User:Ttocserp/Anchorena family

The Anchorena family were the major landowners of 19th and 20th century Argentina. At their peak they held 1,600,000 acres (9,582 sq km) of well watered cattle ranchlands, probably the largest fertile landholding on the American continent. They were blood relatives of the Argentine strongman Juan Manuel de Rosas, who before going into politics had managed their estates. Swift to adapt to changing conditions, the Anchorenas' fortunes were tied up with the emergent Argentine republic. Astute absentee managers, it seems that they rarely set foot on their estates.

Origins
The family made their money in trade; only later did they diversify into land,

Around 1751 Juan Esteban Anchorena, a 15 or 17-year old Basque immigrant, landed in Buenos Aires. Probably he was penniless. He had arrived opportunely at the right place, however.

At that time the focus of the Spanish Empire in South America was Peru, with its silver mines and Pacific outlook. Buenos Aires, a small town on the Atlantic seaboard, was an insignificant backwater. It had even been forbidden to trade directly with the mother country. This was to change dramatically. The Spanish Crown was becoming increasingly anxious about Portuguese expansion in the region. To provide a strong bulwark against it, the Spanish created the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. The new polity was meant to be defensible and to pay its own way, so it was allocated a large territory including Upper Peru (now in Bolivia), the Cuyo provinces of Chile and what is now northern and central Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Buenos Aires was promoted to be its capital, the seat of the Viceroy.

The city now became an important Atlantic trading hub with links to Europe and the Caribbean, and the single source of imported luxury goods for the entire Viceroyalty. It seems Juan Esteban was successful in this trade. He got his start as a cashier in an esquina (corner shop) owned by a fellow Basque, and gradually diversified into trading on his own account, travelling about the Viceroyalty and dealing in hides, mules, slaves and other merchandise.

By 1773 he had done well enough to be allowed to marry Romana Josefa Löpez de Anaya y Ruiz, the daughter of a respectable but impoverished local merchant. From the condescending terms of the marriage contract — and the poor spelling of his surviving letters — it seems she was marrying beneath her station. . He continued to prosper, and by the time of his death (1803) he had amassed a quarter of a million silver pesos, one of the larger fortunes of the time. Further, there were only three surviving sons to inherit it.

Second generation
Two years after Juan Esteban's death, Buenos Aires deposed Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros, the last Spanish viceroy. By 1826 the armies of Spain in South America had been defeated. The Viceroyalty balkanised, shattering the commercial world in which the father had made his fortune. Instead of luxury goods from Spain the region'a main import was mass-produced English cottons. Its main export was hides, the price of which rose steeply in the newly free market. The three sons — Juan José, Tomás and Nicolás — were swift to seize the new commercial opportunities, increasing and multiplying their inherited fortunes. It is known that already by 1816 Tomás was worth 95,000 silver pesos, Juan José married with 200,000, and Nicolás ended his days richer than either.

These fortunes were much larger than were then made in cattle ranching, which was a risky business. There were occasional droughts, Indian raids, civil wars, confiscations, impressments and price fluctuations. Few landed estates were worth 25,000 pesos. In 1820, however, the brothers began to divert part of their capital into rural properties, probably as a hedge against inflation, mainly in the south of Buenos Aires province.