Pulperías and Contraband Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires Province

The pulpería , a country store and tavern, stood with the estancia as the most important socio-economic institutions of the Argentine pampa. The store served multiple social and commercial functions (both licit and illicit) and survived into the twentieth century despite virulent verbal attacks and calls for legislative restriction from the colonial era on. Some commentators lauded the pulpería as the outpost of civilization on the savage frontier and projected the pulpero or proprietor as civilization's lonely representative in a barbarian world. He supposedly embodied patriotism, culture, and free enterprise in a hostile, alien environment of anti-social, localistic, unlettered gauchos—the itinerant horsemen of the pampas. Evidence weighs heavily in the opposite direction; however, and the pulpero of fact rather than myth functioned as a contraband capitalist exploiting the landless rural masses and preying upon ranchers whose livestock provided the goods for illicit trade. Far from encouraging culture and civilization on the vast pampa, the pulpería housed excessive drinking and gambling, prostitution, and served as an arena for violent, often fatal, knifefights

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