"Spanish colonial domination of Argentina"
[p. 12]
II
The Spaniards who had come with Mendoza a and many others who arrived in the country at different times founded many towns and managed to defeat and dominate the Indians.
They then began to trade and to cultivate the land, organising themselves similarly to Spanish cities.
Since in our country they did not find any gold mines as they had in Peru , the settlers could not accumulate wealth, for which reason only very few of them returned to Spain; nearly all stayed in the country, where they established their homes and brought up their families.
Consequently they became more interested in the matters of the land and wanted to govern it according to their needs and interests.
This was entirely normal since nobody is more capable of successfully administering and leading a country than the ones living there because they are the ones who really know the needs to be fulfilled and the interests to be protected.
The king of Spain , however, did not agree; he did not want anything to be done without his command, not even
[p. 13]
[Depiction of the early city of Buenos Aires. Text included in the depiction: Buenas Aeres, Rio della Plata oder Parana]
Buenos Aires en 1535
[p. 14]
the simplest matters could be decided without the sovereign’s permission.
The inhabitants of the country were neither allowed to plant vines nor to sell the things they produced to whom they wanted, they could not open up a school without superior orders, and all the official posts were occupied by Europeans; the creoles b were considered incapable and unworthy of making their fortune on their own.
This bad governance, which impoverished the country and humiliated the creoles, was the reason they lost their affection for the conquering race and why they wanted to be independent, in which they were eventually successful.
[a] Editor´s note: Pedro de Mendoza was a Spanish conquistador. In 1536 he founded the colony of Buenos Aires. He became the first governor of the Río de la Plata region in what is today Argentina. See Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pedro-de-Mendoza (20.07.2016). ↩
[b] Editor´s note: In this context, the term creoles ( criollos ) designated people of European, mostly Spanish, descent who had been born in the territory of what was to become Argentina. The term served to differentiate Creole people from Spanish colonial administrators and more recent immigrants who had been born in Europe. On the diverse and varying meanings of the term in Spanish, Portuguese, English and French see Bauer, Ralph; Mazzotti, José Antonio: Introduction. Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas, in: Bauer, Ralph; Mazzotti, José Antonio (eds.): Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas. Empires, Texts, Identities, Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009, 1–57, here 3-6, 52-54. ↩
