The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite in the Nineteenth Century: The Example of the Senillosas

Using a reconstruction of the history of Felipe Senillosa and his family as a point of departure, this article examines the nineteenth-century Buenos Aires entrepreneurial elite, with particular reference to the way this group developed and evolved over time. An émigré who fled from the restoration of absolutist rule in Spain after the fall of Napoleon, Senillosa arrived on the shores of the River Plate as this area moved toward independence, and in the span of a few years he worked his way into the porteñosocioeconomic elite. Senillosa was able to leave his heirs a significant fortune that included not only estanciasin the province of Buenos Aires but also several other economic undertakings. Senillosa's two sons, Felipe Bonifacio and Pastor, occupied notable positions within the late-nineteenth-century Argentine upper class and were esteemed among the most prestigious rural entrepreneurs of their time. However, they did not emulate the economic success of their father and as a result began to lose standing among the truly rich. Lacking entrepreneurial talent, the members of the next generation found it difficult to maintain their social position, and they continued on a downward trajectory. By the 1910s, the Senillosas were no longer among the wealthiest families in Argentina.

The Senillosas are a particularly noteworthy example of the ascent of an immigrant family to the center of the Argentine economic elite and of the opportunities for social and economic advancement present in the River Plate after independence. No less important, their story also reveals much about the pressures that forced some members of the late-nineteenth-century upper class to descend from their former lofty positions—a phenomenon that, despite its significance, has been largely neglected by historians. Considered as a whole, the Senillosas' rise and fall turns out to be highly illustrative of the strengths and weaknesses of the nineteenth-century propertied class and allows us to advance some hypotheses regarding the characteristics and evolution of this group.

A brief reference to the historiographic debate on the Argentine economic elite may provide a useful introduction to this issue. Traditionally, historians have argued that the nineteenth-century propertied class was a parasitic, rent-seeking elite that based its economic and social supremacy on control of the fertile pampean land. This negative view of large rural entrepreneurs, which socialist and other left-leaning thinkers developed at the beginning of the twentieth century, gained wide currency after the Great Depression, as the export sector entered into a long period of decline and the economy lost momentum. In the last 30 years, however, this interpretation has been called into question. Despite the rural sector's weak performance after the Great Depression, this portrait of the pre-1930 landed elite as lacking entrepreneurial spirit and as an impediment to economic growth precludes a coherent explanation of the formidable agrarian expansion that stretched from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s and made Argentina one of the world's leading agricultural exporters. This fact explains why most current views on the nineteenth century rural entrepreneurs emphasize their dynamism, entrepreneurial spirit, and business acumen. ¹

Jorge F. Sábato's La clase dominante en la Argentina moderna is perhaps the most powerful indictment of the traditional conception of the Argentine economic elite to date. Sábato's work not only questions the supposed backwardness of the major landholders of the pampas but also seeks to reject the very definition of the turn-of-the-century economic elite as a landed class. Sábato did not look into the earlier period, and thus for the most part he accepted the depiction of the postindependence business elite as a landed class. But he insisted that between 1880 and World War I large-scale entrepreneurs formed an extremely dynamic business group whose economic interests...