The Volga Germans had already crossed one frontier before they reached Argentina. Invited to settle along Russia's Volga River in the eighteenth century, they kept their German language and Catholic faith intact for generations on the steppe. When conditions soured, many emigrated again, this time to the Americas. In Argentina, after first arriving near Colonia Hinojo, a group led by Father Luis Servet negotiated with the landowner Eduardo Casey to settle by the Sauce Corto railway station that would become Coronel Suárez. Between 1886 and 1887 they founded three farming colonies near the town: Santa Trinidad, San José, and Santa María, known in the old tongue by their Russian colony names, including Dehler and Kamenka. There they rebuilt the world they had carried with them, church by church and harvest by harvest, on the far side of the planet from where their ancestors began.

The culture they preserved is still visible in the calendar. Every year each colony celebrates its Kerb, the festival of its patron saint, a word descended from the German Kirchweih, the consecration of a church: Kirche for church, Weih for blessing. There are parades and dinners, craft exhibitions and sports competitions, and the festivities have been formally declared of municipal and provincial interest. Fewer people live in the colonies now, as the larger towns pull younger generations away, but the families who remain still pass down the dialect and the recipes from one generation to the next. To stand at a Kerb celebration is to watch a distant province of nineteenth-century German Russia kept deliberately, lovingly alive in the South American grass.

The city's name carries its own thread of history straight into Argentine literature. It honors Manuel Isidoro Suárez, a colonel born in 1799 who fought in the wars of independence and, on 6 August 1824, led Peruvian and Colombian cavalry to a decisive victory at the Battle of Junín in the highlands of Peru. That colonel was the great-grandfather of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the towering writers of the twentieth century, who immortalized his ancestor's charge in verse, including the poem A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junín. So a farming town on the Pampas, founded in 1883 by Eduardo Casey on what was then the frontier of indigenous territory, bears the name of a cavalry officer whose battlefield glory would echo decades later through some of the finest poetry in the Spanish language.

Coronel Suárez has one more claim that reaches far beyond the province. Its polo club, founded in 1929, produced the most dominant team in the history of the sport. In the Argentine Open, the world's premier polo championship, the Coronel Suárez squad won ten consecutive titles from 1961 to 1970, an almost unimaginable run. The team revolved around two legendary families, the Harriotts and the Heguys: Juan Carlos Harriott Jr. would amass twenty Open championships, more than any player in the tournament's history, and is widely regarded among the greatest ever to swing a mallet. All told, Coronel Suárez has claimed twenty-five Argentine Open titles, by far the most of any club. A modest agricultural town of around 24,000 people, ringed by German colonies and named for the ancestor of a poet, also happens to be the spiritual home of championship polo.