The real Argentine: Notes and Impressions of a Year in the Argentine and Uruguay

by J. A. Hammerton

Whether this curious international arrangement exists in connection with any other European countries, I know not; but suspect it does not, else the heroic efforts of many foreign women residents, and especially the French, to maintain the nationality of their children, would not be necessary. Seldom does a steamer leave Buenos Ayres for Europe without carrying several lonely women who have left their husbands, perhaps in some remote corner of the Pampa, in order that the child to be born may see the light under the flag of its parents’ country. M. Huret mentions the case of a French lady who, in addition to a long and toilsome journey from the interior, undertook the trip to Europe and back on two occasions within three years thus to preserve the French nationality of her children. With English mothers the chief, indeed the only reason for following this course is to save any son of theirs from the burden of military service. And many a poor lady who has made the trip has been disappointed to be told the child was a girl!

Argentine statesmen are most insistent on the maintenance of the conditions that go with Argentine citizenship, and to such a point that the famous Bartolomé Mitre, one of the greatest men the nation has produced, declared that, rather than withdraw the condition, that he who becomes a citizen of the Republic must renounce his allegiance to his native land, he would “set fire to his country from all sides.” Officialism is alert and open-eyed in its watch and ward over the native-born sons of foreigners who seek to evade their military obligations. So far as I could gather, there was but little disposition to do so on the part of most of the young citizens sprung from Gringo parents; rather are they apt to look down upon the country of their fathers, and to swell with pride at being privileged to serve the Argentine.

Exceptions to this rule will most usually be found among the sons of resident Britishers, though many of them, and especially the Irish, willingly do their duty by the Republic. I remember overhearing the mother of one of these young Irish porteños scolding him because he insisted on speaking Spanish, even among his own people, where English (with a thick brogue) was the language of the family circle. He had served his term in the Republican army, and gloried in reciting its illustrious achievements, before which the efforts of the poor blunderers who muddled through with such footling officers as Napoleon and Wellington paled into insignificance. What were the British Grenadiers to the Granaderos de San Martín? What indeed! But the Englishmen and Scotsmen who, by accident of birth, rank as Argentine citizens, and have done their military service, are comparatively few in proportion to the whole. I have met native-born Argentines not a few who were far less enamoured of the country and its ways, and more sanely appreciative of old England than many British residents who had better reason to entertain these sentiments.

A certain lofty contempt for the Englishman at home is to be noted in the attitude of the “British Colony” to things British. “I have no use for the untravelled Englishman,” said an Argentine-born Englishman to me. This gentleman’s parents had evidently been so essentially English that their son, now a man of about fifty, had grown up and attained to prosperity without being able to speak more than “Gringo Spanish.” He had no use for the untravelled Englishman, and yet I shall venture to say that many a Lancashire or Yorkshire man who has travelled no farther than London will have as broad an outlook as the English porteño who has never been outside of the Argentine. This very gentleman, one of the most charming and agreeable of the British residents with whom I came into touch, had himself visited England for the first time two years before I met him, and confessed that the old land, with its unlimited facilities for the larger enjoyment of social life, made a deep impression on him, even to the point of awakening the desire to go “home” and avail himself of his British birthright for the rest of his days.

An “Estancia” Homestead of the Old Clay-built Type.

Judge ye, therefore, to what extent he was entitled to sneer at the untravelled Englishman! So far as enlarging one’s horizon or enriching the mind is concerned, a month on the Continent of Europe, amid historic scenes and in touch with the grand, great things of the past, will do more than many years of Buenos Ayres. Thus I was at first inclined to stiffen against my porteño friend and resent his suggestion, but I had misunderstood him, and we were really in entire harmony, he and I. His point was that the Englishman who arrives in Buenos Ayres direct from England, and has never before travelled throughout his own country or even troubled about that Continental tour is apt to prove a social bore to his fellow-countrymen in Buenos Ayres. I concur most heartily, for this is the very type of Englishman who discusses in the loudest voice and with the most unreasoning bigotry the incomparable advantages of the Argentine over the benighted little island he has left. Nor must it be supposed that the seven thousand miles from the Thames to the River Plate do anything appreciably to reduce the untravelled state of this Englishman. There is not a great deal to see, and what there is slips past the average voyager without notice, so that he reaches his journey’s end in the same splendid state of untravelled ignorance that he left his native town in England.

In any consideration of the British colony, we ought to have established in our minds what exactly are its constituents. A very large number of its members are associated with the management of the railways. Even readers who are only indifferently informed on South American subjects are probably aware that the British are the great railway makers of the world, and that the thousands of miles of lines which interlace the far-flung towns of the Argentine are monuments of British enterprise, while some £150,000,000 of good English money has gone to their making. In this alone the Britishers have proved themselves the greatest benefactors of the country, although it has not been entirely a work of philanthropy. The railways, then, being chiefly British concerns, show a natural preference for British employees, and thousands of young Britons are serving on them to-day in all sorts of capacities, but chiefly as clerks, accountants, draughtsmen, engineers, and department managers.

Time was when the young railway employee in England who secured a post in the Argentine went direct from a thistly pasturage to a field of clover; was able to keep his horse and ruffle it with the best. That was before the standardising of the currency, when a paper peso would occasionally be as good as gold, and usually a great deal better than it has been since the establishment of the caja de conversión. To-day they speak of those times as of a Golden Age that has vanished, and now the lot of the minor railway employee is by no means an enviable one. It is true that he will probably receive a salary twice or two and a half times greater than he got at home, but, as I have already made clear, the net result of such a salary will be that financially his Argentine condition, if not worse than his British, will be but little better. He will handle more money, and he will get a great deal less for what he spends. Meanwhile, he has signed his two or three years’ agreement, and must struggle on, however inadequately he is financed for the fight. Falling readily into the ways of his better situated countrymen, he endeavours to vie with them, and in the process is lucky indeed if he avoids running into debt. From this class, to which naturally there are many exceptions among the higher placed officials—many of whom are men of outstanding ability, handsomely paid and more liberally treated than they would be in similar positions in Great Britain or North America—we have not the best of material for the building of the British colony.

The British banks and financial agencies, so numerous throughout the Republic, are very largely staffed from home, though there is also a large native element in every office, as it is not to be supposed that the operations of these banks are confined to a British clientéle. Far from that; I should imagine that the large majority of depositors with such as the London and River Plate Bank were foreigners. Certainly, to judge by my occasional visits to that busiest of banks, there were always fewer Britishers among those waiting on the outside of the counters than there were English-speaking accountants and cashiers on the inside. In addition to the heads of departments who were, I think, without exception, Britishers, the staff contained many English-speaking porteños, but working away at the books, and not in touch with the public, one could note many essentially British faces. This is typical of most of these banks operating in South America, some perhaps employing more of their fellow countrymen than others. If anything, the Anglo-South-American Bank seemed to me to find employment for even more Englishmen than the average in its various branches in the Argentine and along the Pacific Coast.