hora, making of bsas elite, los senillosa

An earlier version of this article was read at the V International Congress of BusinessHistory, São Paulo, Brazil, 2–5 September 2001. For comments on earlier drafts, I wouldlike to thank Ezequiel Gallo, Juan Carlos Garavaglia, Tulio Halperin Donghi, and HildaSabato. This text was translated into English with the help of Kristina Boylan. Theresearch was partly funded by a grant from Fundación Antorchas. I would also like to thankStephanie Bower.

Hispanic American Historical Review 83:3Copyright 2003 by Duke University Press

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos

Aires Economic Elite in the Nineteenth Century:

The Example of the Senillosas

Roy Hora

Using a reconstruction of the history of Felipe Senillosa and his family as apoint of departure, this article examines the nineteenth-century Buenos Airesentrepreneurial elite, with particular reference to the way this group developedand evolved over time. An émigré who fled from the restoration of absolutistrule in Spain after the fall of Napoleon, Senillosa arrived on the shores of theRiver Plate as this area moved toward independence, and in the span of a fewyears he worked his way into the porteño socioeconomic elite. Senillosa wasable to leave his heirs a significant fortune that included not only estancias inthe province of Buenos Aires but also several other economic undertakings.Senillosa’s two sons, Felipe Bonifacio and Pastor, occupied notable positionswithin the late-nineteenth-century Argentine upper class and were esteemedamong the most prestigious rural entrepreneurs of their time. However, theydid not emulate the economic success of their father and as a result began tolose standing among the truly rich. Lacking entrepreneurial talent, the mem-bers of the next generation found it difficult to maintain their social position,and they continued on a downward trajectory. By the 1910s, the Senillosas wereno longer among the wealthiest families in Argentina.

The Senillosas are a particularly noteworthy example of the ascent of animmigrant family to the center of the Argentine economic elite and of theopportunities for social and economic advancement present in the River Plate

after independence. No less important, their story also reveals much about thepressures that forced some members of the late-nineteenth-century upper classto descend from their former lofty positions—a phenomenon that, despite itssignificance, has been largely neglected by historians. Considered as a whole,the Senillosas’ rise and fall turns out to be highly illustrative of the strengthsand weaknesses of the nineteenth-century propertied class and allows us toadvance some hypotheses regarding the characteristics and evolution of thisgroup.

A brief reference to the historiographic debate on the Argentine economicelite may provide a useful introduction to this issue. Traditionally, historianshave argued that the nineteenth-century propertied class was a parasitic, rent-seeking elite that based its economic and social supremacy on control of thefertile pampean land. This negative view of large rural entrepreneurs, whichsocialist and other left-leaning thinkers developed at the beginning of thetwentieth century, gained wide currency after the Great Depression, as theexport sector entered into a long period of decline and the economy lostmomentum. In the last 30 years, however, this interpretation has been calledinto question. Despite the rural sector’s weak performance after the GreatDepression, this portrait of the pre-1930 landed elite as lacking entrepreneur-ial spirit and as an impediment to economic growth precludes a coherentexplanation of the formidable agrarian expansion that stretched from the earlynineteenth century to the 1920s and made Argentina one of the world’s leadingagricultural exporters. This fact explains why most current views on the nine-teenth century rural entrepreneurs emphasize their dynamism, entrepreneurialspirit, and business acumen.1

Jorge F. Sábato’s La clase dominante en la Argentina moderna is perhaps themost powerful indictment of the traditional conception of the Argentine eco-nomic elite to date. Sábato’s work not only questions the supposed backward-

452 HAHR / August / Hora

1. See, among others, Guillermo Flichman, La renta del suelo y el desarrollo agrarioargentino (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1977); Jonathan Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina,1776–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Ezequiel Gallo, La pampagringa: La colonización agrícola en Santa Fe, 1870–1895 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1983);Eduardo J. Míguez, Las tierras de los ingleses en la Argentina, 1870–1914 (Buenos Aires: Ed. de Belgrano, 1980). Reviews of this literature can be found in Eduardo J. Míguez,“Expansión agraria de la pampa húmeda (1850–1914): Tendencias recientes de sus análisishistóricos,” Anuario IHES 1 (1987); and Hilda Sabato, “Estructura productiva e ineficienciadel agro pampeano, 1850–1950: Un siglo de historia en debate,” in La problemática agraria:Nuevas aproximaciones, ed. Marta Bonaudo and Alfredo Pucciarelli, vol. 3 (Buenos Aires:CEAL, 1993).

ness of the major landholders of the pampas but also seeks to reject the verydefinition of the turn-of-the-century economic elite as a landed class. Sábatodid not look into the earlier period, and thus for the most part he accepted thedepiction of the postindependence business elite as a landed class. But heinsisted that between 1880 and World War I large-scale entrepreneurs formedan extremely dynamic business group whose economic interests encompasseda wide range of activities—from agriculture to industry, from commerce tofinance. For Sábato, the sharp fin de siècle Argentine businessmen obtainedsupernormal profits by diversifying their assets into activities that were justopening up or where barriers to entry allowed for the accumulation of profitsabove the normal level. In this light, Sábato suggests, it would be more accurateto describe the large entrepreneurs of the turn of the century as an economi-cally diversified elite rather than as a purely landowning class.2

Sábato’s view lacks sufficient empirical testing. However, his ideas havehad a marked influence on recent Argentine historiography, to the extent thatthey may constitute the most widely accepted point of departure for any analy-sis of the country’s larger entrepreneurs.3 Significantly, Sábato has describedPastor Senillosa, one of the most distinguished members of the family underconsideration here, as a paradigmatic example of a turn-of-the-century busi-nessman who, in order to obtain above-normal profits, diversified his assetsinto various spheres of activity. This article shows that this interpretation requiresrevision. Until the end of his days, Pastor Senillosa held most of his assets inrural enterprises. Although it is true that he also invested in other sectors ofthe economy, it is important to note that this decision was not oriented, as

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite 453

2. Jorge F. Sábato, La clase dominante en la Argentina moderna: Formación y características(Buenos Aires: CISEA/Imago Mundi, 1991). Sábato’s work has merited several specificstudies; see Hilda Sabato, “La cuestión agraria pampeana: Un debate inconcluso,” DesarrolloEconómico 27, no. 106 (1987); Larry Sawers, “Agricultura y estancamiento económico enArgentina: A propósito de las tesis de Jorge F. Sábato,” Ciclos 4, no. 7 (1994); and EduardoSartelli, “El enigma de Proteo,” Ciclos 6, no. 10 (1996).

3. Sábato’s ideas have had a marked influence on Argentine historiography over thepast two decades. Studies such as Hilda Sabato, Capitalismo y ganadería en Buenos Aires: Lafiebre del lanar (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1989); and Jorge Schvarzer, La industria quesupimos conseguir (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1996), develop several of his hypotheses. Amongthe general works that adopt Sábato’s point of view, it is worthwhile to mention Luis A.Romero, Breve historia contemporánea de la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Fondo de CulturaEconómica, 1994), esp. 23; David Rock, Argentina, 1516–1987: Desde la colonización españolahasta Alfonsín (Buenos Aires: Alianza, 1988); and Alain Rouquié, “Hegemonía militar,estado y dominación social,” in Argentina, hoy, ed. Alain Rouquié (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI,1982), esp. 38– 44.

Sábato suggests, toward the prospect of obtaining higher profits; Senillosa’sdiversification of investments can be better understood as an economic strat-egy aimed at creating new sources of income for his numerous heirs, given theinsufficiency of his territorial holdings. Furthermore, it is not the case that theSenillosas were an exception among large Argentine entrepreneurs. Compar-ing the Senillosas with a sample of other large-scale businessmen at differentpoints in the nineteenth century allows us to conclude that the family wasrather typical and that Sábato’s interpretation should be discarded. This doesnot mean, however, that the traditional view of the nineteenth-century eco-nomic elite as a landed class provides full understanding. Recent work on thesubject, and the evidence produced here, suggest that, if anything, economicdiversification was an important economic strategy in the immediate postinde-pendence period, rather than during the later period as Sábato suggests.

Felipe Senillosa:

A Diversified Postindependence Entrepreneur

Felipe Senillosa, the first member of this family to set foot in America, arrivedin the River Plate region more by ill fortune than by design. Senillosa was bornin Valencia in 1790 and, following his father’s lead, took up a military career. Inthe early 1800s, he was sent to the Royal Academy of Alcalá de Henares totrain as a military engineer. In 1808 his studies were interrupted by the Frenchinvasion of the Iberian Peninsula, and Senillosa marched to the front. Shortlyafterward, his unit surrendered to the French army in the siege of Zaragoza. Itdid not take much to convince this deeply republican young officer to put him-self at the service of the French. After completing a new course of studies inmilitary engineering at Nancy, he served Napoleon until the latter was defeatedand captured after the battle of Leipzig in 1814. Senillosa returned to his homecountry, but the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in Spain made things dif-ficult for a former French officer. He soon decided to emigrate to London;there he met Bernardino Rivadavia and Manuel Belgrano, who would invitehim to move to the River Plate.

Senillosa arrived in Buenos Aires in 1815, with little more than the skills he had acquired in the barracks. However, his knowledge of engineering andmathematics were advanced by contemporary River Plate standards. Senillosahad completed his professional training in the engineering corps of the Napo-leonic army, an environment where the prestigious ideas of Enlightenment sci-ence and technology blossomed. An ardent propagandist of these ideas, whichalready had considerable appeal in the Plate, he soon became a respected fig-


ure in Buenos Aires. In fact, Senillosa’s cultural capital and republican feelingsallowed him to rapidly earn a notable place in the porteño society of the revo-lutionary period. He became the first professor of the Cátedra de Matemáticasdel Estado in 1816, director of the Academy of Mathematics the followingyear, and professor of geometry at the newly created University of BuenosAires by 1822. By the end of the 1820s, Senillosa’s intellectual prestige enabledhim to acquire a seat in the Buenos Aires House of Representatives, which heheld through the long dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas. As a fittingexpression of the recognition he enjoyed, he was commissioned during thesedecades to design and build residences (Rosas’s own, in Palermo, is attributedto him), public thoroughfares, churches, and state monuments. Senillosa’s careerat the service of the state is also linked with the early history of the Depart-ment of Topography, an institution of great importance during this period,over which he presided in 1827.4

The foundation of the Department of Topography reveals the growingimportance given to the creation of a more accurate registry of rural propertiesin republican Buenos Aires, which reflects the rising value of pampean landafter independence. During the colonial period, the countryside was not a highpriority for viceregal authorities. Land was cheap and abundant in the pampas,and the state made little or no effort to develop a legal system to enforce prop-erty rights. The low economic value of land can be seen in the traditionalmethod of measuring plots, which consisted in measuring just the length of thefront side of a plot along a stream of water, without much attention to its depth(and therefore to its surface). Before independence, silver production in Potosíand the resultant international and interregional markets were the true motorsof the viceregal economy and the major sources of income for its economicelite—at whose pinnacle stood not landholders, but wholesale merchants.Urban rents and money lending, rather than rural production, provided addi-tional sources of income.5 Demand for rural produce was meager, largelybecause the mercantilist economic system banned trade with foreign partners.This forced rural producers to rely on local markets and constrained the expan-sion of agricultural production, which experienced little change in the century


4. Archivo Senillosa, Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter cited as AS), 2-5-10;Vicente Osvaldo Cútolo, Nuevo diccionario biográfico argentino (1750–1930) (Buenos Aires:Elche, 1985), 4:67–71; Fernando Aliata, “Senillosa, Felipe,” in Diccionario histórico dearquitectura, hábitat y urbanismo en la Argentina, ed. Jorge Liernur (Buenos Aires: Ed.FADU-UBA, 1991), 360–63.

5. Susan Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778–1810 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1978), chap. 3.

before the 1810s. The pampean countryside was populated mainly by small-scale grain and livestock producers (owners, tenants, and squatters), whoseplight the colonial bureaucrats largely ignored. In fact, up until the revolutionof 1810, the viceregal administration’s major concern regarding the pampas wasto guarantee a regular supply of foodstuffs for urban consumption. It made lit-tle or no effort to help develop larger market-oriented rural concerns or toenforce property rights on lands.6

Independence from Spain forced the new government and the economicelite to redefine their relationship with the countryside and rural production.The porteño wholesale merchants who had dominated trade with Upper Perusoon lost control of that territory, since it remained in royalist hands until 1825and then became part of the Republic of Bolivia. The wars of independenceand later civil conflict created further obstacles to inland trade in the region.Nevertheless, despite its negative effects on mining and its related enterprises,independence also opened new entrepreneurial opportunities. The possibilityof free trade oriented the pampean economy toward the Atlantic world, and inparticular toward the export of hides and other livestock by-products. Fromthe mid-1810s, and with even more force from the 1820s onwards, the neweconomic opportunities offered by cattle raising began to draw capital awayfrom the distressed mercantile sector. The local mercantile community facedother pressures, too. The opening of the River Plate to the world market allowedEuropean and U.S. merchants to increase their numbers in the region dramat-ically. These recent arrivals, who were the masters of new marketing tech-niques and had close connections with the dynamic markets of the NorthAtlantic, began to displace local merchants from trade. Hence, local capitalists


6. On the rural history of the Río de la Plata region, see Jonathan Brown, ASocioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1979); Carlos Mayo, Estancia y sociedad en la pampa, 1740–1820 (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 1995);Samuel Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism on the Pampas: The Estancias of Buenos Aires, 1785–1870(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jorge Gelman, Campesinos y estancieros: Unaregión del Río de la Plata a fines de la época colonial (Buenos Aires: Libros del Riel, 1998); JuanCarlos Garavaglia, Pastores y labradores de Buenos Aires: Una historia agraria de la campañabonaerense, 1700–1830 (Tandil: IEHS; Seville: Univ. Pablo de Olavide; Buenos Aires:Ediciones de la Flor, 1999). Reviews of this literature can be found in Juan Carlos Garavagliaand Jorge Gelman, “Rural History of the Río de la Plata: Results of a HistoriographicalRenaissance,” Latin American Research Review 30, no. 3 (1995); and “Mucha tierra y pocagente: Un nuevo balance historiográfico de la historia rural platense (1750–1850),” HistoriaAgraria (Murcia) 15 (1998). Also see Eduardo J. Míguez, “El capitalismo y la polilla: Avancesen los estudios de la economía y la sociedad rural pampeana, 1740–1850,” Boletín delInstituto de Historia Argentina y Americana Dr. Emilio Ravignani 21 (2000).

were given an extra incentive to try their luck at new ventures, most notablyrural production for export.7 As I will discuss in greater detail below, however,the entrepreneurs who turned to rural business did not completely abandonother economic activities.

Thus, although marginal in colonial times, rural production for exportemerged as the economic dynamo of the Plate and began to attract resourcesfrom other sectors of the economy, among which merchant capital was para-mount. The republican state encouraged the expansion of the rural export econ-omy in order to lessen the social and political turmoil that characterized thisperiod of acute international and internal conflict and to create a new source ofrevenue (taxes on international trade) that would compensate for the loss ofrevenues collected on silver and internal trade. Essential to this program werethe expansion of territorial control over Indian lands and the consolidation of a legal order that would guarantee property rights in the countryside. TheDepartment of Topography was an important element in this project, andSenillosa—by then one of its leading figures—played a major role in it. Healso approached this venture with personal motives. Throughout the 1820s,Senillosa commanded several surveying expeditions of the frontier lands southof the Salado River (a region that was being opened up for white settlement) in the service of both the state and private interests. In the winter of 1825, for example, he spent several months on the frontier with a party of 60 men,surveying and measuring a huge tract of land in Los Camarones that theAnchorena brothers had bought; by that time, he had already made goodmoney measuring properties for Piñeiro, Blas Escribano, Pita, Hildalgo,Ramos, Ezeyza, Segismundo, Macedo, and several other capitalists who wereinvesting in estancias.8 A few months later, in the summer of 1825–26, heagain returned to the frontier at the head of one of the most important expedi-tions undertaken by the government during this decade.9


7. The classic study of this process is Tulio Halperin Donghi, “La expansión ganaderaen la campaña de Buenos Aires,” in Los fragmentos del poder, ed. Torcuato Di Tella and TulioHalperin Donghi (Buenos Aires: Jorge Alvarez, 1969). For a discussion of more recentliterature, see Raúl Fradkin, “Tulio Halperin Donghi y la formación de la claseterrateniente porteña,” in Discutir Halperin: Siete ensayos sobre la contribución de Tulio HalperinDonghi a la historia argentina, ed. Roy Hora and Javier Trímboli (Buenos Aires: El Cielopor Asalto, 1997), 71–111.

8. Felipe Senillosa, Viaje de Buenos Aires á Camarones, ms., June–July 1825, AS, 176;Juan José de Anchorena to Juan Manuel de Rosas, 22 Oct. 1825, Archivo del Jockey Club,Donación Carlos Ibarguren (h), red folder.

9. Felipe Senillosa, Diario de la Expedición de reconocimiento de la línea de fronteras, ms.,n.d., AS, 176.

These surveying expeditions made Senillosa one of the few porteños withfirsthand knowledge of the new lands opening up south of Buenos Aires. Hequickly used this knowledge to his own economic advantage. In those years,this immigrant’s fortune was insignificant; for example, when he married Pas-tora Botet in 1819 he possessed a mere three thousand gold pesos, less than 1percent of the estate he would accumulate during the remainder of his life-time.10 It is not surprising, therefore, that he chose to start his career as alandowner by making good use of Buenos Aires’s emphyteutic regime (the sys-tem of leasing public lands at a low cost conceived by Bernardino Rivadavia inthe mid-1820s), which well suited those who wished to develop rural enter-prises but did not possess sufficient capital to buy land or were reluctant tobind assets toward this end. In those years Senillosa rented some 32,000 hec-tares in San Vicente and another 6,000 hectares in Salto.11 During the late1820s he began to buy land, albeit modestly: some 1,350 hectares in Quilmesand, several years later, some 2,000 hectares in the Arroyo Camarón.12

Rosas’s land policy helped Senillosa become a great landowner. In 1836, thegovernment promoted the privatization of public lands leased under emphy-teusis. Conditions were very advantageous for buyers. During the late 1830s,Senillosa (who was a decided promoter of this land policy from his position inthe legislature) acquired some 40,000 hectares: an estate of 32,400 hectarestraversed by the Arroyo Chico in Ayacucho and another estate of 8,100 hec-tares on the southwest bank of the Salado River in Pila, which he called ElVenado. It might be useful to examine briefly the conditions of the purchase of the estancia Arroyo Chico, the most important of these holdings. By 1836, Senillosa already held the property under emphyteusis. Conditions were


10. During the nineteenth century, several different currencies were used as mediumsof exchange. At different periods, pesos corrientes (paper pesos), pesos fuertes (silverpesos), onzas de oro (gold ounces), pesos oro (gold pesos), and pesos papel (paper pesos)were widely used in economic transactions. In this article, all currencies have beenconverted into gold pesos (legal tender since the 1881 monetary law) in order to makecomparisons easier. For currency quotations, see Juan Alvarez, Temas de historia económicaargentina (Buenos Aires: Junta de Historia y Numismática Americana, 1929), 99–100; andHilda Sabato, Capitalismo y ganadería, 254.

11. Jacinto Oddone, La burguesía terrateniente argentina (Buenos Aires: Líbera, 1967),88. On emphyteusis, see María Elena Infesta, “La enfiteusis en Buenos Aires (1820–1850),”in Bonaudo and Pucciarelli, La problemática agraria, 1:93–120.

12. See Andrés M. Carretero, “Contribución al conocimiento de la propiedad rural en la provincia de Buenos Aires para 1830,” Boletín del Instituto de Historia Argentina yAmericana Dr. Emilio Ravignani 22–23 (1970): 290; Oddone, La burguesía terrateniente, 135.

extremely favorable for lessees, who paid a small rent for the use of public land.In a speech in the House of Representatives supporting Governor Rosas’s planto sell roughly 4 million hectares under emphyteusis, Senillosa himself notedthat the state was collecting barely 8,500 gold pesos annually for lands thatwere assessed at 0.7 million gold pesos or more.13 It has been estimated thatthis last figure represented less than 6 gold pesos per square league per year—a sum equivalent to the value of one and a half cows per year for the right toexploit 2,700 hectares, an extension that could easily support a thousand cat-tle.14 The conditions for the sale of the lands laid out in the 1836 law were certainly no less favorable than those for renting them. Thus it should notcome as a surprise that once the 1836 law was put into effect, Senillosa movedto buy. For the 32,400 hectares in Arroyo Chico, Senillosa paid a total ofaround 6,800 gold pesos in three installments.15 Furthermore, the paymentwas made not in cash, but in livestock; even though the evidence on this trans-action is scarce, Senillosa must have paid for the land with some 1,600–2,000head of cattle, a figure that represented probably less than 20 percent of thecattle that the property could support.16 It is no wonder Senillosa himselfargued that the price at which the government was selling land was indeedquite “moderate.”17

Not only was Arroyo Chico acquired at little expense; like El Venado,Senillosa’s other large estancia, it was among the best in the region. Both prop-erties were located on important waterways and possessed abundant reserves ofwater as well as some higher ground. The lowlands were particularly apt forthe primitive cattle-grazing technology characteristic of the era (before wirefences, water pumps, and drainage canals began to transform rural enterprisesin the 1870s and 1880s). In the fenceless pampa, streams and lagoons were


13. Honorable Junta de Representantes de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Diario de Sesiones, 7May 1836 (session 527). See also María Elena Infesta, “El negocio con la tierra pública: Lasventas en Buenos Aires entre 1836 y 1840” (paper delivered at the XVI Jornadas deHistoria Económica, Quilmes, Argentina, Sept. 1998).

14. Juan Carlos Garavaglia, “La propiedad de la tierra en la región pampeanabonerense: Algunos aspectos de su evolución histórica (1750–1863)” (paper delivered atthe XVII Jornadas de Historia Económica, Tucumán, Argentina, Sept. 2000), 12.

15. Sucesión (probate records of) Pastor Senillosa, Archivo de la Justicia Federal(hereafter AJF), leg. 13,907.

16. Garavaglia, “La propiedad de la tierra.”17. Honorable Junta de Representantes de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Diario de Sesiones,

10 May 1836 (session 528), 7.

important not only for watering the animals but also in preventing cattle fromroaming past the estancias’ boundaries, thus making management easier. Seni-llosa became aware of the quality of the lands near El Venado thanks to theexpeditions he had undertaken to the frontier region in the mid-1820s. Thediary he wrote during the winter 1825 expedition indicates this clearly. In the June 7 entry, which refers to the crossing of the Salado along the Venadopass, he writes, “[T]he lands immediately surrounding the Salado are hills withgood pastures.”18

Shortage of capital meant that Senillosa’s rural concerns grew slowly dur-ing their early stage of development. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, he reg-ularly bought small herds of cattle (one or two hundred head every few months)from the Anchorenas and other neighboring estancieros in order to enlarge hisbreeding stock.19 By the late 1830s, his estates seem to have achieved a moremature form. However, abundance of land in relation to capital still shaped hisbusiness practice for decades. By 1842, at a time when sheep breeding in thepampas was in its infancy, he already had Irish and creole sharecroppers raisingsheep.20 Also, the overseer of El Venado was employed to manage productionthere, but he also raised his own livestock on parts of the property and dividedthe earnings with his boss.21

A dynamic but largely absentee landowner, Senillosa paid close attentionto other commercial, financial, and real estate ventures. Unfortunately, whatremains of Senillosa’s trade-related correspondence, scarce before the early1840s, does not tell us much about his situation before that date. From thatpoint onward, however, it clearly indicates that he invested simultaneously indiverse areas. By the 1840s, Senillosa possessed a mercantile house that importedwine, cigars, and several other Mediterranean products. In addition, at El Ven-ado he owned a ferry that took passengers and cargo across the Salado. He alsoran two pulperías located on his estates that not only marketed dry goods butalso collected local produce (hides, wool, furs, and so on) for sale in BuenosAires or for export to places such as Brazil, London, Cuba, and the Mediter-ranean.22 The fact that Senillosa actively traded with ports in Spain and her


18. Senillosa, Viaje de Buenos Aires á Camarones, 7 June 1825.19. D. Morete to Felipe Senillosa, 18 May 1826; Manuel Morillo to Juan José de

Anchorena, 20 Oct. 1830, 20 Nov. 1830, 4 Feb. 1831, in Archivo Anchorena, ArchivoGeneral de la Nación (hereafter AGN), 334.

20. AS, 2-5-10.21. Contract between Senillosa and Enrique Gubba, 1 Dec. 1857, AS, 162. 22. M. Churchill to Felipe Senillosa, 8 Mar. 1854, AS, 2-5-10. Felipe Senillosa to

Pedro Bernal, 14 June 1853, AS, 2-5-10.

Caribbean colonies suggests that the relations he had left behind in his countryof birth helped him gain trade partners. Most probably, these links were rein-forced as a result of Senillosa’s marriage with Pastora Botet, the daughter of aBarcelona-born porteño merchant who had been engaged in commerce withthe Iberian Peninsula since the late colonial era. Although Pastora brought a meager dowry to the marriage (some one thousand gold pesos), she gave her new husband something more important: a network of international mer-cantile relationships. These relationships were of great importance in an age when long-distance trade success to a large extent depended upon links withimportant and reliable partners.23 In 1845, Senillosa also entered into a part-nership in a salting house. As the years passed and the scale of the operations ofthe saladero El Reloj grew, Senillosa bought out his original partner, AdolfoMansilla.24 Finally, he also engaged in money lending and discounting bills ofexchange.25

Senillosa always remained attentive to new business opportunities. In anunstable economic environment such as postindependence River Plate, theline between aggressive business practice and mere speculation was a fine one.This became especially apparent when civil or international conflict disruptedtrade. In the latter part of the 1840s, for example, an Anglo-French fleet block-aded the port of Buenos Aires for several years, forcing entrepreneurs to divertpart of their resources away from rural production in order to continue inbusiness. In November 1845, Senillosa wrote to a correspondent in Monte-video that “from this day forward the blockade is in effect and there is little wecan do . . . regarding business[;] the only thing that I believe holds promise isthe purchase of frutos del país, the price of which I believe will drop significantlythis summer.”26 Several months later, Senillosa remarked that the port’s closureoffered business opportunities for speculators who had the resources to buyrural products and could afford to wait for prices to rise again: “[I]t will be a worthwhile speculation to buy dry hides and keep them until the blockade isended.”27 During those years, Senillosa seems to have invested in urban con-struction and considered the possibility of erecting a textile factory to processwool from the pampas.28


23. Socolow, The Merchants, chap. 2.24. Halperin Donghi, “La expansión ganadera,” 34. Sucesión Felipe Senillosa

(hereafter SFS), AGN, 33–34.25. Senillosa to Jaime Mayol, 25 Nov. 1847, AS, 162. 26. Senillosa to Juan Negrón, 1 Nov. 1845, AS, 162. 27. Senillosa to Juan Negrón, 29 Dec. 1845, AS, 162. 28. Senillosa to Juan Negrón, 5 Jan. 1845 and 18 Aug. 1846, AS, 162.

In sum, simply describing Felipe Senillosa as a landowner is insufficient.Even though rural production was crucial to the first stages of his rise to eco-nomic success, it was only one part of a larger urban-based mercantile busi-ness. In fact, in 1850 this holder of more than 40,000 hectares of grazing landreminded one of his foreign correspondents that “my principal occupationtoday is transatlantic trade.”29 A quick look at his estate at the time of his deathin 1858 indicates a basis for this self-perception. Senillosa left his wife and fourchildren roughly 450,000 gold pesos. This sum, representing around 6 percentof Argentina’s total fiscal revenue in 1864, was comparable with the estates ofother large entrepreneurs of his time.30 For example, when Saturnino Unzuédied in 1853, he left an estate of around 350,000 gold pesos, and EustoquioDíaz Vélez passed on to his heirs a similar sum in 1854.31 How was Senillosa’smoney invested? Although the weight of his landholdings is noteworthy, Seni-llosa was (like Unzué) not just a landowner, but a diversified entrepreneur. Hisrural enterprises represented 48 percent of the total value of his possessions.He also owned some small chacras in Quilmes valued at 1.5 percent of hisestate; two urban properties and a suburban quinta in Barracas were valued at12.8 percent of his estate. The mercantile house was appraised at 9.3 percentand the saladero at 7.4 percent, respectively, of his holdings. The pulperías,taken separately from the mercantile house, were valued at 3 percent of hisestate. Finally, the heirs to Felipe Senillosa’s fortune received gold and silvercoins equivalent to 16 percent of the total estate.32

How exceptional was this pattern of investment among the porteño upperclass? A recent work offers a reliable overview of the patterns of wealth accu-mulation during the 1820–53 period that allows us to place Senillosa in per-spective. Juan Carlos Garavaglia undertook a study of large-scale rural entre-preneurs, who owned on average more than 29,000 hectares; he concludedthat, for the entire group under consideration, investment in rural venturesbarely reached 42 percent of their total wealth. Investment in urban and mer-cantile concerns accounted for a larger share of these estates: urban property30.3 percent, cash holdings 10 percent, active credits 5 percent, and chacras andquintas 3.5 percent.33 Even taking into account the peculiarities of each indi-


29. Felipe Senillosa to Angel Calderón de la Barca, 2 June 1850, AS, 2-5-10.30. Roberto Cortés Conde, Dinero, deuda y crisis: Evolución fiscal y monetaria en la

Argentina, 1862–1890 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1989), app. I.31. Sabato, Capitalismo y ganadería, 171; Sucesión Eustoquio Díaz Vélez, AGN. 32. SFS, AGN.33. Garavaglia, “Patrones de inversión,” 128.

vidual case, these figures show that Senillosa’s pattern of investment was typicalof the business practices of the large rural entrepreneurs of the first half of thenineteenth century.

It is important to explain why this pattern of investment became dominantamong large rural entrepreneurs in the half century following the breakupwith Spain in 1810. A recent work suggests that the diversification of invest-ments was a strategy to cope with monetary instability.34 However, problemssuch as currency depreciation and exchange rate volatility were just one aspect(and perhaps not the most important) of the political and economic instabilitythat the River Plate provinces experienced at that time. More than half a cen-tury of blockades, international warfare, civil conflict, and political turmoilshaped business practice in a profound and enduring way. For example, thefour blockades of the port of Buenos Aires during that period interruptedinternational trade for long periods of time and encouraged entrepreneurs toshift to either speculation or internal activities to avoid bankruptcy or heavylosses.35 The River Plate provinces also witnessed long and costly internationalwars and violent civil conflicts (which entailed, as in 1839, massive land expro-priations). The absence of a stable political order created a climate of eco-nomic uncertainty in which stabilizing economic institutions failed to emerge.Thus, capitalists were forced to develop their businesses in an economic envi-ronment far more turbulent and uncertain than that of the last period of colo-nial rule, which itself was disturbed by social upheavals in Upper Peru in the1780s and almost permanent war from 1779 to 1810, first with Great Britainand then with Napoleonic France.36

In such a volatile environment, capitalists had to make profits while at thesame time protecting themselves against economic and political uncertainty. Inrural business, this instability meant that profitability was never assured in theshort run. Apart from the vagaries of nature (very important, given the back-ward technology of the time), profits depended upon political and market fac-tors beyond the producer’s control. The same applies to other ventures, such


34. María Alejandra Irigoin, “Inconvertible Paper Money, Inflation, and EconomicPerformance in Early-Nineteenth-Century Argentina,” Journal of Latin American Studies 32,no. 2 (2000): 342–59.

35. For some examples of the effects of the 1826–28 blockade on rural entrepreneurs,see Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, 192, 206.

36. Halperin Donghi, Revolución y guerra; Ruprecht Poensgen, “The Challenge to anArgentine Merchant House in the Late 18th Century,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staad,Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 33 (1996): 187–222; Socolow, The Merchants, chap. 3.

as commerce, which were also subject to unstable market and political forces.Diversification of assets strove to resolve this dilemma by spreading risks acrossdifferent sectors in order to compensate for sharp, unpredictable fluctuationsin supply and demand. For most entrepreneurs of newly independent Argen-tina, long-term success depended, to a certain extent, on the variety of theirinvestments. This is why rural production (though far more dynamic thanother ventures) did not displace, but rather complemented, diverse undertak-ings such as import and export trade, local trade, mercantile and financialactivities, and the rental of urban property.

Adaptation to the changing business climate of independent Argentinahelps explain Senillosa’s success. However, it is not easy to give a preciseaccount of the crucial steps that allowed him to amass his fortune. This ispartly because Senillosa’s private papers and other available historical sourcesdo not allow us to compare and weigh various relevant factors—such as accessto scarce information, entrepreneurial talent, social contacts, or even merechance—in this businessman’s rise to fortune. The peculiar historical contextof this ascent, however, can be reconstructed in broad brush strokes. If there isone key element in Senillosa’s success, it was his ability to take advantage of thesudden transformations in the River Plate economy in the decades following1810, particularly the crisis in the mining economy and the subsequent shifttoward agricultural production for export. During the era of traditional tech-nology that prevailed until after the middle of the century, livestock raising inthe open pampas was characterized by high (but fluctuating) profits and, aboveall, modest initial investments of capital.37 The low cost of frontier land andthe low levels of rural technology opened a field of opportunity for individualswho, like Senillosa, possessed more ambition and talent than capital.38 AlthoughSenillosa was a new arrival in Buenos Aires society, his intimate knowledge ofthe territory south of the Salado represented a resource that few of his peerscould match. As a consequence, he knew well where to petition the state for


37. Halperin Donghi, “La expansión ganadera,” 28; Brown, A Socioeconomic History,154–55; Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, 211–29.

38. Recent estimates suggest that, after remaining nearly static in the colonial period,land prices began to rise from 1815 onward and peaked in 1828, only to fall againafterward—partly as a result of the war with Brazil, followed by several years of droughtand bad weather. The values reached in 1828 were not exceeded again until the latter part of the 1840s, when they experienced a sharp increase that, with some fluctuations,accelerated throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. See Juan CarlosGaravaglia, “La economía rural de la campaña de Buenos Aires vista a través de sus precios(1754–1852),” mimeo., n.d.

lands in emphyteusis and where to buy public or private lands. Due to thisunique convergence—a firsthand knowledge of the mechanisms for acquiringhigh quality lands at a very low price and a context that allowed for the erec-tion of a rural enterprise with minimal initial investment and expertise in thebusiness—Senillosa was able to expand his rural operations while at the sametime reducing his dependence on rural sources of income by channeling prof-its into other sectors of the economy.

Felipe Senillosa arrived in Buenos Aires at the beginning of the conquestof the new rural territories where the greatest fortunes of the nineteenth cen-tury would be amassed. In this initial stage of agrarian growth and frontierexpansion, the increase in real estate values was so moderate that the land itselfrepresented a small portion of the initial capital required to establish an estancia.It has been estimated that as late as the 1845–54 decade, land still representedless than 20 percent of the capital necessary to establish a large sheep-raisingestancia, while livestock represented almost 75 percent of the total cost.39 Thisunique context helps us to understand how it was possible for men like Seni-llosa to amass what later became large landed fortunes. The era of inexpensivelands, however, would not last long. As the Senillosa probate record indicates,by the beginning of the 1860s the value of the land in his rural holdings hadsubstantially increased and equaled his investments in livestock. The increas-ing value of land indicates that a new stage in the history of agrarian capitalismon the pampas was beginning; this new state of affairs is reflected in the for-tunes of the next generation of Senillosas.

Felipe B. and Pastor Senillosa:

Late-Nineteenth-Century Rural Entrepreneurs

Felipe Senillosa left four children: two sons and two daughters. The daughters,Elvira and Carolina, married into other wealthy families, taking with themtheir share of their inheritance. As a result of their incorporation into otherelite families, their history cannot be followed in the sources of the familyarchive. It was left to Felipe Bonifacio and Pastor, Senillosa’s two sons, to man-age the remainder of the estate after their father’s death. These brothers devel-oped their business careers in an economic and political climate very differentfrom that in which their father had lived. In the last third of the nineteenthcentury, the rural economy acquired a new dynamism due to the expansion ofa more complex ranching business, stimulated first by sheep and later by grain


39. Sabato, Capitalismo y ganadería, 151.

and cattle. Rural technology, which had remained almost static since colonialtimes, began to change at an accelerating pace after midcentury. Larger capitalinvestments and expert management were required in order to make a ruralenterprise more profitable.40 The rise in land prices underlay this process. Atthe same time, the slow, laborious consolidation of the political order after dic-tator Rosas’s fall in 1852 created a more favorable atmosphere for long-terminvestment in the rural sector.

This environment gave rise to more-specialized entrepreneurs.41 The his-tory of the second generation of Senillosas exemplifies this change. For thefounder of this family, rural production was just one part of a diversified busi-ness. His sons’ entrepreneurial strategy was clearly based on other principles,and they are typical of the powerful group of specialized landholders thatemerged in the final third of the nineteenth century. The Senillosa brothers—founders and active members of the Argentine Rural Society, the forward-looking landowners’ association (Felipe B. became vice president and Pastorsecretary toward the end of the 1870s), and regular contributors to its mouth-piece, the Anales de la Sociedad Rural Argentina—well illustrate shifting percep-tions regarding rural modernization, which in the 1870s and 1880s began toappeal to Argentina’s socioeconomic elite. At the same time, they offer twosuggestive examples of the reasons entrepreneurs shifted their attention andassets more fully toward rural production.

The Senillosa brothers’ calls for agricultural modernization, repeatedlymade in Anales and other organs of the agricultural press, were based upontheir own experience as rural entrepreneurs.42 Pastor and Felipe B. took overthe family businesses at a very young age, only 16 and 20 years of age, respec-tively, when their father died in 1858. Unlike their father, an absentee land-owner who almost never went to his rural holdings, the young Senillosas vis-ited their estancias regularly and spent much time there providing direct anddetailed management. Felipe B. and Pastor also began to invest heavily inimprovements, mostly in fences, storage sheds, drainage works, trees, and pedi-greed animals.43 The settlement of Felipe Senillosa’s estate, undertaken between


40. Ibid., 165–68.41. On this theme, see Hora, The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas: A Social and

Political History, 1860–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. 8–14 and 56–68.42. See Hora, “La elite social argentina del siglo XIX: Algunas reflexiones a partir de

la historia de la familia Senillosa,” Anuario IEHS 17 (2002). 43. “El Venado, del Sr. Felipe Senillosa,” El Campo y el Sport, 18 Mar. 1893, 693–94;

“San Felipe, del Señor Pastor Senillosa,” El Campo y el Sport, 18 Apr. 1893, 808–9.“Establecimiento ‘San Felipe,’” 571–73.

1858 and 1863, gives us an early indication of these changes. Until 1858, theLa Fortuna estate (which was part of El Venado) was almost entirely treeless.But in the 1862 inventory one finds 3,282 peach trees and 456 poplars, all fouryears old. These trees were valued at six hundred gold pesos, which repre-sented one-quarter of the value of all improvements to that establishment. InArroyo Chico, 1,200 acacias and peach trees were planted as well during thoseyears.44

Trees were intended to provide shade, shelter, and wood for pens andfences, all of which increased the carrying capacity of the land, while also facil-itating stock management and improving its quality. In fact, the Senillosabrothers were among the first estancieros in the River Plate region to pay closeattention to stock improvements. In 1859 they bought some purebreds andlaid the foundations of a sheep stud farm that began to produce high qualityanimals for the family enterprise. This practice was not widespread, evenamong large-scale landholders, and required a considerable investment. It isnot possible to establish the precise value of their high quality animals in thoseyears, but by 1862 the stud animals of El Venado were appraised at 2,900 goldpesos. This figure was slightly less than the total value of all the improvements(buildings, fences, pens, and so on) of this property, assessed at 3,500 goldpesos.45

Felipe B. and Pastor poured money into their rural enterprise, despitetheir mother’s growing opposition. During the economic crisis of the mid-1860s, the sheep economy suffered as a result of sharply falling wool prices. Atthe same time, revalorization of the paper peso decreased the profitability ofthe export trade. This drop in the earnings from their rural enterprises affectedthe family finances and caused Senillosa’s widow to question the wisdom ofcontinued investment in rural ventures at the expense of other types of invest-ments. In a letter to Juan Negrón at the end of 1865, Pastora Botet painted apessimistic vista of the state of their business: “You know that at this time weare suffering a horrible drought, and so many [of the animals] have sickened,that it has been necessary to borrow money at interest, and the expenditures ofthe estates are so immense, that at this moment I am still indebted.”46 InAugust 1866 she again emphasized their hardships, remarking that “the estates


44. SFS, AGN, 12 and 30.45. SFS, AGN, 9. Regarding the breeding stations, see Estanislao Zeballos, A través de

las cabañas (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1888), 74, 91–100; and Herbert Gibson, The History andPresent State of the Sheep-Breeding Industry in the Argentine Republic (Buenos Aires:Ravenscroft and Mills, 1893), 33–36.

46. Pastora B. de Senillosa to Juan Negrón, 21 Dec. 1865, AS, 2-5-10.

are in very poor condition, we find ourselves with only half the value they hadbefore” and lamenting not having done “what I was advised . . . to sell the ruralestate and put the money in urban properties.”47

Pastora Botet’s words reflect the economic outlook of the entrepreneursof the first half of the century; her husband, had he still been alive, most prob-ably would have shared her views. For businessmen of the postindependenceperiod, who developed their undertakings in a climate of profound uncertainty,diversification of assets and diffusion of risks always assumed primacy over spe-cialization in one activity. Although true stability was achieved only in the1880s, the process of state consolidation and the steady expansion of agrariancapitalism in the pampas began to create powerful incentives for long-termrural investments by the 1860s. Indicators of accelerating development in thesheep economy became more widespread, and several entrepreneurs began toact accordingly, including Pastora’s sons. In so doing, the young Senillosassought to change the course of the family businesses. Instead of following theirfather’s cautious economic strategy, the young Senillosas placed their betsdefinitively on the expansion of the rural economy and invested accordingly.They not only kept their estancias but rode out the crisis of the 1860s by deep-ening their investments in their estates. During the crisis, many cash-strappedproperty owners sold their best breeding animals. Felipe B. and Pastor tookadvantage of these circumstances and bought large quantities of high qualitysheep at little cost.48 To compensate for the drop in the price of their products,they also established a tallow factory to dispose of lower quality animals. Thefinancial support they enjoyed surely helped them weather the difficult times.In a period when there were no institutional sources of credit, their economicleverage and social position must have given them better access to money thanless powerful rural entrepreneurs.49

Thus finding a way not only to survive the crisis but also to improve thequality of their stock, the Senillosas’ wools and breeding stock were soon to beregarded as among the best in the River Plate region.50 In 1879 the breedingstud they had established in El Venado, which had previously only produced


47. Pastora B. de Senillosa to Juan Negrón, 22 Aug. 1866, AS, 2-5-10. 48. Felipe Senillosa, “La cría del merino y el cultivo de la lana,” Anales de la Sociedad

Rural Argentina 19, no. 14 (1885): 314–18.49. On banking and credit at this time, see (among others) Sabato, Capitalismo y

ganadería, 252–85; Charles Jones, British Financial Institutions in Argentina, 1860–1914(Ph.D. diss., Cambridge Univ., 1983); and Norberto Piñero, La moneda, el crédito y los bancosen la Argentina (Buenos Aires: J. Menéndez, 1921).

50. Gibson, The History; Zeballos, A través de las cabañas.

improved animals for the family enterprise, began to market its products withconsiderable success.51 In 1885 Felipe B. boasted that their wool had been top-ping the market for a decade.52

In the 1880s, following the death of Pastora Botet, the Senillosa brothersdivided the family business. Felipe B. kept the lands on the Salado and alsoheld a quarter of the large Ayacucho estate, as did his two sisters and his brother.Throughout the years, he continued to make significant investments in hislands, where, in addition, he built a large country house.53 A renowned estan-ciero, in 1889 we find him purchasing pedigreed animals at the InternationalExhibition in Paris and receiving prizes for his own products.54 By the mid-1890s, after more than 30 years at the head of his rural ventures, Felipe B.named Pedro Pagés (one of the first agronomists graduated in Argentina andpresident of the Argentine Rural Society in the 1920s) to manage his estate andincreasingly distanced himself from the day-to-day management. By that timehe was alternating time spent in Buenos Aires and on his estancia with pro-longed travels in Europe, where he died in 1906.55

Felipe B. offers an example of a character typical of fin de siècle Argentina:the estanciero who, having made a large fortune, lived a life of ease or dedi-cated himself to the pursuit of other public or private goals. Considering thefact that Felipe B. developed his business career in a context that created pow-erful stimuli for long-term investment in the rural economy, it should notcome as a surprise to find that at the time of his death the structure of his estatewas quite different from that of his father. The information provided in hisprobate record indicates that 95 percent of Felipe B.’s wealth, which exceeded2 million gold pesos at the time of his death, was invested in rural enterprises.Felipe B. willed an illegitimate daughter, who had entered into marriage with aFrench baron, his eight thousand hectares in Ayacucho. Although not esti-mated in the probate record, Sofía Senillosa’s inheritance must have beenworth over 0.7 million gold pesos. His only legitimate child, Pastora, inheritedthe rest of his fortune, assessed at almost 1.3 million gold pesos. El Venadoestancia was sold after his death for 1.2 million gold pesos.56 Apart from his


51. Zeballos, A través de las cabañas, 74, 91–100.52. Felipe Senillosa, “La cría,” 316.53. Sucesión Felipe B. Senillosa, AJF, 291, 844– 47.54. Gibson, The History, 195; “Señor Felipe Senillosa,” 169; Carlos Lix Klett, Estudios,

2:1185. 55. A short biography of Felipe Senillosa, with a summary of his writing, can be

found in the Boletín de la Liga Agraria 10, nos. 9–12 (1906): 159–61.56. Details of the sale of El Venado can be found in La Nación, 8 May 1907, 11.

rural holdings, Senillosa possessed only one other sizable property, a residencein Buenos Aires valued at 44,000 gold pesos, or 2.5 percent of his wealth. Insummary, unlike his father, Felipe B. had concentrated his assets in rural pro-duction, withdrawing from other economic activities. And just as the type ofbusinessman we have analyzed in the case of the senior Senillosa was typical ofthe first half of the nineteenth century, so too was Felipe B. typical for thedecades at the end of the century.

My examination elsewhere of a significant sample of the largest fortunesin Argentina at the turn of the century confirms this statement. Here I willsummarize briefly the most important findings of this study, which analyzedthe estates of 26 large-scale rural entrepreneurs who owned at least ten thou-sand hectares of pampean land and who died between 1880 and the end of theFirst World War. This sample includes several of the most successful land-owners of Argentina’s Gilded Age, including Juan and Nicolás Anchorena,Leonardo Pereyra, Tomás Duggan, Diego de Alvear, Pedro Luro, and RamónSantamarina. This analysis shows convincingly that rural property constitutedthe foundation upon which all these fortunes, without exception, were built.Although the weight of investment in urban property tended to be heavieramong older wealth, the structure of these fortunes is, in general, quite similar.For the entire group, investment in rural estates represented 76 percent of theirtotal wealth at the time of their deaths, while investment in urban and subur-ban properties accounted for 16 percent. Investment in liquid assets (credits,bank deposits, stock shares, government bonds, and so on) and commercial andfinancial ventures was marginal, barely reaching 6 percent of their estates.57

The turn-of-the-century large entrepreneurs’ growing specialization inrural activity contrasts markedly with the business strategies dominant half acentury earlier. Why did this shift in investment patterns take place? As wehave already noted, in the decades that followed Rosas’s fall in 1852, state con-solidation generated more propitious conditions for long-term rural invest-ment. In this period, transformations in rural technology and the ever moreexacting demands of the world market also necessitated increased invest-ment.58 Also, the consolidation of a more complex and efficient banking andfinancial system in the last quarter of the century gave Argentina the mostadvanced capital market in Latin America, surpassing even those of Brazil or


57. See my “Landowning Bourgeoisie or Business Bourgeoisie? On the Peculiaritiesof the Argentine Economic Elite, 1880–1945,” Journal of Latin American Studies 34, no. 3(2002).

58. See my Landowners of the Argentine Pampas, 10–14, 45–56.

Mexico.59 This last development curtailed money lending as a lucrative ven-ture, eliminating what had been a major source of income for merchants andcapitalists since colonial times. In addition, during the latter part of the nine-teenth century the railway transformed the transport system, closing anotherfield of activity in which large businessmen had participated in the past. Finally,changes in trade networks affected both the Argentine and foreign-ownedmercantile houses that had served the import-export trade since independence.The growing sophistication of local and international markets and the formi-dable increase in export trade created conditions for the emergence of a fewpowerful (and largely foreign-owned) firms, which came to dominate thefinancing, transport, and marketing of livestock and agricultural exports andthe import of foreign manufactures.60

All these developments forced landowners to concentrate in rural pro-duction. Only a very few large-scale landowners succeeded in maintaining adiminished presence in commerce and finance. However, it is likely that dwin-dling business opportunities in these areas did not create great anxiety amongmost native entrepreneurs. The high profits generated by rural ventures andthe greater efficiency of transport, commerce, and financial services surely pro-vided incentives for most businessmen with rural interests to concentrate theircapital there. In the last third of the nineteenth century, large landowners trav-eled a path that led from diversification to specialization. By the 1880s, Argen-tina possessed a group of large-scale rural capitalists who were both more spe-cialized and wealthier than their peers had been at any point in the past.


59. Carlos Marichal, “Modelos y sistemas bancarios en América Latina en el sigloXIX (1850–1880)”; and Andrés M. Regalsky, “La evolución de la banca privada nacional enArgentina (1880–1914): Una introducción a su estudio,” in La formación de los bancos centralesen España y América Latina (siglos XIX y XX), vol. 1, ed. Pedro Tedde and Carlos Marichal(Madrid: Banco de España, Servicio de Estudios, 1995). See also Andrés M. Regalsky,“Banca y capitalismo en la Argentina, 1850–1930: Un ensayo crítico,” Ciclos 9, no. 18(1999): 33–54.

60. Carlos Marichal, “La gran burguesía comercial y financiera de Buenos Aires,1860–1914: Anatomía de cinco grupos” (paper presented at the XVI Jornadas de HistoriaEconómica, Quilmes, Argentina, 1998). As a result of these changes, in the late nineteenthcentury foreign-owned import-export houses, which had been active since the 1810s, werefailing or moving into other forms of business. British firms, for example, were moving“into estancia management or land ownership. Others remained in distribution, but movedout of importing and exporting to handle the products of local industries. Those housesremaining in import-export under local ownership and management became subsidiaries oragents of particular British companies.” See Vera Blinn Reber, “British Mercantile Housesin Buenos Aires, 1810–1880” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1972), 277.

Concentrating his assets in rural production allowed Felipe B. Senillosa tolive an easy life while enlarging his inherited fortune. However, he did notmatch the economic successes of his father, and certainly at his death he didnot rank among the richest men of his time. This can be seen in a comparisonof Senillosa’s estate (around 2 million gold pesos) with that of the largest land-owners of the turn of the century. Mariano Unzué, for example, one of the wealth-iest men in turn-of-the-century Argentina, possessed a spectacular fortune, farlarger than that of Ernesto Tornquist, the leading Argentine financier of thetime, and comparable to some of the leading estates of the British landowningelite.61 Unzué had received an inheritance similar to that of Senillosa (some125,000 gold pesos) but had multiplied that fortune more than one-hundred-fold during his lifetime to amass more than 15 million gold pesos (equivalent tonearly £3 million, or $15 million) upon his death. Like those of other largeproprietors of his time, Unzué’s estate was composed mainly (79 percent) ofrural lands (248,000 hectares), most of which he himself had bought over thecourse of his life. This great estanciero owned houses and mansions amountingto 8.8 percent of his wealth and liquid assets (mostly bank deposits) worth 7.3percent of his fortune.62

Like Senillosa, then, Unzué abandoned the mercantile ventures that hadmade his father’s fortune in the first half of the century and invested the bulk ofhis resources in land. There is an element that makes these two histories quitedifferent, however—an element of foremost importance in explaining the dif-ference in the size of their estates. Senillosa, who was counted among the mostdistinguished modernizing landowners of his time, invested his resources, fun-damentally, in improvements but did little to enlarge his territorial holdings.In fact, he passed to his heirs “just” the 16,000 hectares he received from hisparents. This decision was not the most propitious for long-term economicsuccess. For as the history of Mariano Unzué (or any of the other leading ruralproprietors of the time) shows, the business strategy that led to the pinnacle ofthe economic elite was not being the most modern and efficient landownerbut, over and above all else, being the biggest. In the pampas, size was moreimportant than efficiency.

Felipe B. Senillosa died in Barcelona in 1906. The fact that he left behind


61. For example, it was larger than those of the marquess of Bute, the duke ofNorthumberland, or the duke of Sutherland, all of whom ranked high among thewealthiest landowners in Europe. W. D. Rubinstein, “British Millionaires, 1809–1949,”Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 47 (1974): 206–23.

62. See Hora, “Landed Bourgeoisie or Business Bourgeoisie?” 604–5.

only two daughters, each of whom had married men in comfortable economicpositions, most likely contributed to his disassociation from the administrationof his fortune. In his later years, then, Felipe B. became more of a rentier thanan entrepreneur. As we shall see, the history of his brother, Pastor, was quitedifferent. Pastor’s sizable family of 11 children inevitably forced him to facelife, in particular in his latter days, in a manner that contrasted markedly withthe serenity in which the landlord of El Venado spent his last years.

When the family holdings were divided after Pastora Botet’s death, Pastortook the mercantile house erected by his father half a century earlier. Duringthe 1880s, this house abandoned the export trade and concentrated on theimport of Spanish and Cuban products (cigars, among other things).63 In addi-tion, Pastor owned several rural properties, the most significant of which wasthe 8,340-hectare estate in Arroyo Chico he had inherited. There he organizedSan Felipe, primarily a sheep operation, where he also engaged in some cattleand horse ranching. San Felipe’s products were well renowned, to the pointthat in 1895 they obtained the highest prices paid in Buenos Aires for finewool. Pastor Senillosa’s purebred horses were also highly acclaimed.64 Theagricultural journal La Agricultura affirmed in 1895 that, due to this kind ofprecedent, “the San Felipe establishment has achieved the fame that it merits,and . . . it can justifiably be cited as a model.”65

However, recognition and entrepreneurial success are not always synony-mous. Despite major currency depreciation, the first half of the 1890s was adifficult period for agricultural exporters due to economic and climatic prob-lems. Some large landholders went bankrupt, and many others, including Pas-tor Senillosa, faced serious problems.66 The price of wool fell by half between1889 and 1893, while the price of wheat also plummeted. To further compli-cate things, the most severe drought in 30 years devastated the Buenos Airescountryside in 1893 and 1894.67 Finally, the Baring Crisis of 1890 contractedcredit and precipitated a decade-long commercial depression. Pastor’s difficul-ties became more acute when his mercantile house collapsed, most probablydue to the contraction of the domestic market following the Baring Crisis.Family correspondence suggests that Senillosa liquidated his merchandise at


63. See the house’s advertisements published in periodicals such as the Periódico delEstanciero and the Anales de la Sociedad Rural Argentina.

64. “Establecimiento ‘San Felipe,’” 572. La Agricultura, 453, 3 Oct. 1901, 743.65. “Establecimiento ‘San Felipe,’” 573.66. Gallo, La pampa gringa, 183–85; Gibson, The History, 96. 67. Noel H. Sbarra, Historia del alambrado en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Eudeba,

1964), 29–31.

great loss and from then on moved away from mercantile activities. At the endof 1894, Pastor’s wife painted a sad picture of their economic situation to herbrother. That year, the sale of livestock had been especially poor, probablybecause the drought pushed ranchers to sell off their animals, driving pricesdown.68 In 1896 Pastor’s finances were still shaky and his outlook pessimistic:“[E]verything I touch turns into shit,” he told one of his sons.69

By the end of the decade, Pastor’s situation had improved, primarilybecause of the general upswing in agricultural and livestock prices. Althoughhe still held debts that would follow him to his grave, the two long trips hetook to Europe with his wife and some of his younger children at the begin-ning of the 1900s suggest that his finances had stabilized somewhat. Hisbiggest problems, however, had only just begun. At that point, several of hissons had reached, or were about to reach, the age of majority. Argentine inher-itance laws, like earlier Spanish laws, called for all property to be dividedequally among all legitimate children. If Pastor had had fewer offspring, per-haps his last years would not have differed so significantly from his brother’s.But his 11 surviving children (nine sons and two daughters) put him in a par-ticularly difficult situation, as the number of individuals he felt he was obligedto help far exceeded his resources. Pastor’s inherited fortune had allowed himto live the life of his upper-class peers, but the division of his landholdingsamong his offspring would make it impossible for them to rely on land as theireconomic base. Like his brother, Pastor had been a great landowner, but hischildren would never enjoy that status.

The Children of Pastor Senillosa: Professionals and

Entrepreneurs in the Secondary and Tertiary Sectors

Pastor was aware of this problem. In 1898 his son Eduardo let him know thathe wished to study agronomy. In spite of the fact that Pastor saw himself as amodernizing landholder, always keen on improvement, he received this newswith dismay, as he believed this choice would preclude Eduardo’s becoming aman of independent means. The day-to-day management of the family’sestancia did not require more than the collaboration of Roberto, one of Pas-tor’s eldest sons, who already had taken up permanent residence at San Felipe.In a letter to his son Felipe, Pastor argued that the family’s territorial holdingswere insufficient to provide his children with substantial income and that if


68. Elvira Chopitea de Senillosa to Juan Antonio Chopitea, 15 Oct. 1894, AS, 2-5-11. 69. Pastor Senillosa to Felipe G. Senillosa, 13 Nov. 1896, AS, 2-5-11.

Eduardo insisted in following higher studies in agronomy, he would be con-demned to working for others and renounce the possibility of making a for-tune. Pastor’s perspective in this matter indicates that he was convinced that arural enterprise was really worthwhile only if it was large scale. Large propertynot only generated income but also increased in value over the long term.With a degree in agronomy but without a large property of his own, Pastorinsisted, Eduardo would become the overseer of “someone else’s importantestablishment, while he’ll personally occupy some small farm, sowing andreaping the whimsical benefits of his studies. . . . [He] forgets that I do not haveenough resources to give each of them a business to run. . . . Eduardo shouldfollow his preparatory studies and once finished he should pursue a careerwhose capital is in its academic qualifications, such as law or engineering.” Pastor concluded that if his children were to stay “at my side, [they] willbecome nothing, even if I find some work to give them . . . it is necessary thateach one find a way to help rather than suckling two at each teat . . . either thecalves die or the cow becomes exhausted.”70

Jorge Sábato has described Pastor Senillosa as a typical example of the finde siècle entrepreneur who sought to invest in different spheres of economicactivity with an eye toward “skimming the cream of the market” and obtainingsupernormal profits. This interpretation is largely inaccurate. Pastor preferredinvestment in land over all other forms of investment. Thus, for example, in1905 he insisted that “whatever capital one invests in land, though it may notproduce profit straight away, is a great investment. In just a couple of years onewill find its value intact, plus interest, plus a large profit.”71 His son Felipe G.,very much like other members of the family, held the same opinion.72

The formidable increase in real estate values in the pampas at the turn ofthe century helps to explain the Senillosas’ enthusiasm for buying land. Duringthese years, for example, the young Felipe G. made good money purchasingfive thousand hectares on the frontier. “Ortiz wrote to me from La Pampa,” hetold his brothers around 1904, “informing me that ‘La Hortensia’ is alreadyworth thirty [paper] pesos per hectare, or $150,000!! It cost me $27,000 back in’98.”73 Nevertheless, for the Senillosas, the increase in land values was doubleedged; it increased the value of their existing property but became an obstacle


70. Pastor Senillosa to Felipe G. Senillosa, 15 Mar. 1898, AS, 2-5-11.71. Pastor Senillosa to Juan A. Senillosa, 9 Apr. 1905, AS, 2-6-2.72. Felipe G. Senillosa to Juan A. Senillosa, 27 June 1906, AS, 2-6-7. Also see

Eduardo Senillosa to J. A. Chopitea, 21 Nov. 1904, AS, 2-6-1.73. Felipe G. Senillosa to Juan A. Senillosa, n.d. (1904?), AS, 185.

to further acquisitions. In fact, all the lands the young Felipe G. bought duringthose years were located in marginal, low quality areas in La Pampa andChubut.74 The same can be said of his father’s acquisitions, among the mostnoteworthy of which are the 57,000 hectares that he bought in the subtropicalprovince of Salta in the middle of the decade of the 1900s for 273,000 goldpesos.75 It is useful to put these purchases in perspective. Advertisements pub-lished in the press at that time indicate that rural property was being offered inplaces such as subtropical Salta and semidesert Patagonia at prices that fluctu-ated between 0.5 and 15 gold pesos per hectare, while grazing lands in BuenosAires province were sold at prices that often exceeded 100 gold pesos perhectare. The much-anticipated land boom in Patagonia and other frontierregions, on which the Senillosas and many others bet, never occurred. Cer-tainly, at the beginning of the century, buying lands outside the fertile pampasoffered an attractive deal, but it was not a ticket to prosperity for present orfuture generations.

Pampean land was a secure and profitable investment that always increasedin value over the long run, and given more resources, it is likely that PastorSenillosa would have bought more. However, the formidable increase in theprice of land in this region meant he could not match the large-scale purchasesthat his father had made before 1840, at a time when the price of land wasalmost nothing. It has been estimated that between the 1840s and the begin-ning of the 1880s land prices increased 20-fold and continued to rise rapidlythereafter.76 After a pronounced drop in the first half of the 1890s (a conse-quence of the Baring Crisis), the increase in real estate values continuedunabated and only slowed down with the onset of World War I.77 In the firstdecade of the century, then, the purchase of large properties on the pampaswas simply beyond the reach of most investors. Understandably, in 1909, theonly option left for Juan Antonio Senillosa, one of Pastor’s sons, was based onthe hope, never realized, of “taking advantage of the great Patagonian landboom.”78

The impossibility of expanding his holdings on the pampas, then, helpsexplain why Pastor encouraged his sons to enter into activities far removedfrom agricultural and livestock export production. Furthermore, contrary to


74. Eduardo Senillosa to Juan Antonio Chopitea, 21 Nov. 1904, AS, 2-6-1.75. Ernesto Senillosa to Julio Senillosa, 10 Apr. 1907, AS, 2-6-4.76. Sabato, Capitalismo y ganadería, 63. 77. Cortés Conde, El progreso argentino (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1979), 162–73.78. Eduardo Senillosa to Juan Antonio Senillosa, 19 Jan. 1909, AS, 15-4-5.

what Jorge Sábato has suggested, Pastor Senillosa’s diversification of assets wasnot intended to increase his profits, but rather to help his sons establish them-selves independently, which would allow them to live the elite life he and hissiblings had enjoyed. Encouraging his sons to try their hands at new industrial,commercial, and financial ventures or to go into the professions was not somuch an attempt to earn extraordinary profits as to guide his sons toward riskybut less capital-intensive ventures. We will not have the opportunity here toanalyze the history of Pastor Senillosa’s offspring. It suffices to mention thatseveral of them entered the professions: Felipe G. studied law, Julio became anarchitect, Juan Antonio entered the diplomatic service, and Guillermo studiedgeology. Others, helped by capital advances from their father, tried their luckin business: Carlos and Eduardo started a reinforced-cement construction com-pany, and Ernesto dedicated himself to food processing. Roberto’s businessinterests remained concentrated in the rural sector, and he later entered publicservice. At the beginning of the century, three of them were studying in theUnited States at Cornell University.79

The expenses of his numerous children weighed heavily upon Senillosa’sfinances. In 1906 Pastor wrote to his son Julio, studying in the United States atthe time, recommending moderation in his expenditures.80 Two years later,Pastor again asked Julio not to incur excessive expenses, in order to “preservethe integrity of the name my parents left me.”81 The funds that Pastor advancedat various times toward his children’s new ventures put additional pressure onhis finances, which already were encumbered by debts dating back to the early1890s. It is likely that, given these circumstances, Senillosa was spending morethan was advisable. As some indexes suggest, this seems to have affected hisrural enterprises negatively.

In fact, the condition of his ranch in the first decade of the century was farfrom robust. During the last third of the nineteenth century, San Felipe hadstood among the most modern and prestigious estancias in Argentina. PastorSenillosa’s enterprise clearly began to lose ground in the 1890s, however. Inthese troubled years, investments in San Felipe seem to have slowed down,precisely when stock raising entered into a period of marked technologicalchange. The growth of grain exports and the opening of European markets tolive animals and, a short while later, processed frozen and chilled meat drove


79. For a brief biography of some of Pastor Senillosa’s heirs, see Hora, “La elite socialargentina del siglo XIX.”

80. Pastor Senillosa to Juan Antonio Senillosa, 2 Dec. 1906, AS, 2-6-3.81. Pastor Senillosa to Julio Senillosa, 18 July 1908, AS, 2-6-5.

this new stage of development. Cattle and grain displaced sheep from the bestlands in the pampas. To raise better cattle, landowners were forced to improvetheir pastures, which they did by adopting mixed rotational farming tech-niques. The massive importation of British Durhams and Herefords also con-tributed to the improvement of the stock. Demand for wire fences, water pumps,and agricultural machinery also increased.

Pastor Senillosa did not adapt well to this scenario, which required a newround of investment in capital goods in order to modernize and maintain orincrease profit margins. To a certain extent, chance played against him. Hisestancia was not in a position to make the most of this stage of agriculturaldevelopment, given that the Ayacucho area where it was located was not wellsuited for grain growing or for the development of the artificial pastures (par-ticularly alfalfa) that were necessary for raising export-quality animals. Thelands that his father had carefully selected based on his in-depth knowledge ofthe frontier, particularly apt for early-nineteenth-century grazing techniques,proved to be ill suited for later technological stages. The diffusion of windmillsand water pumps, for example, downplayed the importance of natural watersources. Thus, by the turn of the century, the low-lying and uneven pasturelands of the Salado River valley, ill suited for agriculture, lost value relative tothe higher and drier lands of the southern and eastern pampas.

In addition, Pastor’s enterprise lost ground precisely in the area that untilthen had been one of its strengths: the raising of pedigreed breeding stock.Although the Senillosas appear to have been aware of the direction that thestock-raising industry was taking, by the middle of the decade of the 1900s it wasclear that their competitors were marketing products better adapted to thedemands of the export trade. In 1907 Roberto Senillosa, the administrator of SanFelipe, insisted that “today all the estancieros have good livestock and there aremany who have first rate animals: Alvear, the Unzués, Martinez de Hoz, RamosMejía, Cobo, Villanueva, López, Urquiza, and a thousand others who have con-cerned themselves with and spent a fortune on breeding animals.”82 Reflectingon the profit margins they had obtained in previous years, he observed that theircurrent earnings were only half of what they had hoped they would be. “Papahas close to 2,500,000 [paper, or 1.1 million gold] pesos invested in propertyand livestock, which should have yielded liquid profits of 250,000 [paper]pesos. But as the livestock of San Felipe is not what it should be in class, vari-ety, reputation, and bloodline, and because its operating expenses are enor-mous, we never manage to obtain a return greater than four or five percent.”83


82. Eduardo Senillosa to Juan Antonio Senillosa, 29 Sept. 1907, AS, 2-6-4.83. Eduardo Senillosa to Julio and Juan Antonio Senillosa, 19 Sept. 1907, AS, 2-6-4.

In those years, Pastor Senillosa tried his luck in new areas of economicactivity, perhaps aiming to compensate for the drop in his rural income.Together with Alfredo Demarchi and Victorino de la Plaza, two well-knownmembers of the business community, he launched the Banco de Fomento Indus-trial Americano. This bank did not survive its exploratory phase, as the initialsubscription of shares was very limited.84 Significantly, Pastor remarked thatmost members of the economically dominant groups believed that land, ofsecure yield, was a more attractive investment option than were stock shares.Stock societies, he lamented, “in great part fail . . . the majority of the wealthyemploy their riches in the purchase of properties, mortgages, etc., and do notenter into the business of acquiring shares of nascent companies.”85 Pastor alsojoined the board of directors of an enterprise created to manufacture flax strawproducts, a project that also failed at an early stage.86

These banking and industrial undertakings—like his other, earlier attemptsto attract North American investors in the cold-storage industry—suggestthat Pastor was limited by capital scarcity; in all of these cases, he was trying tostart a business that depended on extrafamilial partnerships. At that time, Pas-tor found it increasingly difficult to service a mortgage on San Felipe and hisother debts. In 1906 his son Roberto argued that it was essential to remedy thefinancial situation of the family, as its expenditures exceeded its income. The“great loss” caused by the failure of the commercial house in the early 1890s,the expenses of the sons’ studies in the United States, and those of the “immense”family in Buenos Aires, he affirmed, severely compromised his position: “[T]hereis debt and it is big; if we do not try to eliminate it, it will swallow us com-pletely.”87

Excessive expenditures and lack of income from other sources forced Pastor to adjust. Unfortunately, we do not have sufficient information to eval-uate all his options. One can hypothesize, nonetheless, that the large capitalinvestments necessary to improve his livestock and to make San Felipe moreprofitable either were beyond his means or did not appear to be a worthwhilerisk to such an indebted entrepreneur. In any case, Pastor—who by then wassuffering from a serious illness—chose to sell almost all of his livestock and torent the greater part of his lands. In late 1907, some 14,000 cattle, 35,000sheep, and 1,300 horses went under the hammer. Unfortunately, the returns heobtained on these transactions were not very high, given that drought, which


84. Juan Antonio Senillosa to Felipe Senillosa, 15 Mar. 1907, AS, 2-6-4.85. Pastor Senillosa to Juan Antonio Senillosa 28 Apr. 1907, AS, 2-6-4.86. Pastor Senillosa to Juan Antonio Senillosa, 16 Jan. 1908, AS, 2-6-5.87. Roberto Senillosa to Felipe G. Senillosa, n.d. (1906?), AS, 2-6-7.

suddenly contracted pastures on the pampas, drove prices down. Pastor usedthe money to pay off debts and refinanced liabilities. He also bought (undermortgage) his sisters’ share in a family residence located in the center ofBuenos Aires, which he put up for rent when he moved with his family to agrand mansion in the new Barrio Norte. He also paid off part of the lands hehad acquired in Salta. With the little that remained, Pastor was unable to re-equip his breeding stock as he desired.88 From then on, Senillosa was left withsome 2,500 hectares of land at his own disposal. Income from the rental ofmore than 5,000 hectares in San Felipe and the old residence in the city centeryielded some 62,000 gold pesos annually, to which should be added the incomefrom his lands in Salta.89 The precise total of his debts at this time is unknown,although they were without a doubt high.

No longer an active entrepreneur, by 1906 the physically weakened Pastorhad become very much a rentier. Pastor died at his beloved San Felipe in thespring of 1910. Although most of the probate records for his estate have beenlost by a judicial system that has not always taken care to preserve its history,information from family correspondence and other sources indicates clearlythat his assets, approaching 1.8 million gold pesos, were almost entirety com-prised of his estancia and other rural and urban properties. The only otherthing he held were debts, which at that point easily exceeded 0.6 million goldpesos. From the early 1910s on it became difficult for his heirs to service thisdebt. The Great War, which provoked a marked contraction in credit alongwith a pronounced crisis in foreign trade, made things even more difficult.With the interruption of export activities, rural rents decreased markedly,while expenditures and obligations did not contract at the same pace. At theend of 1914, young Mabel Senillosa commented, “[T]here are days of totalwant, like those that have recently passed. The few rent payments that arrivecome late and in minute installments.”90 A few months later, her brother com-plained, “[W]e are all feeling the noose around our necks and if things do notimprove I do not know how we shall end. There is nothing left to sell or pawn,and if the country does not recover we will all go to hell. . . . We are makinggreat efforts to defend San Felipe and this house.”91

Though they were still far from living in poverty, the Senillosas found itquite difficult to adapt to a more modest lifestyle. In 1914 Pastor Senillosa’s


88. Pastor Senillosa to Roberto Senillosa, 14 Oct. 1908, AS, 2-6-5. 89. Ricardo Senillosa to Roberto and Felipe G. Senillosa, 20 May 1908, AS, 2-6-5.90. Mabel Senillosa to Julio Senillosa, 15 Nov. 1914, AS, 14-4-5.91. Eduardo Senillosa to Julio Senillosa, 18 Nov. 1914, AS, 14-4-5.

widow wrote to one of her sons that “the upholsterer has not entered thehouse once this year,” but they remained reluctant to fire their eight domesticservants.92 Thus, it is not surprising that their expenditures continued to putpressure on an ever contracting income, which was increasingly less capable ofsustaining the widow and her unmarried sons and daughters, above all becausetheir debts loomed larger during the war. Lacking sufficient income and inca-pable of moderating their spending, the Senillosas found that they had to liq-uidate assets at an ever increasing rate. In 1919 they sold the breeding stock atSan Felipe, and three years later they were pressed to sell more than one thou-sand hectares of land.93 From that point onward they were only able to retainreduced landholdings and the family mansion, which they did not dispose ofuntil the 1930s.94

Gradually driven from the land and lacking the entrepreneurial talent thatmade their grandfather’s fortune, none of Pastor’s sons were able to emulatethe successes of their ancestors. After the 1910s, the Senillosas were a familythat, while preserving the memory of a glorious past and maintaining its linkswith the Argentine wealthy, slowly descended into the upper middle class. Bythe end of the 1910s, most of them lived off the fruits of their own labors, pub-lic employment, or very meager rents. In an understandable way, the trail ofthe siblings becomes more diffuse with the passage of time, especially follow-ing the death of Pastor and his wife, after which the family ceased functioningas an economic and social unit. At the end of the 1930s, the Senillosas wereforced to sell the great family home. Conscious of the family’s exceptionalityheightened by adversity, they chose on that occasion to donate to the ArchivoGeneral de la Nación the family archive, containing a century’s worth of doc-umentation, from which this history has been reconstructed.

The Economic Elite over the Course of a Century

Felipe Senillosa’s history offers a typical example of the opportunities for eco-nomic and social improvement that opened up with the shift of the River Plateeconomy from mining to rural production following independence. The endof colonial rule and the initiation of free trade sparked a process of agriculturalexpansion in which this immigrant, together with other sharp native and for-


92. Elvira Chopitea to Julio Senillosa, 29 June 1914, AS, 15-4-5; Mabel Senillosa toJulio Senillosa, 24 July 1917, AS, 15-4-6.

93. M. G. Basavilbaso, Las cabañas argentinas (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1919); Cámara deDiputados de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Diario de Sesiones (1922): 1321.

94. Guillermo Senillosa to his siblings, 2 Apr. 1925, AS, 15-4-6.


eign entrepreneurs, developed their business careers. Senillosa arrived in BuenosAires with little more than his intellectual skills and training as a military engi-neer. He did not possess capital, but in the span of a few years he acquired oneparticularly scarce resource: information. Senillosa’s firsthand knowledge ofthe frontier lands that the republican state would soon privatize, together withhis close contacts with the political elite, provided the initial impetus for thepurchase of large but inexpensive territorial holdings. This last aspect of theSenillosas’ history is reminiscent of other economic patriarchs, such as Pereyra,Guerrico, or that of the Anchorena brothers, whose close ties to the state becameimportant elements in their economic success during this same period.

Senillosa offers a good example of how, during the first half of the nine-teenth century, vast extensions of land could be purchased without significantcapital, which contributed to the creation of a new group of large-scale estan-cieros who were richer and more powerful than their colonial predecessors.However, while it is true that rural production was central to Senillosa’s under-takings, it was not his sole concern. As soon as he managed to accumulate somecapital, he invested in other economic activities: internal petty trade, importand export commerce, and money lending. In this, Felipe Senillosa’s attitudetoward business was typical of the period, when capitalists usually reacted to major economic dislocations and political instability by diversifying theirassets.

Felipe’s sons, who reached maturity after Rosas’s fall, developed theirbusiness careers in a markedly different economic context. During the latterpart of the nineteenth century, the agricultural and livestock economy acquiredmomentum, and land prices increased. The estancia economy, and Argentinecapitalism more generally, also underwent significant technological change.Finally, the consolidation of the state and the end of civil and internationalconflict helped open a new stage of agrarian development in the pampas.Felipe B. and Pastor reacted to this new context by transforming themselvesinto full-fledged rural entrepreneurs in a way their father had never been.They counted themselves among the most distinguished and progressive estan-cieros of their time. Unlike the senior Senillosa, for whom rural business wasno more than one aspect of a diversified enterprise, for his sons rural produc-tion became the heart of their business.

The histories of Felipe B. and Pastor illustrate the motives that pushedmany entrepreneurs of the second half of the century to concentrate in pri-mary production. The high returns offered by rural business in the pampas’golden age surely worked as an incentive for entrepreneurs to specialize inlivestock and grain production. It is important to note, however, that these

stimuli were not always positive, as the failure of Pastor’s mercantile housesuggests. In the last decades of the century, a new international division oflabor enabled a handful of large and powerful firms, mostly of foreign origin,to dominate the bulk of the import-export trade, internal commerce, andbanking and finance. The mercantile and financial practices that prevailed dur-ing much of the nineteenth century were rendered obsolete, and entrepreneurswho had acted in these spheres were forced to specialize or move to other areasof business. Felipe B. chose to move away from commerce, but Pastor main-tained his import house until he was hard hit by the depression of the 1890s.He then abandoned this activity, carrying away from it a debt that followedhim to the grave. We cannot know precisely the total liabilities resulting fromthe fall of Pastor’s mercantile house. But it seems reasonable to assert thatFelipe B.’s healthier accounts were due in part to his quick withdrawal fromthe mercantile sphere in favor of rural production, which in hindsight provedto be a wise decision.

If what is suggested above is correct, it is necessary to conclude that thehistory of these two generations of the Senillosa family, which encompasses theperiod from the outset of the expansion of livestock production up to the turnof the twentieth century, offers a revised understanding of the making and evo-lution of the wealthiest segment of the Argentine economic elite. In the firstplace, it challenges the traditional depiction of the porteño elite as a groupwhose economic superiority was based on control of rural land. In fact, duringmuch of the nineteenth century this group can be better described as a diver-sified entrepreneurial elite rather than as a purely landowning class. Only inthe latter part of the century did economic and political changes create theconditions for the metamorphosis of the postindependence diversified entre-preneurial class into a landed bourgeoisie.

This fact requires us not only to modify the traditional interpretation ofthe nineteenth-century elite but also to reject recent revisionist interpretationsof large-scale Argentine businessmen, such as that advanced by Jorge Sábato.For Sábato, the large-scale entrepreneurs of the first half of the nineteenthcentury were fundamentally a landed class that, as the economy grew morecomplex, expanded its investments toward other sectors of the economy untilit became, by the turn of the century, a greatly diversified entrepreneurialgroup. The histories of Felipe Senillosa and his two sons—each of whom wastypical of the great entrepreneurs of his time—can be better understood in aconceptual framework that in many respects is the inverse of that suggested bySábato. Rather than the evolution of a landowning class into a diversifiedentrepreneurial elite, it shows the emergence of a landowning entrepreneurial


class (and presumably, that of businessmen specializing in other spheres) out ofthe more diversified elite of the immediate postindependence period.

The downward economic path of the third generation of Senillosas, whoarrived at adulthood at the end of the nineteenth century, allows us to formu-late some final remarks regarding the importance of land for the entrepreneursof the period. For Pastor’s children, specialization in rural production becamemore difficult, as the division of his territorial holdings among so many heirsmeant the third generation could not rely on land to maintain its elite status.The Senillosas, however, illustrate in its extremity a problem that affected mostlarge rural entrepreneurs, with variations according to the peculiarities of eachlandowning family and the size of their landholdings. And this was not justbecause most wealthy families were large ones, whose ability to transfer largeestates to the next generation was seriously impaired by the mandate of part-ible inheritance. The rapid rise in the price of rural property in the last decadesof the nineteenth century made it impossible for turn-of-the-century entre-preneurs to replicate the massive purchases of land that had been typical in theprevious period. This latter process substantially modified the horizons withinwhich rural entrepreneurs acted. A brief consideration of this point suggestswhat was the greatest failure of the second generation of Senillosas as busi-nessmen—the one that excluded them and their heirs from the pinnacle of theArgentine economic elite—and at the same time reveals why other entrepre-neurs of the period were much more successful.

In the 1900s Pastor Senillosa and his sons were convinced of the long-term economic advantages of investing in land. At that point, however, it wasalready too late to act upon this realization, as the only affordable lands werethose of inferior quality located beyond the pampas. Unfortunately, Pastor andFelipe B. had passed up the opportunity to buy better, cheaper lands in earlierdecades, when it was still within their reach. In the long run, progressive land-owners such as Pastor and Felipe B., who invested in improvements ratherthan territorial expansion, were economically less successful than landownerssuch as the Duggans, the Duhaus, the Unzués, the Pereyras, or the Anchore-nas. It is true that some of these entrepreneurs, who were active in the secondhalf of the nineteenth century, had larger economic resources at their disposal.But as the example of Unzué suggests, the crucial element in explaining theirsuccess was their prioritization of land acquisition over modernization.

In the early stages of livestock expansion in the pampas, capitalists such asthe Anchorenas were already extending their rural holdings in a manner thatwas clearly beyond the reach of entrepreneurs of more recent wealth such asFelipe Senillosa. There are cases, however (such as the Duhaus or the Dug-


gans), of fortunes made in later periods. The major difference between theseimmigrants and the Senillosas is the single-minded tenacity with which theformer invested their resources in land acquisition. Unlike these estancieros ofhumble origins, Pastor and Felipe B. Senillosa did not buy land in significantproportions in the 1860s and 1870s. They lost their last opportunity when theyabstained from the great land sales that occurred with the last stage of frontierexpansion at the end of the 1870s and the beginning of the 1880s. While thosewho acquired enormous properties at this point were not always able to put theland under production immediately, capitalists like the Anchorenas, Duggans,and Unzués laid the foundation for the accumulation of fortunes comparableto the great landowners of Europe by the turn of the century. In the end, then,the comparison of the Senillosas with the largest landowners of the late nine-teenth century invites us to draw a rather unpleasant conclusion: the mostinnovative rural entrepreneurs, those most committed to technology and mod-ernization, were less successful than those who dedicated themselves, first andforemost, to land acquisition. This appears to confirm that the key to economicsuccess for a rural entrepreneur in the pampas during the period of agrarianexpansion was size rather than economic efficiency.

The Senillosa brothers failed to realize this truth at an opportune timeand consequently lost their standing among the truly rich. The fate of FelipeB. and his two daughters was less dramatic than that of Pastor’s family. Theelder of the Senillosa brothers died with the certainty that his daughters enjoyeda favorable economic situation, although at a significant distance from the pin-nacle of the Argentine elite. Pastor’s children suffered a more precipitous decline.This was little less than inevitable given the enormous size of his family, whichconstituted a heavy burden on the family finances. At the turn of the century,the fall in rural income forced Pastor Senillosa to try his luck, with more des-peration than enthusiasm, in new spheres of economic activity. In this finalstage of his life as an entrepreneur, he harvested more failures than successesand did not succeed in turning around his economic woes or those of his ruralenterprise. Pastor’s worst fears did not come true while he was alive, but theend result of his difficulties was the erosion of the link between the succeedinggeneration and rural property. The “milch cow” (this is how he referred to SanFelipe) was not completely exhausted, but it did lose its capacity to sustain thethird generation of Senillosas.

Pastor’s children had to confront the consequences of the fragmentationof the family’s landholdings. Even though they knew land to be secure andprofitable, most of them were forced to engage in new activities in the sec-ondary or tertiary spheres of the economy or to earn their living in the profes-


sions or as civil servants. For this third generation of Senillosas in the RiverPlate, entry into new areas of economic activity was not an attempt to diversifyassets. Rather, it was the necessary result of the contraction of their landhold-ings and, as a result, of their rural income. In this way, the Senillosas antici-pated the path that many scions of other landowning families would followafter 1930, when the Great Depression and the collapse of the pampean exporteconomy magnified earlier problems linked to property fragmentation. Thedeparture of several of the young Senillosas from rural activities did not meanthat they were destined inevitably to lose their standing among the wealthy.The burgeoning domestic economy at the turn of the century, followed by theboom of the urban economy in the 1920s, opened new opportunities for entre-preneurs. In fact, after World War I, almost all new fortunes were made in theurban, rather than rural, sector. The youngest Senillosas simply lacked the luckor the necessary talent to succeed in this new setting. Their undistinguishedentrepreneurial lives, however, were not exceptional. In fact, in part due tosimple factors of family size, it seems reasonable to conclude that over the longterm more members of the old elite families lost their socioeconomic positionsthan succeeded in remaining at the top.


hora, making of bsas elite, los senillosa

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