¹ The importance of these years to national formation is highlighted by Lilia Ana Bertoni's discussion of public policies implemented between 1880 and 1900 in response to the volume of European immigration and the claims to this population made by the countries of origin (Patriotas, cosmopolitas y nacionalistas: La construcción de la nationalidad argentina a fines del siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica de Argentina, 2001)).

² William Foster, David, The Argentine Generation of 1880: Ideology and Cultural Texts (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990), pp. 57–67.Google Scholar

³ Donghi, Tulio Halperin, “The Buenos Aires Landed Class and the Shape of Argentine Politics (1820–1930),” in Agrarian Structure and Political Power: Landlord and Peasant in the Making of Latin America, edited by Huber, Evelyn and Safford, Frank (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), pp. 39–66.Google Scholar Hora, Roy, The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas: A Social and Political History, 1860–1945 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ This was the view of the events of 1880 held by porteños, as expressed by Gutiérrez, Eduardo in his classic of the period, La muerte de Buenos Aires: epopeya de 1880 (Buenos Aires: Luis Maucci y Cia, 1894),Google Scholar first published in La Patria Argentina between June 25 and December 29, 1882.

⁵ Hora, , The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas, p. 3.Google Scholar

⁶ Throughout the paper the literacy of those who filled out the separate household forms will be referred to not as a characteristic exclusive to them, but as a definition which characterizes them as a group. In 1895 Argentina took its second national census. Census takers recorded the population in note-books, which made no provision for numbering households or dwellings or indicating addresses or status within households. But in the federal capital and the other principal cities of the republic, literate residents could fill out separate household forms. Consistent identification of head of household is possible for these households. The instructions for the boletín de hogar o familia read as follows, “These loose forms are designated for the principal cities of the Republic, and a copy may be given to each household or family in which the chief or principal person of such promises their respective census taker to fill them out truthfully, clearly and spotlessly.” The head-of-household is identified as the person on the first line of the form, unless information in the building census indicates a correction is necessary. Archivo General de la Nación (abbreviated hereafter as AGN), Buenos Aires, Segundo Censo Nacional. Población, Ciudad de Buenos Aires.

⁷ Of the thirteen census districts which formed the core of the city of Buenos Aires in 1895, district 15 had the highest concentration of provincial male heads-of-household, male heads-of-household being identified by their filling out a separate household census form (see note 6). Of the 338 provincial male heads-of-household identified in the downtown census districts, eighty-two were in district 15. Not only were twenty-four percent of all identified provincial male heads-of-household in district 15, but they also represent 7 percent of all separate households identified within this district, in comparison with the overall downtown percentage of 3. While in most of the districts, provincial households represent 1 or 2 percent, the 7 percent of district 15 is approached only by the 5 percent of district 1 and the 6 percent of district 13. AGN, Población, tomos 466–514, 548–572, 588–592.

⁸ There were 125 households headed by females from the provinces; the fate of 103 (82 percent) of these was linked to an unidentified male from whom they were widowed.

⁹ Scobie, James, Argentina: A City and a Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 151.Google Scholar

¹⁰ In 1895 31,290 people were counted in district 15, “República Argentina, Segundo Censo, Tomo II: Población,” (Buenos Aires, 1898), p. 3. Most of these were entered into notebooks by the census taker of their block. But 1,382 households containing a total of 11,407 people filled out individual census forms, which were distributed by the census taker and later collected. On 268 of these forms two or more separate family units can be distinguished within the household. But on 1,114 of these forms it is possible to identify a family unit, which connected all the members of the household, as relatives, boarders or servants. Of these 882 had a male head-of-household. Reflective of the massive immigration Argentina experienced in the late nineteenth century, 525 were foreign-born. Among the 357 Argentines are 8 whose place of origin did not indicate their province of birth. In indicating their place of origin, 267 Argentines listed the province or the city of Buenos Aires and 82 Argentines listed one of the other thirteen provinces. Two of the eighty-two—Juan José Paso and Vicente González—although born in the Mesopotamian provinces (Corrientes and Entre Rios), were the sons of families long-established in Buenos Aires (Archivo General Tribunales, Capital Federal (hereafter abbreviated as AGT), Sucesiones, “Vicente González” 1373 (1918); “Juan José Paso,” 18493 (1942)), and Simon Andrés de Santa Cruz was not born in Entre Rios, as listed, but in La Paz, Bolivia ( Cutolo, Vicente Osvaldo, Nuevo Diccionario Biográfico Argentino, 7 volumes (Buenos Aires: Editorial Eleche, 1968), VI, 661-62.Google Scholar Piccirilli, Ricardo, Romay, Francisco, Gianello, Leonicio, Diccionario Histórico Argentino, 6 volumes (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Históricos Argentinos, 1953–1954), VI, 382 (hereafter abbreviated as NDBA and DHA).Google Scholar

¹¹ Five had returned to their home province. Anuario Kraft, tomo 2 (1912), 4355; Registro Civil, Capital Federal, Defunciones, “Mario A. Calvento,’ March 13, 1901; Archivo de la Provincia de Córdoba, Civiles; Archivo de la Provincia, Salta, Sucesorio, “José María Uriburu,” carpeta 9 (1914). No trace has been found of four of the remaining six following the census of 1895 and the other two disappear from the records following the deaths of their wives. Information on residence at the time of death was extracted from the death certificate customarily found in a sucesión (or in two cases obtained directly from the Registro Civil), or from the entries in the registers of Cementerio Norte (hereafter abbreviated as CN), Entierros (1892–1901), (1901–1906), (1906–1911), (1912–1917), (1917–1922), (1922–1927), (1928–1933), (1933–1937), (1938–1943), (1956–1961). Study of the setting through the prism of the 1895 census was first undertaken by Korn, Francis in Buenos Aires, 1895: una ciudad moderna (Buenos Aires: Editorial del Instituto, 1981).Google Scholar

¹² República Argentina, Segundo Censo, 10 de mayo 1895, Tomo III: Censos Complementarios (Buenos Aires, 1898), p. 3. Sargeant, Charles, The Spatial Evolution of Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1870–1930 (Tempe, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1974), pp. 22,Google Scholar 28–29, and Scobie, James, Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb, 1870–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 91,Google Scholar have commented upon the persistence, throughout the nineteenth century, of a settlement pattern centered on the Plaza de Mayo.

¹³ Lienur, Jorge F., “La ciudad efemera: consideraciones sobre el aspecto material de Buenos Aires, 1870–1910,” in El umbral de la metropolis: tranformaciones técnicas y cultura en la modernización de Buenos Aires, 1870–1930, edited by Lienur, Jorge F. and Silvestri, Graciela (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1993), especially pp. 215–216.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Gorelik, Adrián, La grilla y el parque: espacio público y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires, 1887–1936 (Quilmes, Argentina: Universidad de Quilmes, 1998), especially pp. 154–55, 183, 196, 288–90.Google Scholar

¹⁵ These 338 households encompass fifteen percent of the provincial population in the thirteen downtown census districts of the city. Their northward bias is paralleled by a similar, though less marked, bias (56 per cent) in the provincial population of these districts in its entirety. Población, p. 18.

¹⁶ The unit of currency referenced in this article is the peso. AGN, Segundo Censo Nacional, Boletín 20, Edificación, Capital Federal, sección 15, legajo 95. Unfortunately only the data on number of stories and construction material were compiled and published and it is not possible to make comparisons on building value and living accommodations with other census districts.

¹⁷ AGN, Segundo Censo Nacional, Ciudad de Buenos Aires, distrito 15, Boletín 32, Industrial, legajo 106; Boletín 41, Comercio, legajo 116.

¹⁸ Halperin, , pp. 39,Google Scholar 46, 62–63; Hora, , The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas, especially “The Making of a New Landed Class, 1880–1912,” pp. 45–83.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Terán, Oscar, “El Lamento de Cané,” Vida intelectual en el Buenos Aires fin de siglo (1810–1910): Derivas de la “cultura científica” (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económico, 2000).Google Scholar Trillo, Mauricio Tenorio, “1910 Mexico City: Space and Nation in the City of the Centenario ,” JLAS 28:1 (February, 1996), pp. 75–104.Google Scholar Needell, Jeffrey D., “Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires: Public Space and Public Consciousness in Fin-de-Siêcle Latin America,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37:3 (July 1995), pp. 519–40.Google Scholar Scobie, James R. (completed and edited by Baily, Samuel L.), Secondary Cities of Argentina: The Social History of Corrientes, Salta and Mendoza, 1850–1910 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 164–65.Google Scholar

²⁰ The occupational categories employed in this study are adaptations of the classifications developed by Sofer, Eugene F. and Szuchman, Mark in “The State of Occupational Stratification Studies in Argentina,” LARR 11:1 (1976), pp. 159–172 Google Scholar and in supplementary lists. I divided those in non-manual occupations into just two categories, low and high. The principal criteria for distinguishing between the two is the focus of the economic activity; whether it was oriented toward the locality (primarily store-keeping) or the wider world (primarily the import-export sector) but also industry, entrepreneurial activ-ities, the arts and diplomatic posts. As enumerated by Szuchman and Sofer, manual occupations were classified as skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled. Professionals are divided into two categories, low professionals and high professionals, according to the degree of formal education required. As the objective of this study is based on identification of sectors of the population, rather than examination of issues such as mobility, I created separate categories for certain groups. Among these are occupational labels, which do not necessarily indicate a uniform socio-economic standing. These were the servants, landed, rentistas (landlords), military officers, students, dependientes, empleados and comerciantes. Participants in the commercial sector of the economy identified their occupation in the census either by a general label, comerciante or comercio, or less frequently by a specific trade or enterprise. In the case of the latter, it is possible to distinguish between low non-manual and high non-manual occupations. But in the case of the former, it is not. Merchants (high non-manual category) and shopkeepers (low non-manual category) alike might identify their occupation as comerciante or comercio. However for the provincianos among them we have supplemental information. The identification of the shopkeepers in the commercial census and the information collected from biographical entries, the social register, the building census and the city guides on the merchants allow us to make distinctions in our more detailed descriptions of the provincianos which we cannot make in our census statistics on comerciantes.

²¹ The eight landed provincianos represent 21.6 percent of landed Argentine male heads-of-household, approximating the 23.4 percent representation of provincials among all Argentine male head-of-households.

²² AGT, Sucesiones, “Ernesto Fernández,”27336/27337 (1957); “Juan Agustín Torrent,” 3027 (1909); “Vicente González”. Torrent's administration of another property, one in the province of Buenos Aires, which he owned in partnership with his brother, was described by his sister-in-law as more “appropriate to a frontier estancia in 1820 Argentina” (AGT, Sucesiones, “Juan Eusebio Torrent,” 9077 (1901)), p. 110.

²³ AGT, Sucesiones, “Wenceslao Escalante,” 984 (1912); “Carlos Sarachaga,” 21966 (1928); “Emilio Gouchon,” 31692 (1912); “Lucas López Cabanillas,” 15234 (1935); “Ernesto Fernández,” “Benjamin Paz,” 2244 (1903); “Enrique Sobral,” 2743 (1917). Members of the Caseres, Martínez de Hoz, and Ortiz Basualdo families studied by [Balmori], Diana Hernando (“Casa y Familia; Spatial Biographies in Nineteenth Century Buenos Aires,” (Ph.D. diss.: University of California at Los Angeles, 1973)Google Scholar are found in district 15 (AGN, Población, district 15, blocks 6, 21 & 75).

²⁴ Hora, , The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas, pp. 61–62.Google Scholar While Cárcano went home to Córdoba, after the disintegration of his presidential hopes, and then on to Europe ( Cárcano, Ramón J., Mis Primeros 80 Años (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, n.d.), p. 113,Google Scholar Roca and Juárez Celman are found among the provincial male heads-of-household in the downtown census records of 1895 (AGN, Población, district 1, blocks 3 & 19).

²⁵ In the separate-household-form database, forty-two percent of male heads-of household in district 15 fall into one of these two categories (commerce/low non-manual and skilled labor), and in a database which combines the separate household forms and the notebooks of the census takers, forty-five percent of the entire male population of district 15, fourteen years of age or older, are similarly categorized.

²⁶ Along with descriptive information, two statistics place the occupations of provincial male heads-of-household in context. One is their percentage in the various occupational categories in comparison with (a) their percentage in the total population of male heads-of-household and (b) their percentage in the total population of Argentine male heads-of-household. The second is the actual numbers of provincial male heads-of-household in the various occupational categories in comparison with the expected frequency, the frequency which would occur if chance was the only factor determining the distribution.

²⁷ The 79 Italians classified as comerciantes exceeded their expected frequency (60), as did the 28 Spaniards (20). Although Italians were 24.7 percent of the literate male heads-of-household of district 15 and Spaniards 8.2 percent, they represented 32.5 percent and 11.5 percent respectively of the comerciantes. And although Spaniards only represented 8.7 percent of the skilled workers, Italians represented 59.6 percent. These 62 greatly exceeded an expected frequency of 26. The numbers for the provincianos reveal a far different pattern. None were skilled workers and the fourteen comerciantes do not approach the expected frequency of 23.

²⁸ DHA, II, 112, 359; III, 191, 396–97; IV, 160-62; V, 700; VI, 643, 805–806. NDBA, I, 352; II, 102, 540, 682–83; III, 94, 372–73, 421; V, 338, 657; VII, 362. Udaondo, Enrique, Diccionario Biográfico Argentino (Buenos Aires: Casa editora ‘Coni’, 1938), p. 270.Google Scholar It is quite unusual for there to be no biographical entry in the NDBA or DHA for someone for whom La Prensa (Buenos Aires) or La Nación (Buenos Aires) published a tribute at the time of their deaths. Nevertheless in four cases information was taken from such tributes (La Prensa, December 5, 1915, p. 17; November 21, 1935, p. 10; September 24, 1939, p. 12; La Nación, March 16, 1930, p. 11) in the absence of biographical entries.

²⁹ Paula Alonso, “The ‘Partido Autonomista Nacional,’ Order, and State Building in Argentina in the 1880s,” Latin American Studies Association XXII International Congress, Miami Florida, March 16-18, 2000.

³⁰ DHA, I, 667; II, 112, 359; III, 396–97; IV, 160–63, 191; V, 657, 700; VI, 643, 805–806. NDBA, I, 352, 535; II, 102, 136, 540, 682–83; III, 80, 94, 236, 372–73, 395; IV, 421; V, 338; VII, 362. La Prensa, December 5, 1915, p. 12; November 21, 1935, p. 10. La Nación, March 16, 1930, p. 11. Principios (Córdoba), August 29, 1933, p. 1.

³¹ A complete list of citations for the twenty-four inheritance records of the porteño high professionals may be requested from the author.

³² NDBA, III, 395; DHA, VI, 805–806. Principios, August 29, 1933, p. 1. AGT, Sucesiones, “Nicanor Elejalde,” 955 (1901), p. 20.

³³ We observe a mirror image of this pattern when we look at the Argentine spouses of provincial wives. Thirty-eight percent (three from the city or province of Buenos Aires and fifteen from the provinces) were high professionals.

³⁴ Although 42.6 percent of the German male heads-of-household, 37.4 percent of the Italian and 40 percent of the Spanish were comerciantes, in none of these cases is the ratio of the actual number to the expected frequency (20:13, 79:60, 28:20 respectively) so disproportionate as the 33:11 of the provincial high professionals.

³⁵ Although there were none in district 15, there were, among provincial male heads-of-household in the other twelve districts, one dependiente, and one unskilled, six semi-skilled, and four skilled workers.

³⁶ Avenida Córdoba separated one tier of census districts from the next, inviting a definition of the Barrio Norte as the area to its north as far as the railroad tracks and the bay beyond them. The area north of Avenida Córdoba was divided into census districts 13, 15 and 21, which stretched westward into the country toward Belgrano. On the east district 13 came to a triangular point created by a bend in the shoreline in the vicinity of the Retiro train station. District 15 was in the center. Its boundaries of Junin (west), Paseo de Julio (north), Libertad (east) and Córdoba (south) encompassed eighty-two blocks. A block 83 was not an actual block but the label which was assigned to the entire area on the other side of Paseo de Julio (Libertador).

³⁷ AGT, Sucesiones, “Amancio Pardo,” 2458 (1898), p. 50; “Tomás Cabrai,” 16996 (1929), p. 85; “Juan Manuel Fernández Blanco,” 1088 (1912), p. 65.

³⁸ According to the Baere Maps located in the Municipal Museum, the southern-most streets of district 15 were already built up with Mediterranean-style housing a decade before the famed 1871 yellow fever epidemic precipitated a northward movement of population to this higher ground. The district was subdivided as far as Avenida Santa Fe and in its eastern-most portion as far as Juncal. But in the area north of Plaza Vicente López later development would not have to contend with prior construction. Beyond this point were country lots, often a full block in size, and on the edge of the northern slope down to the bay, quintas stood on land yet to be blocked out by the passage of streets. By 1895 considerable additional development had occurred. In 1869 there were 1,161 buildings in district 15. Only 18 had a second story. In 1895 there were 2,327 buildings in a census district 15 which had lost twelve blocks to the creation of district 21. Of these buildings, 62 were three stories and 458 two stories. Argentina, República, Primer Censo de la República Argentina, 15, 16, 17 de setiembre de 1869 (Buenos Aires, 1872), pp. 80–81; Censos Complementarios, p. 3.Google Scholar

³⁹ Diana, Balmori, “Buenos Aires,” in Notable Family Networks in Latin America, by Balmori, Diana, Voss, Stuart F. and Wortman, Miles (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984).Google Scholar Scobie, Buenos Aires, pp. 131–32. It was a material lifestyle elaborately described in 1891 by Martel, Julian in the classic Argentine novel, La Bolsa (Buenos Aires: Editorial Estrada, 1946), pp. 72–73.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ AGN, Edificación.

⁴¹ Between 1895 and 1908 the value of the house at Juncal 1422 had doubled from $6,000 to $12,000. In approximately the same time period the house at Junin 1057 rose in value from $18,000 to $23,000 (AGT, Sucesiones, “Silvestre Dávila,” 855 (1908), p. 7; “Lino Palacio,” 2290 (1907), p. 87). Decades later Bulrich, Silvina wrote of those who “stoically endure life in the freezing apartment building, without heating, without hot water, but yes, in the Barrio Norte, although not on the best street; one can only expect so much” in Los burgueses (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1978), p. 12.Google Scholar

⁴² Needell, Jeffrey D., A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 138, 188.Google Scholar

⁴³ “Number of servants in household” must be approached with caution because there is no way to determine whether or in which instances servants housed in a separate structure on the property are listed or omitted in the enumeration of the members of the household.

⁴⁴ La Nación, Libro de Oro: Guía de Familias (hereafter abbreviateci as LO), primer a decimotecero volúmenes (Buenos Aires, 1898 a 1911). Anuario Social (hereafter abbreviated as AS) primer a séptimo volumen (Buenos Aires, 1908 a 1914). The copies are found in the Library of Jorge Tornquist currently located in the Banco Central; the set for the Libro de Oro is complete from 1898 to 1911 with the exception of the 1909 issue and for the Anuario Social from 1908 to 1914. There are scattered issues from 1916 until 1945 but by the World-War-I era the objectives of the registry appear to have significantly changed.

⁴⁵ LO (1898), n.p.

⁴⁶ de Beneficencia, Sociedad, Origen y desenvolvimiento de la Sociedad de Beneficencia de la Capital, 1823–1912 (Buenos Aires: Establecimiento Tipografico M. Rodríguez Giles, 1913), pp. 21–30.Google Scholar Two recent dissertations give further foundation to the prominence of these two institutions in porteño society. Edsall, Thomas, “Elites, Oligarchies, and Aristocrats: The Jockey Club of Buenos Aires and the Argentine Upper Class, 1920–1940,” (Ph.D. diss.: Tulane University, 1999), pp. 13–71.Google Scholar Mead, Karen, “Oligarchs, Doctors and Nuns: Public Health and Beneficence in Buenos Aires, 1880–1914,” (Ph.D. diss.: University of California at.Santa Barbara, 1994), pp. 291–300.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ AS (1908), n. p. All ten of the provincianos in the 1898 Libro de Oro axe found in the 1908 Anuario Social with the exception of the two who had died. Thirty of the thirty-eight bonaerenses in the 1898 Libro de Oro are found in the 1908 Anuario Social (four of these may have died). But fourteen of the twenty-four provincianos and thirty of the sixty-three bonaerenses found in the 1908 Anuario Social are not found in the 1898 Libro de Oro.

⁴⁸ Paralleling the residential location of those found in the Libro de Oro in 1898, are the findings of Francis Korn on the residential location of members of the Jockey Club in 1897. In her article, “La gente distinguida,” Buenos Aires: Historia de Cuatro Siglos, v. 2 edited by Romero, José Luis and Romero, Luis Alberto (Buenos Aires: Altamira, 2000), pp. 45–55),Google Scholar she indicates the highest concentration was to the immediate north of the Plaza de Mayo, voting district 14, covering the same area as the 1895 census districts 1, 3 and 5.

⁴⁹ A meticulous search of the Recoleta indices lends confidence to the claim that the fifty-seven provincianos found there represent the total. Unfortunately such a search of the Chacarita indices is not possible. Therefore it was only possible to identify those eleven buried there for whom a date of death was available from other sources. In theory, any or all of the six provincianos for whom a final destination has yet to be identified could be buried there.

⁵⁰ Burial in Cementerio del Norte does not necessarily indicate a long sojourn there. However it does indicate a mentality oriented toward status and connections which allow one a space, if only temporarily. An illustration of this is the case of José Maria Ortiz whose removal to Cementerio Oeste is documented in the records of Cementerio del Norte (CN, Entierros (1901–1906), April, 6, 1902).

⁵¹ 4AGT, Sucesiones, “Benjamin Basulado,” 13087 (1929); “Tomás Cabrai.”

⁵² AGT, Sucesiones. Of the fifty sucesiones, two, “Emilio Cabrai,” 597 (1908) and “Celso Nasario Rojas,” 2627 (1912) are missing and two “Emilio Gouchon” and “Benito Villanueva,” 49511 (1933) are missing volumes. Estate records describe those with resources but are not confined to the noteworthy, the powerful, the wealthy, while the absence of a record of a sucesión has a variety of possible meanings. It can indicate that the individual possessed no property, that the estate was inventoried in a jurisdiction other than the federal capital (a fifty-first sucesión was in fact located in the provincial archives of Salta and three others in La Plata, the capital of the province of Buenos Aires); that the property of the individual was held in a sociedad anónima, as it appears was the case with the merchants of the cohort. Drawing on the research of others, Amarai, Samuel (The Rise of Capitalism on the Pampas: The Estancias of Buenos Aires, 1785–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 56)CrossRefGoogle Scholar has noted our inability to measure the completeness of the probate inventories, most importantly the diminution of estates through “the extra-legal distribution of wealth.” The case in this study, which inspires the least confidence, is that of César González Segura. A member of a wealthy mendocino family (Joan Supplée, “Provincial Elites and the Economic Transformation of Mendoza, Argentina, 1880–1914,” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Texas, 1988) and Bragoni, Beatriz, Los hijos de la revolución: Familia, negocios y poder en Mendoza en el siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: Taurus, 1999), pp. 207–209,Google Scholar 231), long-time resident of a $140,000 (1895) dwelling on Avenida Callao (Edificación, 173), member of the Jockey Club and the Club Mar del Plata (NDBA, III, 395), one of the original subscribers to the Libro de Oro (1898, 29), the claim of his heirs in 1940 that there were no existing goods suggests the extra-legal distribution of wealth to which Amarai refers rather than an impoverished estate (AGT, Sucesiones, “César González Segura,” 79890 (1948)). Nevertheless from the items listed in existing inventories, a lifestyle can be sketched, more accurate in some cases than a monetary valuation.

⁵³ AGT, Sucesiones, “Santiago Brian,” 11354 (1923); “Alejandro Franco,” 13613 (1911); “Adolfo Labougle,” 22481 (1926); “Clodomiro Ledesma,” 12727 (1918); “Rafael Pero,” 11089 (1921); “Wenceslao Escalante.”

⁵⁴ DHA, IV, p. 643; NDBA, IV, pp. 10–11.

⁵⁵ La Prensa, May 24, 1921, p. 11.

⁵⁶ LO (1898), pp. 34, 53; (1902), pp. 16, 29.

⁵⁷ The work of Pastoriza, Elisa (“Sociedad y política en la gestación de una ciudad turística: Mar del Plata in los años treinta,” (Ph.D. diss.: Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, 1999), pp. 93–122 Google Scholar and Fey, Ingrid, “First Tango in Paris: Latin Americans in Turn-of-the-Century France, 1880 to 1920,” (Ph.D.diss.: University of California, Los Angeles, 1996), pp. 44–52)),Google Scholar testify to the importance of these practices to the lifestyle of high society.

⁵⁸ Carranza, Carlos Alberto, Recuerdos de Infancia (Buenos Aires: n. p., 1947), p. 185.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ AGT, Sucesiones, Villanueva; LO (1902), p. 84; Edificación, p. 62; AGN, photographie archive, caja 40, negative B86.072. La Prensa, April 9, 1933, p. 9; April 10, 1933, p. 9. Villanueva is the only district 15 provincial mentioned by Roy Hora in his description of “the extent to which the elites of the interior were merging their economic interests with the littoral upper classes,… in the process adopting the values and outlook that were also transforming Argentina's wealthier group,” The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas, pp. 61–62.

⁶⁰ AGT, Sucesiones, “Benjamín Paz”; “Carlos M. del Castillo,” 28084/85 (1941); “Enrique Sobral”; “Alfredo Zinder,” 10454 (1927); “Juan Agustín Torrent”; “Tomás Cabrai”; “Lucas López Cabanillas.”

⁶¹ AGN, Edificación, 42, 51, 97, 108, 114, 144, 160. AGT, Sucesiones, “José Lisandro Albarracín,” 10317 (1920); “Abelardo Breton,” 16123 (1933); “Eduardo Larguía,” 1575 (1902); “Alejandro Sarmiento,” 2757 (1900); “Manuel Fernández Oro,” 1132 (1919); “Félix Dufourg,” 879 (1911); “Silvestre Dávila”; “Lino Palacio.” AS (1908), 107, 152; LO (1902), 28. CN (1892–1901), 222; (1901–1906), 4, 35; (1906–1911), 3, 65; (1912–1917), 39; (1917–1922), 52; (1933–1937), 5.

⁶² Alonso, 10. Balmori, Diana and Oppenheimer, Robert, “Family Clusters: Generational Nucleation in Nineteenth Century Argentina and Chile,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 21:2 (April, 1979), p. 249.Google Scholar Farrell, Betty G., has described in detail the transition from a system of directed marital alliances to an orchestrated system of patterned marriages within the boundaries of social acceptability in her book, Elite Families: Class and Power in Nineteenth-Century Boston (Albany, New York: State University Press of New York, 1993).Google Scholar Jurado, Alicia described the effectiveness of this system in Descubrimiento del Mundo: Memorias, 1922–1952 (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1989), p. 161.Google Scholar In her recent work, Pilar de Quirnós, González Bernaldo locates the breaking of porteño sociability out of the bonds of the family in the mid-nineteenth century, Civilidad y política en los orígenes de la Nación Argentina: Las sociabilidades en Buenos Aires, 1829–1862 (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica de Argentina, 1999), pp. 201, 260.Google Scholar

⁶³ Appropriate social skills were not, however, the exclusive possession of porteñas. Who could doubt, for example, Margarita Beeche de Pero (DHA, I, p. 499), daughter of a noted scholar, had sufficient cultural background to converse with the leaders of Argentine society or question the ability of Clementina del Viso de Cannona (NDBA, II, p. 136), who accompanied her father to Italy, when he accepted the ambassadorship, to carry herself with grace in the salons, the theaters and the race track of the Buenos Aires elite. Nevertheless provincials with porteña wives were more likely to appear in the earliest of the social registers, the Libro de Oro, than those with wives from the provinces (32 as compared to 24 percent).

⁶⁴ Carranza, especially pp. 197–99, 216–18, 238.

⁶⁵ Bunge, Julia Valentina, Vida: Epoca Maravillosa, 1903–1911 (Buenos Aires: Eméce Editores, 1965), pp. 237–38.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ Three of the spouses whom the author has categorized as porteñas are not identified in the census as Buenos-Aires born and in fact Isabel Durañona de Villafañe (Oriental), Enriqueta Segueira de Avila (Brazil) and Luisa Carranza (province of Cordoba) were not born in Buenos Aires. Nevertheless all three of these women were members of families with at least a three-generation history in the city ( Calvo, Carlos, Nobilario del antiguo reynato del Rio de la Plata (Buenos Aires, 1936–1948), v. 2, pp. 7–65;Google Scholar v. 4, pp. 97–102; v. 5, pp. 213–20) and each spent a significant part of their childhood there. Two other spouses whom the author has categorized as porteñas grew up in the province, not the city of Buenos Aires.

⁶⁷ AGT, Province of Buenos Aires, La Plata, “Bias D'hers,” 426 (1886), p. 3.

⁶⁸ One need only compare the extent to which creditors besieged Adolfo Carranza's estate at the time of his death (AGN, “Adolfo Esteban Carranza,” 5291 (1896)) to the way in which he was remembered (NDBA, II, pp. 139–40) for evidence of this.

⁶⁹ The figure for 1898 was calculated on the basis of 7 out of 37 porteña wives, as one was already dead by this date; and the figure for 1908 on the basis of (6 of the previous 7) + (8 additional) out of 33, as five were dead by this date. Four others appear in other volumes. And there were those such as Wal-dina Elejalde de Anabia and Micaela Guerrico de Albarracín, who are not listed but whose death is noted in the necrology of the register (LO, II, p. 135; IX, p. 198).

⁷⁰ A complete list of citations for the fifty inheritance records of the mothers and fathers of the porteña spouses may be requested from the author. There are three sets of porteño in-laws of whom we know nothing but their names and places of birth, which in one case is England (Davies) and another France (Martin), while the surname of the third (Williams) suggests English descent.

⁷¹ Hora, Roy, “Landowning Bourgeoisie or Business Bourgeoisie? On the Pecularities of the Argentine Economic Elite, 1880–1945,” JLAS 34:3 (August, 2002), pp. 587–623.Google Scholar

⁷² It is unfortunate for our study that Benito Villanueva never married. Carlos Ibarguren sheds the following light on the absence of a spouse in the life of this attorney, who termed himself a hacendado in the 1895 census. “A bachelor, this sensuous mendocino conquered love with the same positive means that he applied to all the arenas in which he acted,” Ibarguen, Carlos, La historia que he vivido (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1999), p. 161.Google Scholar We can only speculate on the match he might have made and what it might have revealed about the place of provincials in the porteño elite.

⁷³ Hernando [Balmori], II, 343–85.

⁷⁴ AGT, “Manuel José Guerrico,” 1260 (1909).

⁷⁵ Gálvez, Lucía, Delfina Bunge: Diarios íntimos de una época brillante (Buenos Aires: Pianeta, 2000). Hora, pp. 34, 57, 104–105.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ AGN, “Gregorio Guerrico” 6089 (1877), “Micaela Eguren de Guerrico,” 5937 (1849). Gregorio Guerrico, father of Micaela Guerrico de Albarracín, was the brother of Manuel José Guerrico, grandfather of Anatilde Guerrico de González Segura. Manuel José accumulated large landholdings during the Rosas era, which subsequently passed to his three children, including Anatilde's father, also named Manuel José.

⁷⁷ AGT, “Jorge Tornquist & Victoria Beccar.” 3068 & 11534 (1900). NDBA, VII, pp. 352–54 [Torn-quist, Ernesto]. DHA, VI, pp. 639–40 [Tornquist, Ernesto].

⁷⁸ de Torino, Zulema Usandiveras, La Esposa (Salta, Argentina: Victor Manuel Henne, 1996).Google Scholar Calculations, made using a database created by Thomas Edsall, indicate that only 12 percent of the provincials who had served in the Chamber of Deputies and 8 percent of the provincials who had served in the Senate between 1880 and 1895 filed a separate household census form in one of the downtown districts of the federal capital in 1895. These statistics are indicative rather than absolute because the database does not contain date of death. If it were possible to remove those who died before the 1895 census was taken, the percentages would be higher to some unknown degree.

⁷⁹ These seventeen were 28 percent of a total of sixty such cases in the census tracts of the central area of the federal capital.

⁸⁰ AGN, Población, 566, block 57.