10 Centavos

Mendoza's 1893 fractional notes were a provincial stopgap against chronic small-coin shortages that plagued interior Argentina throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. The federal government's inability to maintain adequate copper and nickel coinage in circulation repeatedly forced provincial and even municipal authorities to issue their own low-denomination paper — a practice that Buenos Aires officially discouraged but rarely suppressed.

Jacobo Peuser's lithographic house was the dominant commercial printer in Argentina at the time, handling everything from postage stamps to trade catalogs. Not a security printer by specialization, which shows in the relatively modest anti-counterfeiting measures typical of this provincial series.