'Corn Fever': Italian Tenant Farming Families in Argentina (1895-1912)

Abstract

Grito de Alcorta is the name under which the first great agrarian strike in Argentina has gone down in history. It was an outburst which roused land? owners, politicians and intellectuals brusquely from their dreams of an unbounded and unproblematic prosperity. On 25 June 1912, the farmers of Alcorta, a village in the province of Santa Fe, stopped work in the fields. As tenants, they wished to obtain from their respective landowners, or 'colonizing intermediaries', a sizable reduction in their rentals and a series of contractual improvements. These were designed to ensure a drop in production costs, greater stability of land tenure, indepen? dence in managing tenant affairs, and immunity from any kind of personal constraint or interference. In response to the intransigence of the landowners they were able to threaten to withhold sowing of the corn on time. It was necessary to begin sowing by September. From Alcorta, the conflict rapidly spread throughout the whole of the southern part of the province of Santa Fe, in the heart of the Argentine corn belt.1 The dense organizational network was consolidated throughout the month of July and the protest thus came to involve the neighbouring provinces of Cordoba and Buenos Aires. By 1 August, the peasant movement was already strong enough to set up a union to combine the action committees and farmers' associations that had sprung up all over the three provinces; it was named the Federacion Agraria Argentina (F.A.A.). At the end of September the land? owners in the first areas hit by the conflict agreed to sign new and better con? tracts. However, the tenants in the La Pampa region, where wheat (which had to be harvested in November and December) was the main crop, then started their own dispute, which was bitterly fought out until December. The Grito de Alcorta was not a sudden or isolated flare-up. It was the symptom of a deep crisis that had been building up over the previous few years and which was to break out again in the years to come: further strikes took place in 1913, 1917, and 1919. In the process, the farmers and their unions were transformed into major forces in Argentine political life.2 The roots of the 'agrarian question' in the heart of the world's largest granary' will be the subject of this article.