Generations...
Jennie Howard arrived in Argentina in 1893 as part of a delegation of sixty-five North American teachers hired by Domingo F. Sarmiento (education leader and ex-president) to organize teachers' seminars in the country. She was 38 years old and had had a long and successful teaching career in the U.S.. Howard organized the Normal School for Women of Corrientes and was regent and vice-director of the Normal School for Women in Córdoba.
Howard, a well-educated woman of some means, recounted in her memoirs, published in Spanish in 1931:
"Forty-six years ago (1883), geographic knowledge of the Argentine Republic in the United States of America, even among teachers, was limited mainly to the old name, Patagonia. This appeared vertically on the maps of South America in the geography books of the time, bisected by the stranger name of Buenos Aires that we pronounced “Bonus Airs.” The other references were the illustrations, in those same books, of long lines of carts that crossed endless plains. So distant did those remote and fabulous lands seem, and so scarce was the amount of information you could get about them, that there was little interest in knowing where those carts were going or from where they came.
If by chance some people had heard mention of Sarmiento as a progressive representative to the United States government of some country, few associated him with the earth kicked up by the oxen pulling those carts…"
