Part 3

Borges: A Life
by Edwin Williamson

(Page 3 of 4)

The Conquest of the Desert made General Roca the strongman of Argentina. Anxious to avoid the instability that had plagued the country since independence, he created a political machine that secured power through systematic electoral fraud for the next thirty years. The criollo republic thus never evolved into a genuine democracy, passing instead into the hands of a ruling class of landowners, led by political caudillos, who controlled the burgeoning export economy in association with foreign business interests. Those criollos who had been excluded from the bonanza of progress denounced the materialism of the new elite. Former presidents like Mitre and Sarmiento lamented the corruption of the civic virtues of the early republic. The rule of President Juárez Celman-a stooge of General Roca's-was especially resented, and when Baring Brothers, a British investment bank, crashed in 1890, Roca's opponents staged an armed uprising in Buenos Aires.

Although this "Revolution of 1890" was defeated, out of it grew the Radical Party, which would become the major party of opposition, largely representing the urban middle classes. Both the Acevedo and the Borges families would give their allegiance to the new party, not least because its founder, Leandro Alem, was a close friend of Isidoro Acevedo's. The watchword of the Radicals was "Intransigence," which meant that they rejected electoral deals as a means of gaining power, preferring instead to mount armed rebellions. The Radicals rose against the government in 1892 and again in 1893, but the political machine created by General Roca held fast, and there was no stopping the new money, the new men, even the new races, that came flooding into the country to change the face of the old criollo republic beyond recognition.

In the course of the 1880s and 1890s, the new plutocratic elite would transform Buenos Aires into one of the most modern cities in the world. Public services were revolutionized with the electrification of public lighting, the creation of modern water-supply and sewerage systems, the mechanization of horse-drawn tramways, the construction of an underground railway, as well as one of the largest suburban railway networks in the world. At the same time, the elite embarked on a hugely ambitious plan to redevelop the entire center of Buenos Aires. The pattern of the original Spanish settlement still determined the shape of the city, which amounted to little more than a tight grid of narrow streets extending from the central square of the conquistadors to form a warren of low houses and dim churches. But the modern aspirations of the elite could no longer be contained within this ancient layout; the new ruling class sought to burst out of the confines of its Spanish colonial heritage and remake Buenos Aires in the image of Paris.

A primary aim of the project was to arrange the great buildings of state so as to reflect the separation of powers that constitutes the ideal balance of liberal government-a new palace would be built for the president, and another great building would house the congress, and each would stand within sight of the other at either end of a grand avenue. The transformation began with the enlargement of the central square-now called the Plaza de Mayo-that had formed the heart of the city since its foundation. The old fortress, which had once housed the Spanish viceroys, had already been demolished in 1853, after the defeat of Rosas, but this further enlargement would involve the demolition of La Recova, the old arcaded market. The new presidential palace, known as the Casa Rosada, was situated at the far end of the enlarged square. Another huge square was created to the west and a vast neoclassical edifice built there to house the National Congress. The two squares, designated respectively for the executive and legislative branches of government, were joined up by a splendid thoroughfare known as the avenida de Mayo, which required the demolition of several streets and the controversial mutilation of the Cabildo, one of the oldest colonial buildings in the city. When the avenida de Mayo was inaugurated in 1894, it was something of an architectural wonderland, its lofty buildings topped with extraordinary confections in concrete-a proliferation of whorls, pinnacles, turrets, and spires, set among dozens of little cupcake domes.

The avenida de Mayo represented a new line of demarcation between the old Buenos Aires and the new. Since the epidemic of yellow fever in 1871, there had been a drift of better-off families from the center to more salubrious higher ground toward the north. In the 1880s this area was refashioned as the Barrio Norte, and it remains the favored area of the middle classes to this day. Once more it was Paris that provided the inspiration. The innovations undertaken in the French capital by Baron Haussmann were much admired, and his ideas were adopted in the planning of the new district. Entire streets were sacrificed to spacious boulevards. The Frenchman Charles Thays designed several Gallic-style squares and parks, including the imposing Plaza San Martín. The boulevards were graced with trees native to the River Plate-notably the jacarandas that blossom in November, brightening the Barrio Norte with splashes of blue, and palos borrachos, whose large pods put out creamy yellow flowers in February. The grandest families built mansions in the style of Parisian hôtels, complete with domes, mansard roofs, and heavy wrought-iron gates. The giant pile that now accommmodates the Círculo Militar on the southwest corner of the Plaza San Martín is one of the largest and most impressive of the mansions of the Argentine belle époque; it was designed by a Parisian architect as a town house for José C. Paz, founder of the great newspaper La Prensa.

Still, it was not just the wealthy classes who were to change the face of Buenos Aires toward the end of the nineteenth century. The huge numbers of foreigners who came to work in Argentina also contributed to the reorganization of the city. They settled around their places of work-the stockyards, tanneries, and meatpacking plants that serviced the booming export economy. These new immigrant settlements were very modest indeed, not much better than strips of one-story houses grouped into geometrically exact blocks and fanning out into the countryside along the routes of the tram lines or the suburban railway. The historic limits of the city were breached by the growth of new districts like Almagro, San Juan, and Boedo. The new suburbs pushed westward, too: immigrant communities like La Paternal, Villa Ortúzar, Villa Urquiza sprang up beyond the railway line that served the cemetery of La Chacarita in the northwest. In a matter of a decade or two, pleasant little towns like Flores and Belgrano would be threatened with absorption by the relentless expansion of the capital.

As different ethnic groups gravitated toward particular areas, these raw proletarian barrios soon became the focus of communal loyalties. The largest group by far were the Italians, known derisively as "gringos" by the criollos. But they, too, tended to congregate according to their region of origin. The Genoese settled in La Boca, at the mouth of the Riachuelo, a river that debouches onto the estuary of the River Plate. A Neapolitan barrio, suitably called Nueva Pompeya, grew around the Corrales, the great stockyards on the south side of the city. The barrio of Palermo in the northwest attracted immigrants from Calabria and Sicily. Jews from Eastern Europe gathered around the Plaza del Once to the west, where a garment industry began to thrive. To a lesser extent, Armenians, Turks, Arabs, and many others who flooded in from the Old World formed their own communities in different areas of the city and its environs.

The historic center of Buenos Aires, where the old criollo families had lived for centuries, was increasingly left in a social limbo, suspended between the elegant Barrio Norte and the new immigrant barrios. Once-respectable districts in the city center, especially those to the south of the avenida de Mayo, like San Telmo or Barracas, degenerated into decrepit slums. There were many large, historic mansions that turned into overcrowded warrens known as conventillos, as the rich abandoned their houses and subdivided them into tiny apartments for rental to poor immigrant families.

On the other hand, those patrician families who had failed to profit from the land boom of the 1880s were effectively demoted in the new pecking order that was emerging in Argentina. Borges's mother cited in her memoir the case of Micaela Soler, a kinswoman of hers on the Suárez side, who lived on the income from the pensions that her father, the illustrious General Miguel Estanislao Soler, had been awarded by no fewer than three South American countries for his services in the wars of independence. Doña Micaela was just about able to keep up the grand style in which she had been raised-there was nothing she loved better than to have a coach with a liveried driver draw up outside her house-but even so she had been obliged to move to rented accommodation, and this was a circumstance with which she could not fully come to terms: whenever her Italian landlord had the effrontery to ask for rent on the first day of the month, she would reach into her wardrobe for her papa's sword and brandish it in the face of the startled man until the wretched gringo finally learned that he must wait for his rent until somewhat later in the month.

Copyright © 2005 Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Edwin Williamson is the King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish at Oxford University and a fellow of Exeter College. His books include The Penguin History of Latin America.