The descent to any of the subway stations along the Avenue carries the mind instantly back to Manhattan. The underground scent is the same, news-stands and advertising placards are as inevitable; along the white-tile-walled platforms are ranged even penny-in-the-slot scales and automatic vendors, though with the familiar plea, “Drop one cent,” changed to “Echad 10 centavos,” which is significant of the difference in cost of most small things in the chief cities of North and South America. Yet the subway fare is a trifle cheaper on the Plata, being the tenth of a peso normally worth barely forty-three cents. One’s impression of being back in “Bagdad-on-the-Subway,” however, is certain to evaporate by the time he steps out of his first tren subterraneo. The Porteño believes in moving rapidly, but his interpretation of the word hurry is still far different from our own. There are certain forms of courtesy which he will not cast off for the mere matter of stretching his twenty-four hours a few minutes farther; there are certain racial traits of deliberate formality of which he is incapable of ridding himself. Moreover, the “Subterraneo” is British, and it retains the dignified leisureliness of its nationality. One buys a ticket of a man who is intensely aware of the fact that he is engaged in a financial transaction; at the gate another man solemnly punches the ticket and returns it to the owner, who is warned both by placards and italicized remarks on the ticket itself that he must be constantly prepared instantly to display it to the inspectors who are forever stalking through the cars; where he disembarks, it is solemnly gathered by still another intense employee, who will infallibly make the passenger who has carelessly mislaid the valuable document in question produce another ten-centavo piece and witness the preparation and cancelation of a billete suplementario before he is granted his freedom. There are no express trains; the locals are rather far apart; they cease their labors soon after midnight, and do not begin again until dawn. On the other hand, the cars are roomy, spotless and as comfortable as a club easy-chair; the noisy ringing of bells and slamming of doors by disgruntled guards is lacking; signs to “Prepare yourself to leave the coach before arriving at the station of destination” take the place of any attempt to hustle the crowd. The company loses no courteous opportunity of “recommending to the passenger the greatest rapidity in getting on or off the cars, in order to accelerate the public service,” but mere placards mean nothing to the Spanish-American dowager of the old school, who is still inclined to take her osculatory and deliberate farewell of friends and relatives even though the place of parting be the open door of this new-fangled mode of transportation, surrounded by inwardly impatient, but outwardly courtier-like, subway guards and station employees.
Three important railway companies operate five lines to the suburbs, and every evening great commuters’ trains, more palatial than the average of those out of our own large cities, rush away into the cool summer night with the majority of “B. A.’s” business men. It is perhaps a misnomer to call the score or more of residence sections suburbs, for they are compactly united into the one great city, of which they constitute fully three fourths the capacity. But each district bears its own name, which often suggests its character and history. Even a total stranger might guess that Belgrano and Flores are rather exclusive dwelling-places; Coghlan, Villa Malcolm, Villa Mazzini, and Nueva Pompeya recall some of the races that have amalgamated to form the modern Porteño; one would naturally expect to find the municipal slaughter-house and less pleasant living conditions in Nuevo Chicago. In these larger and newer parts of Buenos Aires the broad streets are in striking contrast to the crowded and narrow ones down town. Though the Porteño has inherited the Spaniard’s preference for taking his front yard inside the house, neither the sumptuous dwellings of the aristocratic north suburbs nor the more plebeian residences of the west and south have that shut-in air of most Latin-American cities, where the streets slink like outcast curs between long rows of scowling, impersonal house-walls.
The far-flung limits of Buenos Aires inclose many market gardens, and the land side of the city belongs to the backwoods it faces. But the thousands of makeshift shacks which fringe it are not the abode of hopeless mortals, such as inhabit the hovels of less progressive South American towns. The outskirt dwellers of Buenos Aires have the appearance of people who are moving forward, who insist that another year shall find them enjoying something more of the advantages of civilization. Indeed, this atmosphere pervades the entire city, bringing out in pitiless contrast the social inertia of the great Andean region. There are fewer slums in Buenos Aires than in New York; the children of the poorer classes are less oppressive in appearance; beggars are scarcer. Though there is squalor enough, the conventillos, or single-story tenement-houses of the larger west-coast cities are almost unknown. Economic opportunity has here given birth to new hope and brought with it the energy and productiveness which constitute a great people, and by the time the visitor has wandered with due leisure through the vast length and breadth of Buenos Aires he is likely to conclude that there the Latin is coming into his own again.
Though it is not quite so difficult to find a native argentino in Buenos Aires as to run to earth a genuine American in New York, there are many evidences that its growth has come mainly from across the sea. The city is not merely European in its material aspects, but in its human element. The newcomer will look in vain for any costume he cannot find on the streets of Paris or Rome; the wild gauchos from the pampa, the beggars on horseback, the picturesque Carmelite monks and nuns that troop through the pages of “Amalia” and kindred stories of the past century are as scarce as feather-decked Indians along Broadway. No city of our own land is more completely “citified” than the Argentine capital. Though there has as yet been far less European immigration to the Argentine Republic than to the United States—a mere five million who came to stay up to the beginning of the Great War—a disproportionate number of these have remained in Buenos Aires. Fully half the population of the city is foreign born, with Italians in the majority. The long-drawn vowels and doubled consonants of Italian speech are certain to be heard in every block, though more often as a foreign accent in the local tongue than in the native dialect of the speaker. For the Italian fits more snugly into his environment in the Argentine than in the United States. He finds a language nearly enough like his own to be learned in a few weeks; there is a Latin atmosphere about the southern republic, particularly its capital, which makes him feel so fully at home that he is much less inclined to segregate than in the colder Anglo-Saxon North. Add to this that the climate is more nearly that of his homeland, that the Argentine welcomes him not merely with five days’ free hospitality and transportation to any part of the country, but with the communal abrazo as a fellow-Latin and a near relative, and it is easier to understand why ships from Genoa and Naples are turning more and more southward on their journey across the Atlantic. Were it not for the reversal of the seasons on the two sides of the equator, the Argentine would have a still larger permanent Italian population. But as it is summer and grape-picking time in the boot-leg peninsula when it is winter on the pampas, large numbers of Italians flit back and forth like migratory birds from one harvest to the other, or go to spend the money earned where it is plentiful in the place where it will buy more.
The Castilian lisp also stands out frequently in the sibilant native speech of “B. A.” and the boína of the Basques is so common a headdress in the city as to be inconspicuous. After the Spaniard there are French, English, and German residents, decreasing in proportion in the order named, and Americans enough to form a champion baseball team. Jews are less ubiquitous than in our own metropolis, but they are numerous enough to support several synagogues and a company of Yiddish players for a season of several weeks, after which the Thespians find new clientèle in the larger cities of the interior.
It is surprising to most Americans to find that Buenos Aires is strictly a “white man’s town.” The one negro I ever saw there was posted before the door of a theater, as an advance attraction. In the country as a whole African blood is scarcer than in Canada; while the United States has twelve non-Caucasians to the hundred, the Argentine has but five. Nor do there remain any visible remnants of the aborigines, at least in the capital. The caste of color, so intricate and unescapable in the Andes, is completely lacking. Nor are the places of importance in its social structure confined to those of Spanish origin. Along with the Castilian and Basque names that figure in its society and big-business columns are no small number not only Italian and French, but English, Baltic, and Slavic, some of them more or less Spanicized by long Argentine residence. As in Chile there is a little aristocracy of third or fourth generation Irish, retaining the original spelling of their family names, but pronouncing them “O-co-nór,” “Kel-yée,” “O-bree-én” and the like. It was an ordinary experience in running consular errands in Buenos Aires to come across business men with English or Irish names who spoke only Spanish, or men who spoke English with both an Irish brogue and a Spanish accent and accompanied their remarks with a wealth of Latin gesticulation.
To say that these transplanted Irish are active in local and national politics is to utter a tautology. Strictly speaking, Buenos Aires is not self-governing; as a Federal District—the most populous one in the world, by the way—it is ruled by an intendente appointed by the national executive. But its influence on the national life is more potent than that of Washington and New York combined; as it has more “influential citizens” and large property owners than all the rest of the republic, it has roundabout ways of imposing its own will upon itself. Not that those ways are devious in the cynical sense. It is something of a traditional hobby among the heads of aristocratic old families, most of them with ample wealth, to accept municipal office and to seek public approval in it out of family pride, and their privilege to be free from the handicap of listening to every whim of an ignorant electorate. Thus Buenos Aires enjoys the distinction among large cities of the western hemisphere of being for the most part rather well governed. On the whole, perhaps a larger percentage of public funds are actually and advantageously spent in municipal improvement than in the case of most “self-governing” cities. Besides, it is one of the distinctions between North and South America that while the cry of “graft” is more frequent in our municipal than in our national affairs, our neighbors to the south seem more capable of handling a city than a nation.
It is as easy to become a citizen in the Argentine as in the United States, but it is not quite so easy to remain one. The duties of citizenship are more nearly those of continental Europe than of the free and easy Anglo-Saxon type. There is compulsory military service, for instance. In theory every male citizen must enter the army or navy for two years when he reaches maturity; practically there is by no means room for all in the armed force which the Argentine considers it necessary to maintain. Hence the requirement reduces itself to the necessity of drawing lots, and of serving if designated by the finger of fate. This is no new and temporary whim in the Argentine, but was already in force long before the European war. The argentino, however, goes his models of the Old World one or two better. The man who does not serve, either for physical or lucky reasons, pays a yearly tax toward the support of the force from which he has been spared. As in continental Europe, every citizen must have a booklet of identity, issued by the police and duplicated in the public archives. This document is so essential that, though I spent less than three months in the country, I found it advantageous to apply for one, that is, the simpler cédula de identidad for non-citizens. The temporary resident, and even the citizen, may “get by” for a time without this little volume, but the day is almost sure to come when he will regret its absence. Of two men whose public altercation chances to attract the attention of the police, the one who can produce his libreto is far less likely to be jailed than the one who cannot. The chauffeur who has an accident, the man who is overtaken by any of the mishaps which call one’s existence to the notice of the public authorities, is much better off if he has been legally registered. Moreover, the citizen can neither vote nor exercise any of his formal rights of citizenship without displaying his booklet. It contains the photograph, a brief verified biography, the signature, and the thumb-print of the holder. The argentinos have carried the use of finger-prints further than perhaps any other nation. Even school children taking formal examinations must often decorate their papers with a thumb-print. Both photograph and cédula are produced by a well-trained public staff in well-arranged public offices, in which prints of all the applicant’s fingers are filed away under the number inscribed on his libreto, and where courteous attendants bring him into contact with the lavatory facilities which he requires before again displaying his hands to a pulchritudinous public. In addition to the essentials contained in all booklets, that of the citizen has several extra pages on which may be inscribed from time to time his military and civic record.
But to come to the polls, now that we are armed with the document indispensable to any participation in an election. A new election law had recently been passed, one so well designed to express the real will of the people that pessimists were already prophesying its attempted repeal by the oligarchy of wealthy property owners, from whom it would wrest the control of government. As in most Latin-American countries, Sunday was the day chosen for the casting of ballots. About each polling-place, most of which were in sumptuous public buildings, rather than in barbershops and second-hand shoe stores, were a few of Buenos Aires’ immaculate, imperturbable policemen and the three or four officials in charge. Otherwise there was little animation in the vicinity. The new election law forbids voters to approach the polls “in groups,” and makes electioneering or loitering within a certain considerable distance of the booths penal offenses. Glancing cautiously about him, therefore, to make sure that he was not a group, the Porteño stealthily yet briskly stepped forward to do his civic duty. The officials rose to greet him with dignified courtesy, and requested permission to peruse his booklet. This being found in order, his military service honorably completed, or his military tax paid, they permitted him to cast his ballot, at the same time recording that act on the proper line of his libreto. This latter formality is of such importance that the voter himself would protest against its inadvertent omission. For the new law in the Argentine requires each citizen to vote. Unless he can show unquestionable proof that he was seriously ill or unavoidably absent from his home district on election day, the citizen whose libreto does not show, at the next revision by authority, the mark of the election board is subject to a fine.
The most cynical of observers could scarcely have suspected any “crookedness” in the election as it was carried out that day in Buenos Aires. Outside the capital things were perhaps a trifle less ideal; at least tales of strife drifted in for some time afterward from the remote provinces, where the familiar old South American experience of seeing the cacique, the hereditary “boss,” impose his will with a heavy and sometimes a bloody hand was still repeated. But there was considerable evidence that the entire country is improving in this respect. Those who lie awake nights worrying about the future development of foreign lands need not lose much sleep over the Argentine, for here at least is one South American country unquestionably able to work out its own destiny.