THE SOUTH AMERICAN WAY^323Historians of American immigration argue about the relative im
portance of push and pull, and of course both mattered, at different
times. Some portray the great flood as a kind of huge kidnapping op
eration. (Europeans, especially, have trouble dealing with the repudi
ation implicit in this massive exodus.) Nonsense. For most of these
newcomers, the United States was a land of hope and unlimited pos
sibilities. Personal considerations played their part. Immigrants came
because their predecessors wrote happy, if not always true, letters about
life in the New World. They came because relatives, friends, and neigh
bors preceded them; and when they arrived, they went to stay with or
lodge near their forerunners. They came to a country that in the nine
teenth century offered just about no obstacle to admission. Many went
back—perhaps a third. But the great majority stayed (or came back a
second time), found jobs alongside their kin, moved about with a free
dom they had never known in the Old World.Back to Argentina. Its economic takeoff had to wait for the second half
or even the last third of the nineteenth century. When it came, it closely
fit the Ricardian trade model. The major growth sector was livestock,
which yielded hides for leather and wool (often together and exported
to such wool-pulling centers as Mazamet in France), tallow, and salt
beef. When refrigeration came in the 1880s, it gave a big boost to the
meat trade, especially to Britain. At first the process worked best with
lamb and mutton, but as techniques improved and temperatures be
came more reliable and precise, Argentina began sending frozen beef
and then much tastier chilled meat.
Agricultural development lagged, primarily because labor was scarce;
but the opposition of ranchers and the depredations of the tenacious
Araucanian Indians, still fighting the Europeans after three hundred
years, created further impediments. (As in the American West, or for
that matter in Africa, it took repeating weapons to crush native resis
tance.) The hostility of the Indians is understandable: they were fight
ing for their land. But the ranchers also: farming means fences and an
end to open range. (One can't have catde tromping the furrows and
eating the crops.) Still, as in the American West, the barbed wire moved
forward in Argentina, the cheapest cattle-unfriendly fencing ever de
vised.*
Labor remained scarce through most of the nineteenth century. Not
* Imports of barbed wire were of the order of20,000 tons a year in the early 1890s—
Rock, Argentina 1516-1987, p. 136.