the nineteenth century, thus became increasingly tied to and dependent on the coast in the twentieth century. The railroad linked Salta to Buenos Aires in I 89 I. Then, because of the

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Salta: The Sleeping Beauty

failure to develop that rail system further and reconstruct Salta's former economic hegemony over parts of Bolivia and Chile, the railroad served to subordinate the province and the city both economically and politically to Buenos Aires. Even more critical to the patterns of late-nineteenth-century urban development, however, was Salta's losing battle against abysmally poor public health conditions. When the city proved incapable of resolving those problems, it had to turn to the national government for the financial assistance to build a water and sewer system. With its health thus assured, the city once more began to grow. Although Salta was unable to reestablish its former far-flung sphere of influence, it was eventually able to complement and benefit from its dependence on the coast's agricultural-export prosperity by the development of local construction and food-processing industries, the expansion of tobacco and sugar production, and the development of oil and natural gas resources.

FIVE

Mendoza: Challenge and Response

In the 198o's, the urban area of Mendoza, more correctly referred to as Greater Mendoza, stretches out ten miles to its most distant suburbs and claims a population of over half a million. Set on a semiarid plain at the foot of the Andean Mountains, surrounded by irrigated orchards and vineyards, with growing industrial capabilities and a homogeneous, ambitious population, Mendoza exudes prosperity and development. Broad avenues and modern buildings immediately strike the visitor's eye. Notable are the activities on the streets, the movement of cars and people, the bright lights and decorated shop windows. Even the hot, arid summer does little to diminish the energies of these people. They walk and talk with determination and decision. Pleasant tranquillity exists alongside the drive and movement of this city. Beneath the shady cover of poplars and acacias that line the downtown streets, water flows steadily through the acequias, or irrigation ditches, that form refreshing borders for sidewalks and pavement. Attractively arranged plazas with walks, gardens, and trees enhance further the sense of openness and light afforded by the wide streets. Once out of the downtown area, which stretches along the principal north-south Avenida San Martin, one encounters peaceful, shaded streets with modest, comfortable one- and two-story stucco or brick residences. Because this growth and prosperity have come since the I 8 8o's, the case of Mendoza poses particularly interesting questions about why and how such development occurred. Nothing in its history up to I 8 50 forecast the privileged position it holds in the late twentieth century as one of Argentina's most rapidly growing and most promising urban

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Mendoza: Challenge and Response

centers. Instead, remoteness, aridness, and poverty weighed heavily on the city, compounded by the periodic curse of earthquake and flood. Like most of Argentina's provincial capitals, Mendoza was founded in the second half of the sixteenth century as an outpost of Spain's conquest of America. Conquistadores had already visited portions of the region in their travels between the bastion of Spanish power in Peru and the Indian frontier represented by Chile's central valley. In early I 56 I, a small band of 40 Spaniards and mestizos crossed the Andes from Chile, charged by their governor with establishing a city that would bear his name. After considerable exploration and despite some misgivings, these conquistadores founded a settlement within an already existing Indian village. The following year, a rival commander sought to move the center of this "city" a half mile to the southwest to escape the dangers of floods and disease inherent in the original lowlying site. Thus began an orientation toward higher ground south and west of the original site that has endured into the twentieth century. Because of its commercial, military, and administrative functions, Mendoza was able to evolve beyond its original formal and highly schematic outline of a few dozen lots around a central plaza. Its location at the foot of the main pass to Chile, along with the presence of a relatively docile and sedentary Indian population and an adequate water supply from several streams, guaranteed a basis for trade and agriculture. Its population, estimated at 300 in the early seventeenth century, grew to 8oo by I70o and to 3,500 by I770. In I8Io, when the population was slightly over 5,ooo, the "city" still consisted of little more than several dirt streets and a cluster of one-story, adobe-brick houses, churches, and a cabildo. 1 By I 8 50, Mendoza had progressed steadily, if not dramatically, to become the principal provincial capital of western Argentina, a main trade center on the route to Chile, and an irrigated oasis, already important for its production of fruit, wine, and alfalfa. Since the eighteenth century, Argentine beef had made its way on the hoof across the Andean passes to Chile. By the middle of the nineteenth century, so,ooo head of cattle a year were being sent to Chile. The animals came mostly from the coastal areas of Santa Fe and Cordoba, but they rested on the alfalfa pastures immediately to the east of the city as they fattened for the trek across the mountains. 2 The importance and profits of this trade had turned most of the adjoining agricultural lands into irrigated pastures. Grapes, fruit, and wheat, although recognized to be

Mendoza: Challenge and Response

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of excellent quality, were produced mainly for the local market. The nearby provinces did buy some dried apricots, prunes, raisins, figs, brandies, and wines, and a little wheat, but the volume of these exports had not increased substantially over that of the eighteenth century. Beyond such agricultural products, most of the city's wealth came from its role as commercial emporium for the area of Cuyo, which included the provinces of San Luis and San Juan as well as Mendoza. Furniture, clothes, and even some foods for the upper class came by ox cart from Buenos Aires or by mule from Valparaiso and Santiago. Hardware, bolts of cotton cloth, tobacco, yerba mate, and many other products for the lower classes also arrived by this same slow and costly route. From Mendoza's shops and warehouses, carts subsequently spread these products out to the region's far-flung towns and farms. Despite the wars of independence and the ensuing civil strife of the early nineteenth century, the structure and character of the city showed little change from what had developed during the colonial years. But travelers, who reached Mendoza after I,ooo miles of travel by dusty, jolting stagecoach across the pampas from Buenos Aires or after a week's arduous trek by mule over the Andean passes from Santiago, often shared the relief expressed by one of Chile's leading writers, Benjamin Vicuna Mackenna, when he arrived in I 8 55: "No matter where the tired traveler comes from, Mendoza seems to be a paradise, and its gardens of fruits and flowers seem the Garden of Eden in miniature, especially after having been among the rocky crags of the Andes or having crossed the vast desert from Buenos Aires; and even its houses, low and small, appear to be palaces after the huts of the poststops and the hovels along the Andean passes. "3 The area of the city still remained small: a rectangle, eighteen blocks from north to south by six blocks from east to west, enclosed between two major irrigation canals, the Tajamar on the west and the Zanj6n on the east (Map 5. I). These canals brought precious water from the Mendoza River, located several miles to the south. Paralleling the Tajamar along the city's western edge ran the main road for goods and travelers arriving from Chile. In the early nineteenth century, this road, the Alameda, had been made into an attractive promenade with poplars and stone benches. Persons arriving from the east, on the other hand, usually entered the city along one of two bridges which spanned the 30 yards of the Zanjon and opened almost directly onto the main plaza.

Pre-earthquake City

1. Plaza Antiqua (formerly Principal) 2. Plaza Buenos Aires (formerly Nueva) 3. Dominican Monastery 4. Merced Church 5. Plaza lndependencia 6. Plaza Lima 7. Plaza Chile 8. Plaza Montevideo 9. Plaza Cobo 1o. San Nicolas Church

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