There are only about 200 or 300 Indians in the Poma region at the present time. They act as muleteers for the pack trains and otherwise herd cattle, sheep, and goats and raise a few potatoes and the like.
There is no law compelling the Indians (called peons, i. e. workmen) to work on the fincas, or farms, as in Bolivia and parts of Peru. The use of the land is arranged when they come to rent it. Each finca is a cross section of the valley and is generally owned by whites or persons of mixed white and Indian blood. A part of each proprietor’s holdings in the valley is cultivated under his personal direction, though the greater part is pasture land. What he does not superintend directly he rents to so-called arrenderos. A few white people are arrenderos, but for the most part the Indians are the renters of the land. They obtain their right to work it for a stipulated sum, and, as we have said, grazing rights are free. The topo- graphic relation of arrenderos to hacendados is shown in Figure 67. The arrenderos cultivate barley, potatoes, and alfalfa at the mouths of the tributary valleys where there is ready access to the trails that connect them with neighboring ranches and settlements. The tributary ravines that enter the main valley on either side are so steep-sided and deep and so nearly barren in their mid-slopes asto constitute excellent natural boundaries between the different fincas, hence in the land titles the bound- ary is said to run from one quebrada or ravine to another and the estate to comprise all the land between.
For six or eight years before the World War the purchase of land in Argentina had been going on rapidly in sympathy with the rapid increase in the price of farm products. Everyone was trying to get land. In the Calchaqui valley the price of property advanced from three to five times its value a few years earlier, and a number of large ranch owners were able to sell the least productive parts of their holdings in fractions for prices that amounted to as much as the entire sum paid for the land five years before. Guilberto Diaz at Poma bought 63,000 hectares in 1903 for 83,000 pesos. In I912 he sold 30,000 hectares, chiefly in the mountains, for 80,000 pesos.
