A license to collect.

• Author: Luxner, Larry
• Position: Auto license plates

Snow-capped mountains surround the Argentine village of San Martin de los Andes, where architect Daniel Rubinger pursues an unusual hobby after long hours at the office:license-plate collecting.

Clear across the other side of Argentina, near the Paraguayan border at Posadas, lives real-estate agent Alfredo Abrazian. He has dozens of license tags from all over the world hung in his storefront office along Calle Sarmiento for passersby to admire. "It's good for business," he jokes.

Both Rubinger and Abrazian are among a very select group of people throughout Latin America and the Caribbean who make a hobby out of accumulating what Argentines call patentes, Puerto Ricans tablillas, Dominicans placas and Chileans chapas. Like the region's inhabitants, these license plates come in an astounding variety of sizes, colors, shapes and textures.

Despite their beauty and inherent historical value, the number of people worldwide who collect motor vehicle registration plates is negligible. The U.S.-based Automobile License Plate Collectors Association (ALPCA) has only 5,500 members, half of which are inactive. And unlike stamp collectors, properly known as philatelists, the study of license plates is so arcane there isn't even a name for those who engage in it.

The truth is that no one really knows how license plates began. The bible of all serious hobbyists - the 558-page Registration Plates of the World, published by the European Registration Plate Association in London - claims the German state of Baden began issuing plates on a regular basis in 1896, and that Luxembourg was reported to have issued the number "1" tag to a Benz the year before.

According to the book's researchers, the first Latin American governments to issue number plates were Argentina and Chile i 1904, followed by Ecuador in 1905 and Puerto Rico in 1912.

No one knows when license plates first appeared in Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela or the republics of Central American, but early porcelain tags from these countries command upwards of $100. One particularly sought-after plate is that issued by the Argentine province of Neuquen in the early 1960s, which sports a beautiful hand-painted scene of Lanin Vocano. Only 100 or so of these plates are known to exist.

Rubinger, who has lived in Neuquen for the last 10 years and keeps perhaps 30 of those plates in his garage, says he has been collecting casually for five years and seriously for the last two.

"I was already collecting...