Walter's Story
Photo © Sergio Quaroni
When you walk from the central plaza of Corral de Bustos (a small town of 15,000 people in the middle of the Pampa Gringa in the South of Córdoba), you arrive at the last road that divides the town from the country. Standing there, at the limit, you see the fence, the field, the windmill, the small forest scattered in the pampa. The Pampa Gringa is where immigrants, mainly Italians who came Argentina in the late nineteenth century, settled down. I was born and raised in that landscape.
Corral de Bustos is located between the Camino Real (Royal Road) and the Camino de Frontera (Frontier Road). Camino Real linked Buenos Aires (since its foundation in 1536) to Cuzco, the center of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Camino Real connected Buenos Aires with the territory of the Indians, activated in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the time the railroad from Rio Cuarto to Rosario was constructed, von Inflinger and Godeken (German immigrants) had purchased an enormous amount of land. Their land formed a triangle with other large extensions of land that belonged to the Urangas, a family of “Gallegos” (as all Spaniards were called) that settled in the region in the second half of the XVIIIth century.
Although this narrative came to me later on my life, it was imprinted in my body during the eighteen years I lived in that town. And with time I learned to see the world, and today to look at globalization, from that embodiment and from the southern geo-political and geo-economic perspective. All of what I did in the past 25 years is grounded in the splendors and miseries of those years; in the joy of simplicity in life and the discomfort of the imperial/colonial wound as lived by families of Italian migrants that landed in the middle of nowhere.