Alejandra García
and Gladis J. Mignacco [1]

The negotiation of identities through the generation of connoted place names seems to be a recurrent strategy of the South American governing elites to align geographic spaces with social and economic policies. Venado Tuerto, a city in the Argentine province of Santa Fe founded by Eduardo Casey in 1884, became an important settlement of Irish and other immigrants. In order to provide an understanding of the toponymic process, street names and their changes from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the 1930s are identified and studied in this article within the context of local and national social changes. Venado Tuerto (the name) is associated with the frontier land in the pampas, a place where the concept of Nation was to be developed, and where the sense of community was conceived step by step. Toponymy, a necessary complement for the logoization of cartography (cf. Benedict Anderson 1991), establishes the relationship between societies, time, and place names. The link between the geographic space and the perceived idea of frontier came from the fact that urban people integrated themselves better to the environment than the rural population. In a foundational stage, toponymy represented the values of the immigrants. The identification with an European ethos was key to represent their opposition between civilisation and barbarism. As a consequence, there was a cultural supremacy of the Irish settlers. At a later phase, the project of creating an Argentine identity gave preference to the sense of ownership over other values. This included the European immigration typical of the twentieth century. The toponymy of Venado Tuerto streets is a sample representation of these identification processes.

During the settlement of the area around Venado Tuerto, toponymy changed according to different historical, political, social and cultural forces of the country and the city. When we analyse those changes taking into account the contributions of cultural geography, an unexpected local history is revealed. Cultural geography help to research the city streets’ toponymy through time, and provides an understanding of continuities, changes and anomalies. This research shows the place naming modalities from the foundation of Venado Tuerto until the present time.

Streets Names in Old and New Venado Tuerto

Does the foundation of Venado Tuerto, its name, urban planning, and street naming reveal the history and the geography of the place? Were history and geography taken into account during those fundamental processes?

© Alejandra García and Gladis J. Mignacco, Irish Argentine Historical Society

Last Update: July 2004