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.