The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas: A Social and Political History, 1860-1945.

The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas: A Social and Political History, 1860-1945. By Roy Hora (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ix plus 264 pp.).

The estancia, the large plot of land devoted to livestock raising has been--and probably still is--a stereotypical image of Argentine rural life and society. Nonetheless, we lacked a modern historiographical approach to the men that owned the land: the estancieros or hacendados. (1) This absence is remarkable since the landowners played a major role in the Argentine society until almost mid-twentieth century. As Ramon Carcano, a landowner from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, put it: "At the bottom of every Argentine heart there is an estanciero" (pp. 62-3).

Roy Hora's book fills this historiographical vacuum and at the same time offers a challenging and original contribution to the study of the Argentine social and political development. First of all, Dr. Hora successfully discounts the popular image of a static, traditional, stable landed class. The Landowners ... is mainly the history of the making of a social class. During the decades previous to the 1880s, Argentine's economic elites had more powerful links to urban than to rural life. Livestock was part of their business portfolio, but they perceived themselves as merchants rather than estancieros. This is shown by the failure of the Sociedad Rural Argentina (an association created by the most forward-looking rural entrepreneurs) to appeal to most of the landowners and encourage them to a deeper commitment to the rural development and also by the frequent practice of proprietors' absenteeism.

One of the achievements of Hora's work is its dynamic analysis of the landowner group. Although agro-export was the main feature of Argentine economy during the 1860s and 1870s, the estancieros, as a rather homogeneous and cohesive group, began to play a more active role in Argentine society after 1880. The political stabilization, the end of the Indian threat in the frontier, the extension of the railroad, the building of public utilities, and other institutional reforms, allowed the landowners to pay more attention to their rural affairs and even to abandon the practice of absenteeism and move to the countryside. The pro-business tranquillity and order imposed by a stronger national government was exploited by the landowners to increase their fortunes and to modernize their enterprises, introducing technical and managerial improvements. The country's economic progress was based on the impressive transformation of the rural sector, and the landowners claimed their right to social pre-eminence as the result of the contribution to that progress made by their economic success and their entrepreneurial skills. Hora challenges the common ideas about the "traditional" mentality of the landowners and convincingly proves that the legitimacy of the estancieros' aspirations to the social upper stratum arose from their talent. They considered themselves a landed meritocracy rather than a regressive aristocracy.

This has been a shared feature of the economic elites in Western World since the end of the nineteenth century. The members of upper class have tried to justify their social ascendance on the grounds of their incarnation of the dearest social values--at the same time trying to model the social values themselves to fit them to their own characteristics. The pervasive influence of the idea of progress--to a great extent related to economic, technological and scientific connotations--in Argentina, as in many other countries, led the landowners to invent themselves as a group within this ideological framework. A rather similar story could be told about the "scientific" ideology launched by Fordism and Taylorism at the beginning of the 20th century with extraordinary success among the factory owners in Western World. Yet, the Argentine economic elites at the turn of the century were peculiar compared to their peers in other countries. Revealing and underlining this peculiarity is one of the most original contributions of Hora's book, and it is worth further comment.

As a reaction to the static and conservative image of the Argentine economic elites, a historiographical trend has depicted a more "modern" business-oriented class. But, in this interpretation, the main feature of this class was its diversified economic assets and its flexibility to shift its main activity as a response to the international market conditions. However, as Hora successfully proves, that was also a characteristic of most bourgeois groups in Western Europe, the United States, and even Latin America. The peculiarity of Argentina was the undisputed presence at the top of the upper class of the group of landlords from the Pampas (the fertile region of the Argentine East coast), probably the wealthiest landed class in Latin America in those years. The frequent comparisons introduced by the author help to highlight this difference and constitute some of the many virtues of the book.

A second major contribution of The Landowners ... relates to the relationship between the landed class and politics. The traditional and most popular story narrates how a group of landowners hold political power during the export-led growth period in Argentina. This extremely simplistic view has been challenging by Hora. As was mentioned before, in 1880 a new political elite achieved a stability never seen in Argentina, and allowed the country to follow an impressive path of growth. The policies of the Argentine national governments since that very moment favored agro-export expansion and facilitated the accumulation of capital, with the landowners the main beneficiaries from this process. Notwithstanding this, the new political ruling class was a mixture of "professional" politicians and elites of the interior of the country, and the landowners regarded it with suspicion and with concern in some critical moments. The State had become since 1880 a very powerful actor. The landed class could have clout with the politicians, but the State's autonomy was beyond any doubt. There was no identification between political power and the landowners as a group, and Hora shows this through analysis of the rural proprietors' attempts to participate in the electoral contest, creating their own political parties (Union Provincial in 1893 and Defensa Rural in 1912). These attempts were unsuccessful, but they point out the troublesome relationship between the estancieros and the political elites. Besides, the estancieros' electoral failure was the result of two processes: first, the absence of a social base, due to the complexity of rural society in the Argentine pampas, which impeded the establishment of deferential or paternalistic links between the landowners and the majority of the countryside society; and second, the powerful political machinery developed by the National Government (the Partido Autonomista Nacional) and the landowners' lack of electoral skills.

The difficult "communications" between landlords and the conservative political regime favored the development within the former of a relatively sanguine view of the democratic reforms of 1912. Democracy, however, proved a disheartening period for the landowners. Two important aspects, underlined by Hora, deserve our attention. First, landowners were not an obstacle to democracy, because of their distrust of the traditional political elites (the oligarchy) and because, unlike other Latin American economic elites, the landowners' main source of income was the market and not the State, reducing therefore their fears of a political change. Second, the reaction against democracy and president Hipolito Yrigoyen's alleged demagoguery led to an alliance between conservatives forces (the heirs of the Partido Autonomista Nacional) and the landowners. Nonetheless, this alliance arose at the end of the export-led growth in Argentina, and was not a permanent feature of the whole period, as used to be believed.

The Landowners ... successfully narrates the making and slow decline of a landed class in Argentina since 1860 until the emergence of Peronism in the mid-twentieth century. Dr. Hora has dealt with a wide range of issues, thus some of them may have deserved further attention, like the relationship between the big and the middle proprietors, or the reaction to the land policies pursued by the military government in 1943. But as a whole, the author offers a new (and in some regards unique) view of the formation of the landowner class in Argentina. His contributions are remarkable for both social and political history. For the former, The Landowners ... presents a stimulating and dynamic analysis of an upper class group, taking into account such suggestive aspects as its social perceptions and representations (the author has wisely used the images produced by literature and even cinema). For the latter, this work makes complex connections between politics and social cleavages, an issue many times neglected or oversimplified in political history.

ENDNOTE 

1. An important exception, and one which has exerted great influence on Hora's work, is Tulio Halperin Donghi's article, "The Buenos Aires Landed Class and the Shape of Argentine Politics, 1820-1930" in Evelyne Huber and Frank Safford (eds.), Agrarian Structure and Political Power. Landlord and Peasant in the Making of Latin America (London, 1995).

Jose Antonio Sanchez Roman

Ohio State University