The main line of the “Central Argentine” does not run into Santiago, but operates a little branch from La Banda (“Across the River”), because of the treachery of the wide, shifty, sandy stream on which it lies. To-day the railroad has a great iron bridge some two miles long, successor to the several less hardy ones, the ruins of which may be seen just protruding from the sandy bed along the way. The company asserts that it spends more to keep up its road into Santiago than it gets back from that city in traffic, but its concession requires it to maintain contact with what is reputed the most “native” capital of province still left in the Argentine. Center of what is said to be the least fertile section of the country, it remains, for a time at least, to the part-Indian race which the South American calls native, the ambitionless cholo or mestizo, with his Mohammedan indifference to the future, his inertia before modern progress. In other words, Santiago is an example of how immigration is driving the native town as it is the native individual into the most distant and poorest corners of the Argentine.
The town is built of crude bricks or baked mud, the only material available, and except in the center it is a disintegrated collection of huts with ugly high fronts and the air of never having reached maturity in growth, though they have long since in age. It has few paved streets and no street-cars, though it is overrun by a veritable plague of those noisy, impudent hackmen who swarm in rural and provincial Argentine and over whom the police seem to have neither influence nor authority. A dead-dry, yellow prairie grass spreads wherever the ground is not frankly sterile; chaparral and other desert brush grows even within the town. Its thatched ranchos of reeds, to be found anywhere a few blocks back of the central plaza, are overrun with goats, pigs, cur dogs, and naked children, like the most backward towns of the Andes. Here are to be found the choclo, locro, chicha, and other corn products common to the Andean cuisine, the same thin sheets of sun-dried beef, the swarming gente del pueblo so common to Peru and Ecuador, so unknown in Buenos Aires. The popular speech is again the Quichua of the Incas, Santiago being the only Argentine town of any size where it has survived, though it is a Quichua as different from that of Cuzco as the Italian of Florence is from that of Naples. Most of the children and many of the adults go barefooted, a rare custom in the Argentine; virtually all citizens have the incorrigible Latin-American habit of stopping all talk to gaze open-mouthed at a passing stranger, entire groups of men on the street corners turning their heads to stare after him until one feels genuine misgiving lest they permanently dislocate their ostrich necks.
There are reminders, too, of the gypsy section of Granada or Seville, hints of Luxor or Assuan in Upper Egypt, as well as of the somnolent towns in the half-tropical valleys of the Andes. The thatched mud huts are surrounded with cactus hedges on which the family wash hangs drying; everything is coated with the fine white dust of the unpaved streets, through which the half-Indian women wade almost ankle deep, their slattern skirts sweeping it into clouds behind them. Now and then there passes one of these chola females leading through the dust-river a donkey bestridden by a girl of the same race and drawing by two ropes tied to knobs in its ends a rolling barrel of water, the chocolate-colored river water on which the town seems chiefly to subsist. A dry, cracked soil under an ardent sun, thin animals eating greedily at poor tufts of scanty vegetation, cactus used as field fences as well as inclosing the miserable ranchos, cactus with twisted trunks that look like enormous snakes about to strike, immense cactus candelabras of ten or fifteen branches, a few poor chickens picking at the sterile soil about the ranchos by day and roosting by night in the rare scraggly trees, scores of hungry-looking goats browsing on nothing, yet somehow keeping energy enough to gambol about a scene usually devoid of any form of unnecessary activity, a few almost leafless scrub trees on which hang rags of raw meat sun-drying into charqui, or, as they call it in southeastern South America, tasajo—these make up the background of almost any picture of Santiago. Against this stand out in slight relief bronzed cholos loafing in the shade of the huts, pigs and children disputing the same dreary playgrounds, men shirtless or in shirt sleeves, with rather lifeless, inexpressive brown features, women dressed in shapeless thin cotton gowns of brilliant colors—apple-green, pink, shrieking red—their rarely washed faces surmounted by masses of coarse, thick, straight black hair knotted carelessly together at the neck, little girls carrying naked babies almost as large as themselves, nearly all holding in one hand the dried-gourd bowl of mate heated over a fagot fire in the open air, sucking it eagerly yet languidly through the straw-shaped metal bombilla. A completely naked gamin of five gallops about astride a stick, his slightly older and no more expensively attired brother doing the like on a scrubby horse without saddle or bridle, both scattering the pigs, dogs, and chickens at every turn. From the hut doors or the midst of such families seated al fresco and taking their mate from a single bowl that circulates round and round the group come languid calls of “Ché Maria!” “Ché compadre!” “Ché Gringa!” “Ché” is the popular nickname of affection or familiarity in southern South America, corresponding roughly to our once widespread pseudonym “kid.”
I had the customary santiagueño pleasure of rising at an unearthly hour to catch the morning train to La Banda, only to find there that the “mixed” daily from Buenos Aires into the sugar-fields of the far north was seven hours late. Over the way stood a hotel poetically named “El Dia de Nosotros,” but that day was evidently past, for the place was irrevocably closed, and it was only by a streak of luck that long after my customary breakfast hour I got from an uninviting street stand a cup of what purported to be black coffee. During the delay I fell into conversation with two young Austrians who had been all the way up to Salta in quest of fortune. The best chance for work they had found was at cutting sugar-cane at terms under which no one but the most expert could earn more than two pesos a day. Much as it resembles our own land in some ways, the Argentine does not give one the impression of being any such Eldorado for the newcomer whose stock in trade consists solely of two brawny arms.
The mixto crawled in at last, covered with a thick blanket of fine dust. At the station of Araoz, on the boundary line between the provinces of Santiago and Tucumán, the sterile, bushy country suddenly gave way to sugar-cane, vast fields, veritable prairies of cane, not the little patches of light-green that dot and decorate many an Andean landscape, but prosaic, heavily productive stretches as unromantic as Iowa cornfields, spreading as far as the eye could see in any direction. Cutting had begun, for it was late April, and all the way to Tucumán the dull, sullen rumble of the massive rollers was as incessant as the pungent smell of molasses in the air, while everywhere great brick stacks rose from the flat green landscape, belching forth their heavy clouds of smoke on the hazy, humid atmosphere.
Tucumán, my farthest north in the Argentine, in a latitude similar to that of southern Florida, was once under the Inca, though the casual observer would scarcely suspect of any such past this bustling modern Argentine town and capital of the smallest yet most prosperous province of the republic. It is a town that lives, breathes, and dreams sugar, accepting proudly the national nickname of the “City of Sugar.” A checkerboard place, some of its wide streets paved with wooden blocks, its houses of the old Spanish one-story style, yet often seventy or eighty meters deep, with two flowery patios hidden away behind the bare, though gaily smeared, façades, it has mildly the “feel” of the tropics intermingled with its considerable modern activity. Electric tramways and lights are very much in evidence, yet horsemen resembling those of the Andean wilds may be seen riding along under the trolley wires. In the central Plaza de la Independencia are orange-trees laden with ripe fruit, pepper-trees, palms, and cactus, not to mention a highly unsuccessful marble statue of Liberty, holding in her hands the links of her broken chains as if they were considerably too hot for comfort. About this never-failing civic focus are the government buildings, the cathedral, the bishop’s palace, and several pretentious clubs, though the entire circuit brings to view no architecture of interest. In one of several other squares there is a statue of Belgrano, who defeated the Spaniards in this vicinity in 1812 with the aid of “Our Lady of Mercies,” whom the general rewarded by appointing her a generalísimo of his armies. Near the central plaza, surrounded with an almost religious atmosphere, is Independence Hall, in which was signed what amounts to Argentine’s Declaration of Independence. It is a little adobe structure, long and low, like many of the poor men’s ranchos scattered about the pampas, carefully whitewashed, with a restored wooden roof and other improvements to make it look new and unnatural, after the approved Latin-American style of disguising what it is feared may be taken for the commonplace. All this is covered by a large modern concrete building in charge of a chinita, who is theoretically always on hand to admit visitors who desire to see the two good bronze reliefs, the medals, the portraits of the signers of the declaration, to sit down in the century-old presidential chair long enough for a snapshot, and to add their autographs to the register locked away in the former presidential desk, in approved tourist fashion. From Tucumán one can make out the dim blue outline of the lower Andes to the west, and in clear sunny weather the snow peaks of Bolivia stand out distinctly to the north. Indeed, it is within the district embracing Tucumán and Santiago del Estero that Argentine life begins to shade imperceptibly into the Bolivian or Andean.
Virtually the entire province of Tucumán is covered with sugar-cane and orange groves. The rivalry between these two products has been acute for decades, now one, now the other usurping the center of the stage. Toward the end of the last century the northern part of the republic “went sugar crazy” and burned whole forests of orange-trees in order to plant cane. The result was a year of overproduction, the only period in which the Argentine exported sugar, though she should easily be able to supply half South America. On the contrary she habitually imports sugar, her own in many cases, for the crude sugar shipped to Europe is often the very sugar which was served in tissue-wrapped lumps in nearly every restaurant and lechería of Buenos Aires long before that sanitary provision was thought of in the United States. But then, so does the Argentine import garlic, and onions, peppers, garbanzos (the Spanish chickpeas of which she is still so fond), cheese, and millions of “fresh” eggs, not only from Uruguay across the river but from Spain and Portugal across the sea, though all these commodities might easily be produced at home. Sugar pays what we would consider a heavy internal duty, which is reputed to be one of the causes why there are so few national refineries. In her one year of overproduction Tucumán province gave the country nearly twice the sugar it could consume. The terrified planters banded together to build up the export trade, got a bounty from the federal government, which was later forbidden by the Brussels convention, and forced the provincial government to pass a law limiting sugar plantations. In carrying this out the tucumanos, who had burned forests of orange-trees a few years before to plant cane, now burned square leagues of cane-fields that were producing too generously. The government indemnified the men who fired their fields and furnished them free seeds of corn, wheat, and barley with which to replant them. But in time the pendulum swung back again and to-day the province has little interest in anything but sugar.
Tucumán retains none of the primitive methods by which cane is turned into brown lumps of panela or chancaca on the little plantations scattered through the Andes. Some sixty immense engenios grind incessantly during the rather short but exceedingly busy season. The capacity of many of these mills is large, though they work less than those of Cuba. These, and the often enormous estates about them, are in most cases owned by English or other foreign firms, the American being most conspicuous by his absence. Not only are we unrepresented in ownership but in the machinery used, which is with rare exceptions British, French, Belgian, and German, for the argentino seems to have an instinct which draws him toward Europe and causes him to avoid all unnecessary contact with what he calls the “North American.” It is not that he fears the “Collosus of the North,” like so many of the smaller, bad-boy republics nearer the Gulf of Mexico, rather is he firmly convinced that his country is as powerful and self-sufficient as our own, but he is inclined by temperament and custom to turn his eyes eastward rather than northward.
In this busy season of the Argentine autumn and winter Tucumán province is a hive of activity. Thousands of workmen of many races are scattered among the horseman-high plants which stretch to the horizon in every direction, slashing off the canes at the ground, clearing them of leaves and useless top with a few quick swings of the machete, and tossing them with graceful easy gesture upon piles often several meters away. Along the wide and soft dirt roads which cut into squares the dense jungles of cane, there is a constant stream of cumbersome two-wheeled carts, usually drawn by five mules, the meztizo driver in his ragged garments and soiled, broad-brimmed hat astride the off hind animal, as they strain toward the points of concentration. There the load is weighed and lifted in a single bundle by huge cranes which are the only American contribution to the average estate, and dropped into the cars of the private railroads that crisscross all the province, or directly into the carriers that feed the three sets of mammoth inexorable rollers. The bagasa left over from the crushing is burned at once in the mill engines, along with the wood brought in from constantly increasing distances; the mosta, or saccharine residue so poor and dirty that it will not produce even the lowest of the three grades of unrefined sugar, is turned into alcohol. Every important factory has a village clustered about it, a community complete from bakers to priest. Field workers have an unalienable right to the two finest canes they cut or load during the day, and at dusk long broken lines of them may be seen returning from the fields carrying their poles over one shoulder, like homeward bound fishermen, or seated on the ground, machete in hand, peeling the cane and cutting it into sections, to thrust these in their mouths, crush and suck them, and spit them out upon the earth about them.
No traveler with a bit of time to spare should leave the Argentine without visiting her chief “holy place,” presided over by La Virgen de Luján. If we are to believe all we are told, it is this patron saint who has made the Argentine the prosperous, happy land it is to-day. To her groups of pious women, headed by the archbishop, made pilgrimage from Buenos Aires when the bill of the new socialist deputies threatened to become a divorce law; to her the country turns when it gets too much, or too little, rain; here the Irish-Argentinos gather en masse on St. Patrick’s day.