The Blood of Cows

A personal history hidden in a decaying industrial site

Photo by Ryan Song on Unsplash.

The first three years of my life were funded by the blood of cows. Although I wasn’t aware of it till much later, my architect father worked for Swift in Argentina from 1959 to 1964, designing meat-packing facilities.

Though it wasn’t what he wanted to do forever, it was a good job. It paid much better than most architecture jobs, and the work was interesting because it presented unique challenges and was different from anything he’d done before (designing apartments, shopping centers, movie theaters). He would have presumably continued there for a while had the company not gone under.

By a chance set of circumstances, my father got an inside tip about Swift’s impending demise during a time when he happened to be corresponding with a former professor at the University of Illinois. The professor told him that if he returned to Urbana he’d have a job for him; six months later, a few weeks before I turned three, we had moved. My first solid memory is of the flight over here, my five-month-old sister in a crib with our heavy silverware hidden under her blankets.

Three months after that, the company went bankrupt.

A tale of industrial decay

My father spent most of his life as a professor, and until recently I was only dimly aware of his previous career. That changed when he went on Google Earth, as he does now and then to search for former haunts, and found a site of industrial decay in Berisso, Argentina, where he’d designed some buildings in the early ‘60s.

Google Earth view of buildings my father designed, now abandoned and decaying. The “S” from “Swift” is still there, but the rest of the name was painted over with a new one.

In an image from the video below, you can see the same building with the Swift name showing and a building to its left that’s no longer there.

This 8-minute video (in Spanish and Portuguese) shows some of the decay, the area’s history, ads for what look like singularly unappetizing meat products, and even a short clip from a 1958 film that was set there:

Berisso, near Buenos Aires (where we lived), was for years a thriving meat processing center employing many thousands of workers, mostly immigrants, who came to benefit from its “golden age.” That era began in 1904 and was accelerated with the arrival in 1907 of meat-packing giants Swift and Armour.

The original Swift & Company was founded by Gustavus Franklin Swift and incorporated in Chicago in 1875; though details are scarce on the internet, I did learn that Swift Internacional, an Argentine holding company for the international operations of Swift & Company, was spun off from Swift in 1918. At some point, International Packers Limited, then Deltec International (a merchant banking operation based in the Bahamas, which somehow sounds shifty!) owned all the Swift and Armour meat-packing plants in Argentina, as well as in various other countries like Brazil, New Zealand, and Australia.

Swift and Armour provided economic opportunities for the men, women, and children (yes, children) it employed, as well as for the numerous businesses that served the workers. But the picture wasn’t all rosy, as you can probably tell by the child labor. Abysmal labor conditions in the meat-packing plants prompted a 1945 march of workers to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, in what’s now considered the beginning of Peronism in Argentina. In the early ‘60s, when my father spent time there, the facilities had been modernized and working conditions much improved, but the meat-packing jobs don’t sound like ones you’d like to have. It was hard, sweaty work, and the pungent, unpleasant odor of the meat stayed on you long after you left the facility.

At the Berisso site, my father remembers designing not only a meat-processing area, including a chilling building, but also a power plant that served just that facility. The animal carcasses would be quartered on the killing floor, the quarters then hung from hooks and conveyed to their assigned rooms in the chilling building. There, they’d be cooled over a couple weeks to the optimal temperature, between 34 and 36 degrees; the cooling had to be done gradually to ensure water didn’t evaporate from the meat, because it was packaged and sold by weight — the more water content, the more weight Swift could charge for. Once chilled, the meat was loaded onto refrigerated ships and shipped to England for sale.

My father had to commute quite a ways on his frequent visits to the building site, catching a bus at 6am and then a shuttle to the facility.

To visit the Berisso site, my father had to commute over an hour from Buenos Aires, via bus and factory shuttle.

2019 Google Maps view of the apartment building my father designed in the Buenos Aires suburb Florida; we lived in one of the apartments.

I’m not clear on all of Swift’s history; Swift seems to be operating in Argentina to this day, and the 1964 bankruptcy isn’t mentioned in any company timelines. The video above makes it sound like Swift maintained operations in Berisso after the company went bankrupt, though my father certainly would have been out of a job had he stayed. Whatever the situation at that time, all meat-packing operations at the Berisso facility ceased in 1983.

By then, we were long gone.

A tale of immigrants

Like many depressed industrial sites, the decaying meat-packing plants hold many stories. The story of Berisso is a story of immigrants, but most of those immigrants were factory workers. The story of the immigrant architect, also embedded in the now-crumbling buildings, had a very different trajectory.

My father’s family moved to Argentina from Italy when he was 18. His entrepreneur father was seeking new business opportunities, and the family did well in both Argentina and Uruguay before eventually moving back to Italy.

Though he started college in Argentina, my father finished his studies in Urbana, Illinois, of all places — where he met my mother, who was from Buenos Aires. They moved back to Argentina to get married; he never expected to end up living in the United States for most of his life, any more than he expected to become a college professor. But that move back to Urbana allowed him to build an unexpected career that he loved.

My mother also benefited from the move, which opened up more opportunities to her. She might not have considered becoming a professor either if they’d stayed in Buenos Aires, but in Urbana she got a PhD and then a position at the university. The move must have been a big deal for her, since Argentina was her home, the place where she’d grown up. But the idea of moving around might not have seemed so foreign; she too was from a family of immigrants in Argentina, like many there. Her mother’s older sisters were born in Russia; her father grew up in Russia and immigrated to Chicago in his teens and later to Buenos Aires.

Although my father started out making a lot less money as an assistant professor than he’d made at Swift, both of my parents enjoyed fulfilling careers. Not only did their university jobs pay quite decently in the end — they were also doing work they were passionate about and engaged in. Plus, the move allowed my father to discover that he preferred teaching, something he’d never considered doing, to practicing architecture.

A tale of chance

So much of life is chance. There was a lot of chance involved in all of my grandparents moving to Argentina from distant continents. Chance played a big role in taking my parents, and then our family, from Buenos Aires to the middle of Illinois. Chance brought me into the world in a family that had the means and ability to move among continents seeking better opportunities.

Like the immigrants who went to Berisso, as an immigrant to the U.S. I benefited from economic opportunities in my new country. Unlike them, I came from a prosperous middle-class background and parents with advanced degrees who already spoke the language of their adopted country and had connections here. The situations we are born into are pure chance.

Chance also shaped the history of Berisso. Its rise to prominence was propelled in part by the rich resources of Argentina, including its famed beef, and in part by situations no one would have predicted, like the demand for canned meat to feed soldiers during various wars. Volatile, corrupt Argentine politics and global economic fluctuations — again, chance — turned Berisso’s thriving meat-packing industry into a distant memory. Few are left who remember it now, though the crumbling buildings may yet stand for some time. But the meat-packing industry in Argentina played a major role in the country’s history. Berisso’s meat-packing era will maintain a place in history books long after it’s faded from the memories of living people.