Political and Socio-Economic Elites: The Encounter of Provincials with Porteños in Fin-de-Siêcle Buenos Aires

In 1880, following a two-generation-long civil war, Argentina embarked upon a critical period of nation-building, which culminated in the centennial celebrations of 1910. In The Argentine Generation of 1880: Ideology and Cultural Texts, David Foster has commented upon the inconclusiveness of national cultural formation as Argentina turned from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the uncertainty of how much from the provinces would be incorporated into the elite-constructed culture emanating from the port city of Buenos Aires. The recently published work of Roy Hora, The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas: A Social and Political History 1860-1945, and the work of Tulio Halperin, “The Buenos Aires Landed Class and the Shape of Argentine Politics (1820-1930),” which preceded it, further heighten the significance of provincial-porteño interaction at this point in Argentine history. Halperin and Hora find that during these years, and beyond, the socio-economic and the political elite of Argentina was not a unified whole, but rather two distinctive groups. In the leadership of the socio-economic elite was a landed class based on the estancias of the Argentine pampa and overwhelmingly porteño in character. Provincials dominated the political elite, as the provinces ‘captured’ the federal government in the years following their reunification with the province of Buenos Aires in 1861. Participation in the federal government brought the provincial political elite into contact with the porteño estancieros who dominated the socio-economic elite, as these were almost universally resident in the federal capital. But Roy Hora has described the relationship between the two groups as “problematic.”