Thomas F. McGann

III. Southern South America

There is no egoism or special virtue in the fact that all of us on this program have numerous research possibilities to suggest. The plain truth is that the field of Latin American history bulges with first-class topics for historical writing. In this respect I am sure that we Latin Americanists are more fortunate than colleagues in some other historical fields where, it is my impression, there is a good deal of trampling of each other’s grapes. But historical research is not the contemplation of ideas, no matter how promising they may be, and in Latin America the investigator confronts notorious difficulties in obtaining orderly source materials. Therefore, before turning to some of the research possibilities, I should touch briefly on several underlying assumptions. The first is that the investigators working on these topics shall be qualified linguistically, technically, and intellectually to accomplish their work in Latin America and in the United States. Unhappily, this has not always been the case in this underdeveloped field. Second, for all of these topics I estimate that there exists a sufficiency of source materials, although in some cases that assumption has not been fully tested in the field. (This is the point at which field research in Latin America takes on a more colorful aspect than research, let’s say, in the British Museum.) Finally, an investigator engaged in research in Latin America must have, or quickly develop, a hunter’s ability to move rapidly yet sure-footedly after his quarry, tracking down private and even public archives which, at the outset of his adventure in research, may be completely unknown to him.

The generation of 'eighty.

Before the argentine revolution of 1810, land was the principal source of wealth and the sanction of social position in the otherwise resourceless Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata. The revolution of May did not significantly alter the fundamental social, political and economic relationships between the masses of the people, the landowners and the soil. And although the administration of Rivadavia in the 1820’s and the dictatorship of Rosas in the next two decades were poles apart in their philosophies of society and government, each bore the same fruit in the further concentration of land in the hands of a relatively few men. After the fall of Rosas and the return of the exiled unitarios in 1852, the position of the landed gentry was not changed, despite the work of men like Urquiza, Mitre and Sarmiento, who applied themselves to the task of awaking Argentina from its long sleep of reaction. These victorious leaders were liberal and pragmatic, but there was no Argentine Homestead Act during their administrations. They accepted the land system as it was and tried to build upon it by spinning out the means of communication and transportation and technical development that would make it workable and by bringing in immigrants to make it fruitful. Aside from the establishment of a few colonies, the methods of land distribution and the laws of landownership remained essentially unchanged. Indeed, the governments that came after the Rosas regime, needful of revenue and concerned with the white elephant that was the government domain, embarked on much the same types of real estate deals as had the tyrant. In one case, in 1857, the government leased 3,000,000 hectares of land to 373 people; in 1867 Mitre’s government sold this land on easy terms to its renters.