Conquest(s) of the Desert

Abstract

The historical concept of the “desert” is both cultural and geographic in Argentina, connecting nineteenth-century territorial conquest to twentieth-century public works projects. Between 1936 and 1940, the architect Francisco Salamone constructed a series of roads, plazas, municipal headquarters, slaughterhouses, and cemeteries. These buildings and infrastructure projects highlight the necessary relationship between settler colonialism and changing labor patterns in the South American nation’s uneasy transition into global capitalism. This paper synthesizes a range of historiography and analyzes visual material, including photographs, architectural drawings, and cartographic documents, to demonstrate the powerful connection between architectural production, cultural erasure, and economic change in Argentina.

Keywords:

• Argentina
• historiography
• public works projects
• materials
• architecture

Conquest as Process

Opening Figure. Francisco Salamone, cemetery portal, Balcarce, Argentina, c. 1937. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

In his 1845 book Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism the influential writer and politician Domingo Faustino Sarmiento wrote, “The evil that plagues the Argentine Republic is its extension: the desert surrounds it on all sides.”¹ For him and generations of ruling elites, the desert embodied disorder beyond the control of the civilizing state.² At this time, competing political factions and visions for the country coalesced around the struggle between rural interests and their strongmen leaders (caudillos) and the supposed civilizing influence of the metropolis—of Europe. Sarmiento’s civilization and barbarism dialectic provides a useful framework for understanding the special meaning of the “desert” in this historical context: it was the allegorical and physical backdrop for state-sponsored projects to control labor and the environment.³ The genocide of Indigenous people and an immigration policy favoring Europeans were part of interlocking historical and economic processes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper argues that the nineteenth-century military campaign known as the Conquest of the Desert was a process involving recurring events that extended well into the twentieth century and were expressed in architectural form. Furthermore, the inextricable link between conquest, capital, and changing labor patterns needed to control the built environment was integral to that process. The historical artifacts produced under Manuel Fresco’s authoritarian governorship of Buenos Aires province between 1936 and 1940 concretize these transhistorical linkages.

The Argentine Pampa is a vast, fertile land to the west and south of the River Plate, although it is not a desert in the geographic sense.⁴ Like the United States and Canada, Argentina’s expansive terrain resulted from military and colonial conquest, Indigenous dispossession, and the transformation of this landscape into parcels of private property—which Argentina’s landed elites incorporated into their sprawling rural estancias.⁵ Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the state-elite alliance waged political and military campaigns to take permanent possession of these lands, which were increasingly imagined as empty (Figure 1). Decades later, architectural design and public works projects helped to cement this image of a tabula rasa. These projects were also instrumental in drawing the territory and its workers into the volatile, export-based system of global capitalism. The concept of the desert frames any analysis of the built environment in the Pampa, linking cultural erasure to land as the foundation of economic change and shifting labor patterns.

Figure 1. Johann Moritz Rugendas, Parada en el campo, 1838. Image via ArtNet, public domain.

While the exact nature and implications of dispossession are beyond the scope of this paper, a growing literature on settler colonialism has yielded a necessary and productive debate about its legacy.⁶ Scholars have pointed to the uses and limitations of this framework, as it sometimes obscures colonizers’ historical use of Indigenous labor in settler societies that later seek their elimination.⁷ As a framework for understanding the histories of colonization in which the extermination of native people played an important role, Argentina’s colonization began with the forced labor of its Indigenous population—not initially their removal. Indeed, Spaniards quickly took advantage of the labor power of Tupí-Guaraní speakers they encountered in the Río de la Plata basin. They gained access to native tribute and labor through alliances, intermarriage, and forced labor arrangements.⁸ While dispossession may have been the ultimate result, it was not achieved—nor desirable—from the outset.

Rather than a single conquest or a process solely aimed at eliminating the native population, the colonization of the region around the River Plate was what Juan Garavaglia called “a long and arduous campaign to ‘pacify the territory,’” which spanned the Spanish colonial period from the sixteenth until the beginning of the nineteenth century.⁹ Military conquests to expand further into Indigenous lands began in 1744. The process intensified in 1810 and 1820, with popular artistic representations emphasizing the antagonistic relationship between white civilization and native barbarism (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Johann Moritz Rugendas, El rapto (El Malón), 1846. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

During this process, the military expanded the border of control emanating from Buenos Aires every few decades. In each case, the elites accepted more land for their allegiance to the state.¹⁰ After a series of battles for independence from Spain between 1810 and 1818 and protracted internal conflicts among competing factions of landowning elites and Indigenous people, the Conquest of the Desert officially took place under the leadership of General Julio Argentino Roca between 1876 and 1880.¹¹ With support from the politically influential Sociedad Rural (a significant representative of the landed estanciero interests), the lands of Mapuche tribes (including Tehuelches, Ranqueles, and Pehuenches) were forcibly incorporated into the Argentine state.¹²

The military built a web of fortifications that pushed southwest from the capital.¹³ The use of physical infrastructure like fences and trenches to separate European settlements from Indigenous land was ultimately superseded by a policy of extermination, with many of the original forts becoming civilian towns and eventually cities.¹⁴ By 1877, as the final military campaign began, the Office of the Engineers of the Province of Buenos Aires produced a map delineating the various subdivisions of the province, along with the numerous territories inhabited by Indigenous people (Figure 3). In this map, vectors and curves crisscross in a web growing outward from the national capital, with a serpentine red line punctuated with “x”s for individual forts, separating the Province of Buenos Aires and the Pampa. By 1910, what was once a collection of fortifications and boundaries became a fast-growing freight and passenger rail system, much of it linked to British capital and at the service of the booming meat and wheat industries. This network, as visualized in official cartographies, serves as a type of diagram of the extractive nature of Argentina’s entry into the global economy, representing real things that occur on the ground, like dispossession, urbanization, and construction, as abstracted representations of capital (Figure 4).¹⁵

Figure 3. F. Taylor, Map of the Province of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1877. The map shows in red the fortifications constructed at the time of the Conquest of the Desert, the state war and genocide of indigenous people. Image: Historic Argentine Cartography.

Figure 4. Buenos Aires and Pacific Railway Company, Ltd., Map of the Argentine Railways, 1910. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

The conquest had substantial economic implications. In the late 1870s, more land for grazing fed fleets of new refrigerated ships, filled with meat packed for transatlantic commerce.¹⁶ By the beginning of the twentieth century, the influx of European cattle breeds, railroad technologies, and refrigerated meatpacking facilities (frigoríficos) meant that beef exports accounted for half of Argentina’s foreign exchange.¹⁷ Argentina’s economy became more volatile and increasingly tied to the world market, as its imports and exports were linked to global commodity prices, fluctuating monetary standards, exchange rates, and foreign debt.¹⁸

By 1930, Argentina’s borders had expanded to capture virtually all available arable land.¹⁹ To combat decreasing profits, cattle and wheat industries mechanized. As Argentinian cities industrialized, mixed agrarianism took hold in the countryside. Facing high labor costs, Argentine farmers were historically quick to embrace mechanization, farming vast tracts of the Pampa with a mixed form of agricultural-industrial production, which challenges traditional understandings of stages of economic growth from agrarian to industrial.²⁰ The architectural works of Salamone produced under Fresco’s governorship were part of a broader—albeit failed—effort to modulate, rationalize, and control the labor force needed to perpetuate the ongoing process of conquering the desert.

Crisis and Construction

In the wake of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s, the British government (and military), long involved in Argentina since its independence from Spain, began to impose limits on imported Argentine beef, favoring sources from the Commonwealth. As a result, the Argentine vice-president, Julio Argentino Pascual Roca (the son of General Roca who had led the extermination campaign of Indigenous people in the Pampa), negotiated a treaty where the British agreed to buy a set amount of beef in exchange for repayments of Argentina’s substantial debt to the UK.²¹ The growing, urbanized—and increasingly unionized—working class became more involved in electoral politics, staging dramatic protests and strikes and clashing with the reigning interests of the estancieros.²² Nationalist political sentiment, paired with a critique of British influence and liberal economics, became popular talking points for politicians after the crash. With universal male suffrage, workers favored the center-left Radical Civic Union. Tensions between Conservatives and Radicals came to a head when Hipólito Yrigoyen’s government was overthrown in a coup d’état in 1930, leading to a decade of right-wing rule at the national and provincial levels.²³

Between 1936 and 1940, the right-wing governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, Manuel Fresco, sought to gain the support of the working class. With a new Department of Labor intervening in the frequent strikes and disputes among laborers and employers, his project sought to industrialize the countryside and bring organized labor under the control of the state.²⁴ Under Fresco’s rule, municipalities commissioned thousands of public works projects, including grandiose municipal headquarters, plazas, cemeteries, slaughterhouses, drains, roads, bridges, and plazas.²⁵ Assembling a roster of engineers, architects, and contractors, Fresco and the local caudillos, the charismatic politicians ruling each municipality, began constructing a system of monumental architecture and infrastructure. Like echoes or aftershocks in the long history of colonization, the growth of extractive landscape exploitation of the landscape, and shifting labor configurations, these projects accentuate and underscore the violent erasure that constructed the Pampa as a cultural desert in the first place.²⁶

Fresco was a provincial leader ruling under what historians consider a “thinly disguised conservative dictatorship.”²⁷ In the 1930s, he went from being an old-fashioned oligarch with ties to British railroad companies to rallying around critiques of foreign business interests.²⁸ He portrayed himself as a figure capable of mediating the central conflicts of capitalism, arguing that urban and rural workers

represent the economy and production, which means Capital and Labor, historically antagonistic and contradictory forces, maximum and sole sources of public and private wealth, generators of the enlargement and progress of nations [pueblos], that live together today in social peace and the tranquility of spirits.²⁹

While this was far from reality, it does reveal Fresco’s image of the state and its connection to labor and industry. While the context is very different, scholars have noted that Mussolini’s Fascist regime, which used the internal colonization of marshland territory in 1930s Italy, also inspired Fresco’s political program.³⁰ “God, Country, and Homeland” were guiding slogans for constructing state schools and public works projects.³¹ Fresco represented the corruption associated with the “Infamous Decade” of 1930s Argentina when the right-wing government intervened forcefully using electoral fraud to secure votes and a strict sense of social discipline in its messaging.³² Beyond rhetoric, Fresco sought to materialize this vision in built form, rationalizing labor in yet another conquest of the unruly hinterlands outside the capital. Francisco Salamone provided the bulk of the services within the cadre of engineers and architects delivering the province’s most visible and iconic structures. ³³

Operational Architecture

In Latin America, design professionals began to provide professional design services as governments became the primary patrons for large-scale projects between 1920 and 1945.³⁴ During this period, architects increasingly gravitated towards state contracts, serving liberal democracies and military dictatorships.³⁵ This was also the time of Argentina’s full entry into the global system of industrialized capitalism.³⁶ Like many of his generation, he was born in Italy and immigrated to Argentina at the beginning of the twentieth century. After studying in nearby Cordoba, he went to work in the Province of Buenos Aires. In addition to designing and constructing buildings for the state, he owned a paving business. Filling contracts for roads that drew together the various towns initially built during the Conquest of the Desert, Salamone represented the close relationship between the production of buildings, roads, and other infrastructure. His projects represent the scaling up of infrastructural and architectural production for the state, which sought to rationalize industry into a modernized network of roads linking industrialized agriculture and political power.³⁷

The projects are notable for their extensive scope and speed of assembly. Fresco planned a trinity of buildings (representing the state, industry, and religion) for all 110 counties within the Province of Buenos Aires. Salamone’s team began 100 projects in less than four years and completed most.³⁸ In addition to the works directed by Salamone during the Fresco administration, the province undertook a much larger set of infrastructure upgrades and expansions, including 197 bridges and 2,500 drains, all of them, like many of Salamone’s projects, using reinforced concrete.³⁹ The building boom was made possible by laws passed in 1928 and 1937 that allowed the provincial government to take on debt to fund construction projects so long as they were “in the public good.”⁴⁰

This team of architects and engineers worked in a burst of activity, especially between 1938 and 1940, in the final years of Fresco’s term. In addition to the scale, extent, and use of newer building technology, Salamone offered what were, at the time, innovative project delivery methods.⁴¹ Should budgets change, his designs were easily adapted; his striated, abstract, and highly repetitive Art Deco forms were quickly shrunk or stretched as needed. For example, because of delays in receiving funding approval for one municipality, the cost increase of materials used in wartime, like cement and steel, caused 30 percent budget overruns. Salamone quickly redesigned the project, rapidly altering the sizes of the tower and other buildings—demonstrating the liquid, flexible nature of his designs to respond to fluctuations in global commodity prices.⁴²

Municipal headquarter buildings were located adjacent to—or in some cases in the center of—the original plaza mayor that formed the historic centers of towns created as military outposts during the Conquest of the Desert. Therefore, the buildings symbolically reinscribe the early bastions of the conquest itself (Figure 5). Furthermore, while architects and engineers responsible for the municipal headquarters worked with local officials to arrive at a design, most buildings were executed with monumental verticality, creating a dramatic effect above the overwhelmingly flat surroundings (Figure 6). They mimic and accentuate the sentinel qualities of the rustic watchtowers used to surveil the Pampa during the military campaign of the 1870s (Figure 7). Like colossal boundary markers, the towers are nodes in a network of beachheads. They mark the process of conquering Indigenous land, absorbing it into state control.

Figure 5. Aerial view of Balcarce, Argentina. Image: Google Maps.

Figure 6. Francisco Salamone, municipal headquarters, Láprida, Argentina, 1938. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 7. Rustic watchtower for a small fort used during the Conquest of the Desert campaign, Cipolletti, Argentina. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Many of Salamone’s slaughterhouses utilize a similar vertical element, accentuating the built forms’ isolation within the Pampa’s mostly flat landscape. This visual effect is even more pronounced with the abattoirs, typically located just outside the town’s edge. Scholars have pointed to these mataderos as examples of scientific management—symbols of an industrializing sector tied to import substitution and rapid economic growth and volatility.⁴³ The siting of these projects accentuates their separation from the urban grid. As spaces of production, their orientation is either aligned with cardinal directions or aloof from the overriding geometries of the conquest urbanism (Figure 8). Instead, they integrate swooping ramps and curves, like miniature factories tied to the expanding road network for which the same architects, engineers, and contractors (like Salamone) were also responsible.⁴⁴

Figure 8. Francisco Salamone, slaughterhouse, aerial view, Láprida, 1939. Image: Google Maps.

In addition, the industrial slaughterhouses reflect prevailing efforts to regiment and rationalize industrial and agricultural labor. Hailed as modern, these miniature factories lodged industrial principles into the web of conquest infrastructure and linked the Pampa to the federal capital’s port. In fact, by the 1930s, estancieros were increasingly transforming their rural holdings into urban real estate—just one of the ways that capital and labor began to exit the Pampa and flow back to the city in a movement reversing the historical process of conquest.⁴⁵

Historians note the fact that at the same time that Salamone designed towers in the Pampa, Alberto Prebisch (an architect, structural engineer, and later the mayor of Buenos Aires) designed an obelisk for the recently cleared Avenida 9 de Julio in central Buenos Aires.⁴⁶ For the centennial monument and new avenue, Prebisch had entire blocks of downtown Buenos Aires demolished (Figure 9). As the land was cleared to make way for towers in the Pampa through a long process of genocide in the nineteenth century, the (highly symbolic) obelisk announces the dominance of the Argentine state, like many other empires, and the control of the land for the sake of extraction and export.

Figure 9. Inauguration of Avenue 9 de Julio, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1937. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Despite Governor Manuel Fresco’s attempt to mobilize dual industrialization of the town and country, the subsequent abandonment of the state-backed slaughterhouses is a reminder of the failed attempt to counter the pull of capital from the countryside to the city (Figure 10). Indeed, when the provincial governor attempted to fold workers into his provincial industrialization scheme, labor was increasingly moving in the opposite direction: out of the province to the Federal Capital, Buenos Aires.⁴⁷

Figure 10. Francisco Salamone, municipal slaughterhouse in Guaminí, Argentina, c. 1937. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Finally, the cemeteries, often the most photographed and garish of Salamone’s projects, serve as architectural counterpoints to the slaughterhouses. These, too, are sited at the city’s edge but are deliberately in dialogue with the existing urban grid. They are not sites of industrial production, but they are sites commemorating social reproduction. They are reminders that the reproduction and memorialization of society are crucial to staking claims on the land. Funerary and bombastic, the cemetery portals serve as markers of permanence (Opening Figure). They are functional placeholders for Christian occupation of the land, overwriting and overruling previous inhabitants, communities, and people.

The cemeteries persist as reminders of the European conquest of the Pampa and the Conquest of the Desert, offering a macabre subtext for sculptural elements in Salamone’s design, like the depiction of the Angel of Death at the cemetery portal in Azul (Figure 11). They do not commemorate the lives of murdered Indigenous people. They memorialize the primarily European settlers who claimed a small piece of land, or often merely a wage, in service of the territorial expansion of the Argentine state and its landed elites.

Figure 11. Francisco Salamone, sculpture for cemetery portal, Azul, Argentina, c. 1939. Image: Flickr, Creative Commons.

Building Materials: Aesthetics and Labor

In his research on the use of reinforced concrete in nineteenth-century France, Sérgio Ferro argues that architects and developers used this new building system to deskill the construction site, allowing capitalists to fight back against powerful trade unions. This new way of building blew apart the traditional processes and practices of bricklayers, masons, carpenters, and plasterers. Contractors could employ low-skilled workers using design drawings and specifications for a new building technology circumventing traditional, unionized trades.⁴⁸

Similarly, Michael Osman has argued that the aesthetic properties of concrete—its homogeneity—allowed for a visual smoothing of the disparate labor processes involved in modern construction.⁴⁹ Scholars of Salamone have argued that reinforced concrete allowed formal exuberance. Yet local labor conditions in Argentina may have been equally important in determining the ultimate building form. Indeed, by 1920, reinforced concrete was already making inroads as part of the industrialization of the building process, which also included using steel frames instead of load-bearing masonry.⁵⁰

Ferro’s example underlines how design often serves the interests of developers against the threat of union power. In selecting the form, materials, and crafts involved in the project, the “public good” that the project represents often contradicts the interests and habits of workers and tradespeople responsible for building construction.⁵¹ Indeed, the increased use of steel relied on the global commodities market, with Argentina considered the most “attractive” foreign market for steel imports from the United States, Britain, and Germany.⁵² Furthermore, in the leadup to Fresco’s rule, the Argentine construction industry had been increasingly radicalized, even paralyzing the city of Buenos Aires with massive strikes in 1935 and 1936, evidence of the growth in unionization in the building trades.⁵³ Nevertheless, during the 1930s, many large-scale unions that united multiple sectors and trades under a single organization were broken up, forcing smaller unions to negotiate without the benefit of scale, often mediated by the state.⁵⁴

Salamone may have chosen reinforced concrete for its representation of permanence. María González Pendás demonstrates how a closer view of the relationship between building processes and the documentation of construction labor itself can reveal the underlying logic of modernist experiments in design, construction, and business. This is the case with her analysis of Félix Candela’s reinforced concrete shell structures.⁵⁵ Yet, unlike Candela, who devised a building system expressing structure and enclosure in a single form, the work done in the 1930s in Argentina was far more heterogeneous. Not the product of a single technique or a single material, like reinforced concrete, many of Salamone’s buildings appear to be monolithic, when in fact they are hybrid structures, mixtures of traditional loadbearing brick with certain flourishes executed in reinforced concrete.

Nevertheless, this hybridity exemplifies inchoate political processes under the heavy hand of a centralizing provincial authority. Indeed, Fresco’s regime saw one of its significant accomplishments as intervening in labor disputes between the workers of various trades and their bosses. The map published in Fresco’s 1940 book, How I Confronted Labor Politics During my Government, proudly depicts the number of labor contracts arbitrated for multiple industries (including construction). The chunky icons—crosses, triangles, and half-circles—denote disaggregated trade unions, now under the supposed leadership of the provincial government. Their iconographic simplicity is oddly reminiscent of the cemeteries, slaughterhouses, and town halls dotting the local landscape (Figure 12). Like the maps of forts and railroad lines, the map presented in the governor’s self-aggrandizing publication invokes land and labor under the control and “protection” of the state, which mediates between workers and the forces of capital.

Figure 12. Unknown artist, map of agreements on salaries, 1936–40. From Manuel A. Fresco, Cómo encaré la política obrera durante mi gobierno. Directivas del poder ejecutivo. Nueva legislación del trabajo. Acción del Departamento del ramo 1936–1946 [How I Confronted Labor Politics During My Government. Executive Power Directives. New Labor Legislation. Actions by the Branch Department, 1936–1946] (La Plata, 1940). Image: New York Public Library.

Much of the recent journalism, academic research, and criticism of Salamone’s buildings seeks to bolster the claims for original Argentine modernism.⁵⁶ While there is no doubt that Western Europe and the United States have outsized claims to the modern architectural canon, the question of representation of autochthonous Latin American modern architecture must take seriously the historical and economic forces that concretize in built form.

Not only was Salamone’s work tied to an authoritarian, corrupt regime, but it was also part of the process ushering Argentina into the global capitalist system, which has resulted in repeated economic crises, especially for the working class in the country. Furthermore, the orchestration of the public works projects under Fresco reinscribes the erasure of Indigenous culture and the creation of the imagined “cultural desert” that was the initial justification for genocide and territorial expansion.

Architectural production and the bureaucratic state apparatus with which it was allied sought to break apart labor, only to superficially conjoin them under the unified aesthetic production of buildings, plazas, and even maps representing this rationalizing impulse. Thus, as Salamone’s work is made increasingly visible through journalism, scholarship, and preservation, we must remember its original purpose, its historical context, and the contradictory tendencies from which it emerged in this particular conquest of the desert.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dante Furioso

Dante Furioso is an architect and PhD student in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, where he was a Lassen Fellow in the Program in Latin American Studies between 2021 and 2022. He holds an MArch from the Yale School of Architecture, where he was an editor of Perspecta, a BA in History from Wesleyan University, and studied at the University of Buenos Aires between 2005 and 2006. Focusing on histories of architectural production in the long nineteenth century, his research concerns the relationship between colonization, industrialization, construction labor, and the emergence of design practice across the Americas.

Notes

1 In Sarmiento’s original, idiosyncratic, and rationalized Spanish: “El mal que aqueja a la República Arjentina es la estension: el desierto la rodea por todas partes [sic].” Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: civilización y barbarie [Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism], 1st. ed., Biblioteca de clásicos argentinos; vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Estrada, 1940), 1.

2 Also beyond the scope of this paper, the notion of “civilization and barbarism” was a recurring theme in Argentine political thought. Sources abound, but in the context of the Conquest of the Desert, see Andrés Bonatti, Una guerra infame: la verdadera historia de la Conquista del Desierto [An Infamous War: The True History of the Conquest of the Desert], 1st ed. (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2015), 20–22.

3 Oscar Terán, Historia de las ideas en la argentina: diez lecciones iniciales, 1810–1980 [History of Ideas in Argentina: Ten Initial Lessons, 1810–1980], Biblioteca básica de historia (Buenos Aires, Argentina) (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Argentina, 2008), 65–91.

4 The River Plate or Río de la Plata is the wide estuary separating the Argentine Republic from the Oriental Republic of Uruguay and also refers to the region that encompasses the two national capitals, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. By desert, in the geographic sense, I refer to an area with comparatively low average precipitation. While Argentina does have areas of geographical desert, this is not the sense in which it was used in nineteenth-century discourse. Beyond Sarmiento, the term has been used by important historians such as Tulio Halperín Donghi. See Tulio Halperín Donghi, Una nación para el desierto argentino [A Nation for the Argentine Desert], Ed. definitiva/rev. by T. Halperin Donghi., Colección de historia argentina (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2005).

5 What is today the modern nation state of Argentina was essentially a colonial backwater from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century that served primarily as an entrepôt between silver-rich Spanish Peru and the European metropole. Without the capital and resources of Peru or Mexico, and lacking substantial Indigenous military allies, Spanish control of the temperate territory came later than in other parts of the Americas. See Juan Garavaglia, “The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: The La Plata Basin (1535–1650),” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas: Volume 3: South America, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–58, https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521630764.002.

6 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Writing Past Colonialism Series (New York: Cassell, 1999); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (December 1, 2006): 387–409, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240.

7 Sai Englert, “Settlers, Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession,” Antipode 52:6 (2020): 1647–66, https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12659.

8 Garavaglia, “The Crises and Transformations,” 1.

9 Garavaglia, “The Crises and Transformations,” 1.

10 Bonatti, Una guerra infame, 192.

11 For a full account of the creation of the elite, ruling class in Argentina see Tulio Halperín Donghi, Revolución y guerra: Formación de una élite dirigente en la argentina criolla [Revolution and War: The Formation of a Ruling Elite in Creole Argentina], 1st ed. (in Spanish). (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Argentina, 1972).

12 The Sociedad Rural represented the interests of those elites who owned estancias, or large estates of land. These estancieros were in conflict with the overwhelmingly urban working classes. See Bonatti, Una guerra infame, 18–19; Robert J. Alexander, A History of Organized Labor in Argentina (London: Praeger, 2003), 51–52.

13 For a discussion of the relationship between the Pampa and modernist architecture in the 1940s see Ana María León, Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires. First edition. Lateral Exchanges. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021, 77–128, in particular 77–80.

14 Ana María León and Andrew Herscher, “At the Border of Decolonization,” e-flux Architecture, The Settler Colonial Project, May 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/at-the-border/325762/at-the-border-of-decolonization/; Ana María León, “Plains and Pampa: Decolonizing ‘America,’” Harvard Design Magazine, accessed February 3, 2023, https://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/48/plains-and-pampa-decolonizing-america.

15 Both maps, and their representation of the Pampa, allowed the crucial aspect of Argentina’s capitalist economy—land—to be seen and reconstructed as a series of fields, first as a site of a battle, then as one for construction and movement of goods, people, and capital. See Susan Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display,” Critical Inquiry 21:2 (1995): 441.

16 Peter H. Smith, Politics and Beef in Argentina: Patterns of Conflict and Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 33.

17 Smith, Politics and Beef, 1.

18 Smith, Politics and Beef, 13.

19 Aldo Ferrer, The Argentine Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 135.

20 Jairus Banaji, Theory and History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2010), 333.

21 The Roca-Runciman Treaty of 1933 was the subject of much debate and negotiation. See Smith, Politics and Beef, 142–44.

22 Approximately 3,330,000 (mostly European) immigrants arrived in Argentina between 1857 and 1914, with the government establishing universal, obligatory male suffrage in 1912. Ferrer, The Argentine Economy, 89.

23 For more on the specific conditions that led to the coup and corruption in Buenos Aires and nationally see María Dolores Béjar, El régimen fraudulento: la política en la provincia de Buenos Aires, 1930–1943, [The Fraudulent Regime: Politics in the Province of Buenos Aires, 1930–1943] Colección Historia y Cultura (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores Argentina, 2005); David Rock, Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Movement, Its History, and Its Impact (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

24 Béjar, El régimen fraudulento, 151–52.

25 The Province of Buenos Aires is separate from the National Capital of Buenos Aires, though they are historically related and geographically nested. For a comprehensive account of many of these works, see René Longoni and Juan Carlos Molteni, Francisco Salamone: sus obras municipales y la identidad bonaerense [Francisco Salamone: His Municipal Work and the Identity of Buenos Aires], Serie cuarta: Estudios sobre la historia y la geografía histórica de la Provincia de Buenos Aires 12 (La Plata: Provincia de Buenos Aires, Instituto Cultural, Dirección Provincial de Patrimonio Cultural, Archivo Histórico “Dr. Ricardo Levene,” 2004).

26 The number of articles about Salamone in the popular press in Argentina is notable, with articles appearing over the past few years in La Nación, Clarín, and other mainstream newspapers. A bourgeoning tourist trade has developed, with a “Salamone Route” being promoted as a way to see the circuit of work of this “enigmatic” Argentine architect as part of an experience. See for example Pierre Dumas, “La ruta Salamone: un viaje por la enigmática obra del gran arquitecto [“The Salamone Route: A Journey Through the Enigmatic Work of the Great Architect”],” La Nacion, January 6, 2019, https://www.lanacion.com.ar/turismo/viajes/la-ruta-del-futurismo-bonaerense-nid2208006/. In fact, two of the primary scholars of Salomone, both practicing architects and professors at the University of La Plata, Argentina, first published their research through a university press and later published it in a series, Masters of Argentine Architecture, produced by the nation’s largest newspaper. See René Longoni and Juan Carlos Molteni, Francisco Salamone, Maestros de la arquitectura argentina 5 (Buenos Aires: ARQ: Diarios de arquitectura de Clarín, 2014).

27 Alexander, A History of Organized Labor, 51.

28 Ramón Gutiérrez, Arquitectura y urbanismo en Iberoamérica [Architecture and Urbanism in Ibero-America], Manuales Arte Cátedra (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1983), 25.

29 In the original Spanish: “Representáis la economía y la producción, que quiere decir Capital y Trabajo, fuerzas antagónicas y contrapuestas, fuentes máximas y únicas de la riqueza pública y privada, generadoras del engrandecimiento y el progreso de los pueblos, que conviven hoy en la paz social y en la tranquilidad de los espíritus.” Manuel A. Fresco, Cómo encaré la política obrera durante mi gobierno. Directivas del poder ejecutivo. Nueva legislación del trabajo. Acción del Departamento del ramo. 1936–1946 [How I Confronted Labor Politics During My Government. Executive Power Directives. New Labor Legislation. Actions by the Branch Department, 1936–1946], vol. 1 (La Plata, 1940), v.

30 Béjar, El régimen fraudulento, 160. For a discussion of the reclamation of territory in Fascist Italy, see Paolo Gruppuso, “In-between Solidity and Fluidity: The Reclaimed Marshlands of Agro Pontino,” Theory, Culture & Society 39:2 (March 1, 2022): 53–73, https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211038669.

31 Rock, Authoritarian Argentina, 115–116. For the connection between Fresco, Salamone, and Mussolini, see Alberto Bellucci and Theodore McNabney, “Monumental Deco in the Pampas: The Urban Art of Francisco Salamone,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 18 (1992): 91, https://doi.org/10.2307/1504091.

32 For more on the década infame, as it is known in Spanish, see Béjar, El régimen fraudulento, 143.

33 This included engineers José Licciardi, Oscar López Méndez, Rodolfo Migone, Luis Constantine, among many others. See Longoni and Molteni, Francisco Salamone, 52.

34 Silvia Arango, Ciudad y arquitectura: seis generaciones que construyeron la américa latina [City and Architecture: Six Generations that Constructed Latin America], Arte universal (Mexico City, Mexico) (México, D.F.: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2012), 207.

35 This is my interpretation of Arango, who emphasizes that architects began to see themselves as “public servants,” albeit for regimes whose relationship to the public was often one of outright repression, fraud, and violence. Arango, Ciudad y arquitecture, 211–12.

36 María Jimena Cruz, “Paisajes de La Modernidad En La Provincia de Buenso Aires: La Obra Del Arquitecto Francisco Salamone (1936–1940) [“Landscapes of Modernity in the Province of Buenos Aires: The Work of Architect Francisco Salamone (1936–1940)”],” Revista de Arqueología Histórica Argentina y Latinoamericana 7 (2013): 67–87. 72.

37 Further research on the details of Salamone’s relationship with Fresco and the various intermediaries involved in the projects is needed to fully appreciate the production of the work. For treatment of historic urbanization in Britain, see Linda Clarke, Building Capitalism: Historical Change and the Labour Process in the Production of Built Environment, Routledge Revivals (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2011).

38 Longoni and Molteni, Francisco Salamone, 131–33.

39 Longoni and Molteni, Francisco Salamone, 35.

40 Longoni and Molteni, Francisco Salamone, 34–35.

41 Not only did Salmone offer a form of total design and project management—from the street to the plaza, to the building, to the interior fixtures—but he offered design services and turn-key products with a 5 percent down payment from the municipality. Whether the funds were immediately available or not, municipalities could begin designing with Salamone today and pay at a later date. He charged comparatively high fees for the time—10 percent of the total project cost—but often elected officials and local bosses signed on, given the lower initial deposit. Graciela María Viñuales, “La Trayectoria de Salamone [“The Trajectory of Francisco Salamone”],” in Francisco Salamone En La Provincia de Buenos Aires: Obra y Patrimonio, 1936-1940 [Francisco Salamone in the Province of Buenos Aires: Work and Heritage (1936–1940)], ed. Felicidad París Benito and Alejandro Novacovsky (Mar del Plata: CEDODAL Mar del Plata: Facultad de Arquitectura, Urbanismo y Diseño, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, 2011), 64–65.

42 Viñuales, “La Trayectoria de Salamone,” 64–65.

43 Smith, Politics and Beef, 17.

44 The paving material for most streets was granite, which in large part arrived as ballast used in European ships used to transport cereals. William Ewing, Construction Materials and Machinery in Argentina and Bolivia, Spec. Agents Series No. 188 (Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1920), 50.

45 By the late 1930s, estancieros were building some of the first skyscrapers in the country, attempting to convert rural, agricultural capital into urban real estate capital. Roy Hora, The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas: A Social and Political History, 1860–1945, Oxford Historical Monographs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 200–201.

46 Bellucci and McNabney, “Monumental Deco in the Pampas,” 102.

47 Béjar, El régimen fraudulento, 151.

48 Sérgio Ferro, “Concrete As Weapon,” trans. Alice Fiuza and Silke Kapp, Harvard Design Magazine, No Sweat, 46 (Fall/Winter 2018): (insert) 8–33.

49 Michael Osman, “The Managerial Aesthetics of Concrete,” Perspecta 45 (2012): 67–76.

50 Ewing, Construction Materials and Machinery in Argentina and Bolivia, 64.

51 Sérgio Ferro, “Dessin/Chantier: An Introduction,” in Industries of Architecture, ed. Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tilo Amhoff, and Nick Beech, 1st ed, vol. 11, Critiques: Critical Studies in Architectural Humanities (Oxon: Routledge, 2016).

52 Ewing, Construction Materials and Machinery in Argentina and Bolivia, 68.

53 Norberto Galasso and Alfredo Luis Ferraresi, Historia de los trabajadores argentinos, 1857–2018 [History of Argentine Workers, 1857–2018], 1st ed. (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Colihue, 2018), 77–76; Alexander, A History of Organized Labor, 64.

54 Alexander, A History of Organized Labor, 65.

55 María González Pendás, “Fifty Cents a Foot, 14,500 Buckets: Concrete Numbers and the Illusory Shells of Mexican Economy,” Grey Room 71 (June 1, 2018): 14–39, https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00240.

56 Much more work is to be done to understand just how this burst of activity between 1936 and 1940 was carried out. Original documents are only now being discovered, which will surely lead to further research. Just in April of 2023 a box of 25 original plans and other documents was discovered in a municipal headquarters storage facility in the province of Buenos Aires. “Encontraron 25 planos originales del arquitecto Salamone en Azul. Ocurrió durante una revisión del Archivo Municipal [“Twenty-Five Original Plans Found by the Architect Salamone in Azul. It Happened During a Review of the Municipal Archive”],” Página/12, April 14, 2023, sec. Cultura, https://www.pagina12.com.ar/540597-encontraron-25-planos-originales-del-arquitecto-salamone-en-.