SOURCE: Slatta, Richard W. “Man to Myth: Literary and Symbolic Images.” In Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier, pp. 180-92. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

[In the following essay, Slatta demonstrates how Hernández's Martín Fierro and similar works sought to humanize the gaucho tradition in the eyes of the general public after having been tainted by the writings of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.]

Gauchos disappeared as a recognizable social group in the last third of the nineteenth century, but literary and symbolic evocations persisted into the twentieth. Sarmiento had shaped the negative attitudes of many Argentines toward the gaucho with his compelling dichotomy of civilization versus barbarism. Hernández poetically and convincingly refuted Sarmiento's interpretation with Martín Fierro. The gaucho's disappearance, a necessity to Sarmiento and an avoidable tragedy to Hernández, set the stage for his mythical return in the works of twentieth-century nationalists and traditionalists. Seldom appreciated in life, the gaucho became the embodiment of Argentine character as the nation's thinkers and leaders reconstructed the past to suit twentieth-century political needs. Vanquished by the juggernaut of oppression and modernization, the gaucho persevered to gain a central place in Argentine thought and letters.

Journalist, educator, historian, political philosopher and practitioner, Sarmiento molded the thoughts and policies of the nation's Europeanizing elite. In Facundo he elaborated a racial and geographical interpretation of Argentine history and society that blamed the rise of the Rosista dictatorship and other ills on the inferiority of the mestizo population. The native's idleness and incapacity for hard work stemmed from the mixture of Spanish and inferior Indian blood. In letters to his friend Mary Mann, who translated Facundo into the English, Sarmiento decried the limitations imposed upon the nation by the “Indian and Spanish element.” He complained of “our ignorant popular masses” and of “those ignorant masses, the poor whites,” that retarded progress. His most extreme and revealing commentary on the gaucho came in instructions to General Mitre in 1861: “Do not try to save the blood of gauchos. It is a contribution that the country needs. Blood is the only thing they have in common with human beings.”¹

Sarmiento proposed four major policies to combat the barbarism of the countryside. First, like most Argentine leaders, he firmly believed in subjecting the rural population to strict control. The gambling and knife fighting that were common on the pampa called for strong countermeasures. In Facundo he suggested that “such customs need vigorous methods of repression, and to restrain hardened men, judges still more hardened are required.”² Strong justices of the peace, alcaldes, and police zealously applied “vigorous methods of repression” throughout the countryside.

Through massive immigration from Europe, Sarmiento hoped to strengthen and purify the native race with an infusion of what he considered to be superior Anglo-Saxon blood. While natives secured the frontier and held back the Indian threat, industrious European settlers could cultivate the plains as they were doing in the United States. Sarmiento contrasted unfavorably the ramshackle huts and dirty children of creole holdings with the nicely painted and well-kept homes of immigrant settlers, epitomizing, respectively, backwardness and progress.³

Land reform and the promotion of agriculture formed another plank in this San Juan politician's program for national greatness. He recognized the links between Spanish-inspired latifundism and the social problems and civil unrest that plagued Argentina. As a tourist and diplomat, Sarmiento visited and greatly admired family farms in the United States, where he traveled in 1847 and again in the 1860s. A county fair, with its blend of solid agricultural and industrial progress, fascinated him. He desired to supplant great estates with family farms peopled by Anglo-Saxon immigrants. In 1868 he dedicated a new agricultural colony at Chivilcoy and declared it the basis of his entire program. Through farming he hoped to see “gauchos transformed into peaceful residents” on a civilized pampa.⁴ But as president he had no more success in eradicating latifundism than did other reformers. The terratenientes held fast.

Public education was the final element in Sarmiento's blueprint for civilization. In his speech at Chivilcoy in 1868 he pledged to “make one hundred Chivilcoys in the six years of my government and with land for each head of the family, with schools for your children.” Landownership and education would uplift the gaucho and turn him from the plundering life of a montonero who followed some ruthless caudillo to a life of peace and productivity. He looked to American educator Horace Mann for inspiration in the philosophical and practical applications of public education.⁵

Given the profound and pervasive impact of Sarmiento's writings, especially his vision of pampean social dualism, the inception and execution of Facundo merit comment. He wrote his sweeping interpretation of pampean life and of his four gaucho archetypes (pathfinder, tracker, troubadour, and outlaw) without any firsthand knowledge of the great plain or its inhabitants. In a letter to Juan María Gutiérrez of May 1847, he confided: “You know that I have never crossed the pampa to Buenos Aires, having obtained a description of it from San Juan muleteers who cross it every year, from poets like Echeverría, and from the soldiers of the civil war.” He also read travelers' journals and even cited Sir Walter Scott as an authority on the gaucho. When he first crossed the great plain, returning from exile with Urquiza's conquering forces in early 1852, Sarmiento felt overwhelmed by “the pampa, that I have described in Facundo, felt by intuition, but that I saw for the first time in my life!” In 1868 he repeated that his vision of the pampa had been intuitive: “I had described the pampa without having seen it.”⁶ Sarmiento's intuition led him to assess accurately some aspects of gaucho character, but his own political goals obstructed his vision on key points.

Facundo, more than a work of history or sociology as is often asserted, is a literary and polemical piece. The literary flavor derives from Sarmiento's admiration for North American and European literature, particularly the writings of James Fenimore Cooper. He modeled his baqueano on Cooper's Pathfinder and compared the outlaw gaucho with Cooper's Hawkeye or Trapper. In discussing the troubadour, he evoked images of the wandering minstrels of the Middle Ages.⁷ Like most pro-European intellectuals in Argentina, Sarmiento sought to place his own work within a broader context of western letters—the benchmark of cultural worth.

But Facundo's overriding purpose was political, not literary. The work is an imaginative, moving attack on the “barbarian” dictatorship of Rosas and on the forces that permitted his success. The gaucho of Facundo is not a historical figure, but rather a political metaphor for the rural masses that kept barbaric caudillos in power. Sarmiento preached the dogma that, to destroy the caudillo and civilize the pampa, the gaucho masses had to be eradicated. His political program, elaborated over several decades and effected in part during his presidency and after, sought that end. Subsequent presidents completed the destruction of the gaucho; but the anticipated regeneration and civilization did not follow.⁸

Other thinkers, including the romantic poet of the Generation of 'Thirty-Seven, Esteban Echeverría, shared Sarmiento's dualism. In El dogma socialista, published in 1837, Echeverría stated flatly that “Europe is the center of the civilization of the centuries and of humanitarian progress.” Though he cautioned against blind cultural subjugation, he urged that Europeanized “social and civilized life” be spread throughout the nation from the cities to counter the influence of rural caudillos. Later intellectuals, including José Ingenieros, Adolfo Saldías, and Ernesto Quesada, promoted their own varieties of geographical determinism, each pitting a feudalistic, caudillo-ruled rural society against modern urban commercial and industrial centers. Ingenieros depicted the nation's history as a racial struggle between white “Euro-Argentines” who had won the country's independence and caudillos like Rosas and Facundo Quiroga, who were supported by the gaucho masses. In place of Sarmiento's urban civilization and rural barbarism, he posited white “Argentines” and mestizo gauchos.⁹

The urban fixation of the Spanish provided the structural basis for the dichotomous vision of Argentine life. The Spanish perpetuated the Roman practice of linking social status with municipal office-holding and urban life and had founded three hundred towns by 1600 in their American colonies. Urban outposts spearheaded their civilizing push by controlling and subjugating the hinterland—areas lacking in worth except insofar as they contributed to the city's well-being.¹⁰

Not everyone subscribed to the tidy rural-urban typology depicted by Sarmiento and others. Gerstaecker expressed the view at mid-century that “the worst people are said here, as in other countries, to be located in the capital itself.” In 1886, Tobal painted an image of the gaucho as a noble savage maintaining his dignity and natural goodness in spite of the encroachments of the evil city. Walter Larden observed in 1911 that “in Argentina, it is not the gaucho class that is untrustworthy.” Even Sarmiento recognized the oppression of the countryside by the city, admitting in Facundo that Buenos Aires sent “only chains, exterminating hordes, and petty subaltern tyrants” to the pampa rather than its civilizing “light, wealth, and prosperity.”¹¹

Sarmiento's dichotomy ignored the obvious and essential interrelations between city and country. In some ways civilization was the mother of barbarism because the extension of forts, settlements, and great estates displaced indigenous peoples and frontiersmen, provoking a violent reaction. Urban interests tried to impose their will upon the frontier with military force and to strip the uncivilized of their ability to resist. For example, Rosas and other leaders forbade the gaucho to carry his facón in towns. On the other hand, civilization could also be the child of barbarism. The colonial traffic in illegal hides, based on the labor of those classified as barbarian, built the economic power of the porteño elite. Thus civilization and barbarism coexisted, interacted, and merged in the Río de la Plata.¹²

Some intellectuals harshly criticized Sarmiento's vision of Argentine social reality. Juan Bautista Alberdi flatly asserted that the gaucho could only represent “barbarism in books that do not understand what civilization is.” He aptly compared the gaucho with the English sailor and mechanic—“coarse, uncultured, rough”—but central to the nation's economic vitality. Manuel Gálvez, a twentieth-century nationalist and admirer of Rosas, dismissed all of Facundo except the introduction as a “truculent and vulgar pamphlet, written by an improvising journalist.”¹³

The strongest reaction to Sarmiento came from José Hernández. Even as Sarmiento had created his fanciful polemic in reaction to the cruel oppression of Rosas, Hernández reacted to the administration of Sarmiento and the porteño elite by showing that urban “civilization” also manifested corruption, repression, and viciousness. By standing Facundo on its head and presenting the city as the source of national social ills and political despotism, Hernández successfully challenged Sarmiento's simplistic dualism and illuminated the greater complexity of Argentine social reality.

In the vigorous, vibrant stanzas of Martín Fierro, Hernández drew upon a venerable, lively national literary heritage. Although elite cultural tastes aped movements and dictates from Europe, several strains of autochthonous literature developed during the nineteenth century. Native writers pursued various paths in emphasizing Argentina's New World experience and traditions. “Indianists” focused on indigenous cultural antecedents, whereas “Americanists” sought out broader roots common to the Americas. Gauchismo, creolism, and nationalism were the three sometimes overlapping strains that played off New World images and types (sometimes nativistically) against foreign influences. Hernández marked the zenith of gaucho-inspired poetry; his liveliness of verse and clarity of vision were never equaled.¹⁴

Gauchesco poetry utilized the rustic dialect of the pampa, which provoked scorn and derision from cosmopolitan critics and linguistic purists. The poems invariably presented an epic narrative with a gaucho protagonist and employed both particular and transcendental themes. Though they drew inspiration from folklore, from the products of illiterate, anonymous authors, gauchesco poets were cultured, lettered men who maintained a proximity to and veracity in describing rural life. Bartolomé Hidalgo, the father of gauchesco poetry, moved the genre from the realm of oral anonymous verse to written culture with his Diálogos patrióticos, published in 1820. Following Hidalgo's inspiration, Juan Gualberto Godoy and Hilario Ascasubi wrote numerous poems, many heavily political and polemical. Estanislao del Campo added his superbly satirical Fausto in 1870, and the Uruguayan master Antonio D. Lussich published Los tres gauchos orientales early in 1872. Lussich dedicated his work to his friend Hernández, who drew inspiration from it for the first part of Martín Fierro, published later in 1872. Because they employed grammatically correct Castillian rather than dialect, the writings of Juan María Gutiérrez, Bartolomé Mitre, and Rafael Obligado comprise a parallel group of modified gauchesco poetry. Although sometimes classified with gauchesco works, La cautiva by Echeverría utilizes Castilian, not dialect, is romanticized and not realistic, and fails to treat the gaucho.¹⁵

The power brokers of Argentine culture never accepted gauchesco poetry as legitimate because of its humble dialect and political content. Entertaining, quaint, picturesque, fit for popular consumption, the poems did not gain elite acceptance in their own time. The porteño cultural elite turned a deaf ear to gauchesco poets as literary figures but acknowledged the truthfulness of the social and political commentary in some of their writing.¹⁶ From its inception, gauchesco poetry resonated with political opinion and polemic. Bartolomé Hidalgo, writing in the blush of independence nationalism, glorified the gaucho as the paragon of patriotism, valor, and religion. Through his delightful character Paulino Lucero, Hilario Ascasubi attacked Rosas, “El ilustro conculador de las leyes” (illustrious infringer of the laws). Estanislao del Campo's Gobierno gaucho (1870) decried such rural social ills as conscription, passports, latifundia, abusive officials, and mercenary merchants—problems pilloried by Hernández two years later.¹⁷

Hernández was a political activist as well as a poet. Fighting beside the federalist caudillos of Entre Ríos—Justo José de Urquiza and Ricardo López Jordan—against Mitre and Sarmiento, speaking out in the provincial legislature, writing prose and poetic attacks, he put his political beliefs into intense, often violent action. In reaction to Sarmiento, Hernández posited Buenos Aires as the locus of the nation's political ills, and through Fierro he voiced his political commentary:

there's some dirty linen here to be washed
and I won't give up till it's done …
I sing giving opinions
and that's my kind of song.(18)

An intense federalism, grounded in a consistent set of classical nineteenth-century liberal beliefs, characterized this poet's political philosophy. In the pages of his journal, El Río de la Plata, he lashed out against the unitarios and their centralizing policies. Reacting to Sarmiento's hostile depiction of Angel Vicente Peñalosa (El Chacho), he published a more sympathetic sketch of the La Rioja caudillo in 1863. Of El Chacho's death, he wrote that “the savage unitarios are celebrating … the unitario party has another crime to write on the page of its horrible offenses.”¹⁹ But Hernández insisted upon a legitimate federalism as epitomized by Urquiza or López Jordan rather than the porteño pseudo-federalism of Rosas. In El Río de la Plata of October 3, 1869, he attacked the “dictatorship of Rosas … a tyranny of twenty years.” And in Martín Fierro he compared the mistreatment of frontier troops with that accorded at Rosas' headquarters: “it was just like Palermo— / they'd give you such a time in the stocks / that it would leave you sick.”²⁰ Speaking to the Chamber of Deputies on November 19, 1880, he criticized Rosas for denying the nation a constitution and added that “for twenty years he tyrannized, despotized, and bloodied the country.”²¹

Hernández strenuously demanded policies that would end the city's oppression of the countryside and uplift the gaucho to his rightful position as a citizen with full rights in the republic. Contrary to Sarmiento, who called for more “vigorous methods of repression,” Hernández urged that the rural population be freed from oppression. In El Río de la Plata of August 19, 1869, he focused upon the hated frontier service as the most visible and onerous evidence of the city's exploitation of the countryside. “What more monstrous contradiction than that which converts the citizen of the countryside into the guardian of the interests of the capital more than his own … ? Frontier service seems to have been conceived as a terrible punishment for the son of the countryside.” In the issue for September 26, 1869, he called for an end to the draft lottery as the “only means of giving security and quietude to the countryside.”

Unlike Sarmiento and the ruling elite, Hernández did not view massive immigration as a panacea for national progress. Reacting to a pro-immigration article in Sarmiento's El nacional, the poet expressed disenchantment with the fruits of the foreign influx. He charged that immigration had filled the cities with an “army of bootblacks, of lottery numbers sellers,” rather than populating the desert. “Immigration, without capital and without jobs, is an element of turmoil, disorder, and backwardness.” Always concerned for the welfare of the native, Hernández feared that masses of foreigners would drive working-class wages even lower. Foreigners appear in Martín Fierro only in caricature as Hernández gave vent to the native's disdain for the gringo, worthless in an equestrian frontier society.²²

On the issues of land reform and education, however, Hernández concurred with Sarmiento. The poet charged that latifundism left rich lands lying in “sterility and abandon … There are no poorer or more backward countries than those where property is divided among a few privileged classes.” Whereas Sarmiento concerned himself with attracting foreign farmers, Hernández wished to see latifundia subdivided among native workers. In his Instrucción del estanciero (Instruction to the rancher), published in 1881, he reiterated the need to establish a system of colonies for rural native workers. He understood and accepted the passing of a strictly pastoral society and its herdsmen as an inevitable part of the nation's agricultural and industrial progress but demanded government aid to the gaucho in making the transition—aid that the liberal elite never provided.²³

Hernández urged public education as well as agricultural and livestock vocational training for the rural population. In a letter to the editors of the eighth edition of Martín Fierro in 1874, he expressed the hope that his work would awaken in the gaucho a desire to read. Fierro lamented his lack of education in the second half of the poem:

The only schooling I ever had,
Was a life of suffering;
Don't be surprised if at the game,
I've made mistakes;—that's not my shame—
It's mighty little a man can know,
If he's never learnt anything.(24)

During the decade in which he published his epic, Hernández abandoned his violent rebelliousness and militancy in favor of institutional reform through the political system. His alteration in tactics is clearly evinced by changes from the first to the second part of the poem, which was published seven years later. He joined the ranks of other reformers called the Generation of 'Seventy—Leandro Alem, Manuel Zuitana, Bernardo Solveyra, Aristobulo del Valle, Rufino Varela—to attempt to alter the shape of provincial politics, supporting the federalization of Buenos Aires and backing Roca's “peace and administration” politics of accommodation. In 1882 he expressed the need for “peace, liberty, and roads,” and he came to accept Sarmiento's premise that Argentina required institutional reform and technological advancement in order to prosper.²⁵ The outlaw of the first part of Martín Fierro became a hard-working, practical paisano seeking stability and social acceptance in the second part. Recognizing the inadequacy of old gaucho ways in modernizing society, Fierro counseled adaptation and compromise, not rebellion. Urging the paisano to value friendship, respect others, work hard, solve problems nonviolently, and avoid drink, Fierro set new priorities: “The gaucho should have house, school, church and rights.” Whereas the old gaucho domador was praised in part one, Fierro expressed admiration for a gentler manner of taming in part two. Viejo Vizcacha represents the shiftless, laughable, worldly-wise creole who had lived beyond his time. As Fierro's son recalled of him, “My guardian was one of the old sort / and there aren't many of them left now.” Hernández accurately captured the transition taking place from the gaucho of the pampa criolla to the domesticated peon of the pampa gringa.²⁶

The disappearance of the gaucho and his transformation into a dependent peon attracted other commentary. Some observers contended that the gaucho had actually disappeared early in the nineteenth century, during the independence wars. Others linked his demise to the shrinking number of wild cattle at mid-century. Still others asserted that he had never disappeared at all, but rather lived on albeit in altered form. Adolfo Bioy Casares, a writer and collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges, wryly noted that several generations of witnesses had asserted that the gaucho “only existed in the past, preferably seventy years before each of these affirmations.” Nostalgia frequently prompted observers to date the decline of the gaucho to the previous generation; indeed, “it is true that his deplorable extinction occasionally appears to us as the most enduring characteristic of the gaucho.”²⁷

The difficulty in dating the gaucho's demise stems from the conundrum of defining who and what he was. Depending upon the scope and nature of the definition, a social group meeting the criteria could be found to vanish at almost any point during the Argentine past. Enrique de Gandia, defining the gaucho as a colonial cattle thief and vagrant, saw him being transformed early in the nineteenth century into a soldier for independence or a montonero for a provincial caudillo. Rosas supposedly delivered the coup de grâce by shutting up these free-roving horsemen into military barracks. Others saw the gaucho losing his livelihood and traditional way of life when the enormous herds of wild cattle gave way to domesticated animals tended by salaried workers. According to Gibson, the early nineteenth century witnessed “the nomad gaucho of the colonial period converted into the loyal gaucho of the estancia.”²⁸

At the opposite extreme from those who see the gaucho vanishing early in the century stand such writers as Manuel Gálvez, Ricardo Güiraldes, and José Agustín de Basualdo, who assert that he did not disappear at all. Focusing upon the character and values of the gaucho, they find that essential traits and traditions have been perpetuated by a reduced group into the present century. As Güiraldes noted in 1926, “the gaucho has neither died nor has he authorized us to dispose of his life with such impertinence.” In 1868 Wilfred Latham perceptively traced the social processes that gradually altered the gaucho. Farming and sheep ranching displaced him from the traditional cattle herding role, and incompetent, dishonest officials and onerous military duty denied him security and an incentive to work. Recognizing the tremendous loss and waste in the gaucho's extinction, Latham asked, “Why should so much excellent material be cast adrift on the plains, homeless and hunted?” He accurately identified the same conditions criticized by Hernández, which brought the gaucho as a social group to an end during the last third of the century.²⁹

As the historical gaucho receded from the pampa, new, conflicting images appeared. Some commentators shed no tears over the gaucho's demise and welcomed his successor—the quiet, obedient, industrious paisano. Others, less impressed with the domesticated creole worker and the strident, demanding immigrant, generated a wistful, nostalgic vision of the old gaucho and his virtues. La vanguardia uncharacteristically lauded the gaucho on November 10, 1894, the birthday of José Hernández, who had died eight years earlier. Quoting thoughts by Antonio Piñero from La agricultura, this socialist organ presented an idyllic portrait of the old gaucho—proud, virile, well-dressed, honorable, free to roam and work as he chose. His successors, the unlettered “rural proletariat,” represented a “miserably dressed … degenerate racial type” vastly inferior to the gaucho of old. The government had contributed to the process of degeneration because each administration would “decrease the number of schools but increase the police.” Juan José de Lezica in 1901 recalled the independence, pride, loyalty, hospitality, bravery, and strength of the gaucho. He unfavorably contrasted the humble, servile paisano of the modern estancia with the magnificent centaur of yesteryear. The modern creole stood as but a “shadow” of the gaucho, “pale, weak, prematurely old.” The gaucho had been “savage, strong, and master of the desert,” but the paisano labored as “a slave,” bullied by gringo foremen and weakened by alcohol. Even police officials became wistful about the old gaucho—a sentiment never voiced while he yet roamed the plains and escaped their clutches. In a 1902 editorial on “Rustling,” Revista de policía lamented the passing of the old “philanthropic gaucho” who had bravely and willingly died for his country. In his place arose the “rascal, egoistic, trouble-making gaucho” who completely lacked noble impulses.³⁰

Ernesto Quesada also deplored the passing of the “true gaucho”—noble, loyal, free, taciturn, proud, and contemplative—whom fencing, farming, and immigrants had pushed from the plains and forced to flee to the interior. In a pseudo-psychological interpretation of Argentine character published in 1904, Emilio Zuccarini contrasted the gaucho with his successor of the late 1880s and early 1890s, the atorrante (vagrant, loafer). The atorrante neither worked nor asked alms, but rather subsisted as a lost, wandering soul overrun and debased by civilization. The old gaucho, the epitome of individualism, rebelled against all forms of authority and sought out the quietude and tranquillity of the remote, solitary pampa.³¹

As the nation approached its centennial celebration of the first shots of independence in 1810, several nationalistic writers elevated the gaucho to the position of paragon of argentinidad. Ricardo Rojas, Leopoldo Lugones, and Manuel Gálvez forged a new image of the gaucho by resurrecting him from his historically despised position and exalting him as the quintessence of national virtue. These three nationalists, born in the interior provinces, viewed the interior rather than the immigrant-saturated littoral as the legitimate repository of Argentina's cultural heritage. Lugones published Guerra gaucha in 1905 and Odas seculares in 1910, but his interpretive lectures on Martín Fierro, delivered before an audience of the cultural elite at the Odeón Theater during May 1913 brought to completion the apotheosis of the gaucho. To Lugones, the wars of independence had initiated the “calamities of the gaucho,” which persisted until his disappearance later in the century. He censured the nation's oligarchic leadership for facilitating the “extinction of the gaucho, an essential element of nationality.” His lectures, published under the title El payador in 1916, mark the beginning of elite acceptance of the rehabilitated gaucho, and of Hernández' poetry as culturally significant. Rojas wrote El país de la selva in 1907 and Blason de plata in 1910, but his major contribution to cultural nationalism came in La restauración nacionalista (1909). The recommendations to reform the nation's educational policies rang with strident nationalism and called for rejection of the Europeanizing cosmopolitanism that dictated porteño cultural tastes.³²

Lezica, Quesada, Zuccarini, and other writers contrasted the peon of the modern ranch unfavorably with the old gaucho. Some twentieth-century novelists extended the rehabilitation even further, imbuing the modern paisano with romanticized virtues of the gaucho. Benito Lynch and Ricardo Güiraldes presented paisanos as retaining the wily sense of humor and the sound traditional values of the gaucho but shedding his anti-social qualities. Lynch, who frequently set his characters in the humid pampa near Dolores, depicted the domesticated peon in Los caranchos de la Florida (1917), Raquela (1918), and El romance de un gaucho (1930). Don Segundo Sombra, based on the life and character of an old paisano whom Güiraldes knew in San Antonio de Areco, also reflected a positive image of the tamed gaucho of the modern plain. Don Segundo—strong, capable, loyal, honest—passes on his wisdom to a young boy whom he tutors for many years. As the lad reaches manhood, Sombra commends him: “You've become a man—better than a man, a gaucho. The one who knows the world's evils because he has lived through them is tempered to overcome them.”³³

The landed elite found final victory in the characters depicted by Lynch and Güiraldes—tractable, forbearing, obedient peons of the new ranching industry. The twentieth-century paisano met the real and idealized expectations of the elite that had strived throughout the century to convert the gaucho into a dependent peon. As historical figures, both the gaucho and his modern-day incarnation, the paisano, gave way to mythical images consonant with the viewpoint and needs of the province's landed oligarchy. The metamorphosis was complete: as the peon replaced the gaucho, so idealized images replaced them both in the nation's literature and thought.

In 1918, Charles Darbyshire recorded a terse but apt epitaph for the domesticated peon of the pampa gringa: “The gaucho, as a rule, cannot read or write. When he dies—after possibly thirty or more years' service—he leaves no effects, no savings bank account; the owner of the estancia puts together a rude coffin and a bullock-cart takes the corpse to the nearest cemetery.”³⁴

“Gaucho”—only the name remained, but the mundane reality recorded by Darbyshire accurately bespoke the unhappy life and death of the gaucho during the nineteenth century. Vanquished in reality, the gaucho still rides a romanticized frontier pampa as an idealized myth and political symbol. His qualities, real and imagined, represent an essential ingredient in the continuous quest by Argentines to define the essence of their national character. Oppressed and downtrodden in life, the gaucho has achieved immortality in the nation's literary and ideological formation—a partial counterpoint to the sad realities of his persecuted existence in the nineteenth century.

Notes

1. Quoted in Leroy R. Shelton, “The Gaucho in the Works of Sarmiento,” p. 47; Domingo F. Sarmiento, Facundo, translated as Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants, pp. 10-11; letters of Mar. 6, 1865, Jan. 15, Feb. 25, 1867, in Sarmiento, Cartas de Sarmiento a la Señora María Mann, pp. 7, 24, 29.

2. Sarmiento, Facundo, translated as Life in the Argentine Republic, pp. 48-52.

3. Ibid., p. 11; Sarmiento, Argirópolis: Capital de los estados confederados, vol. 13 of Obras de D. F. Sarmiento, pp. 89, 94, 97-99.

4. Sarmiento, Discursos populares, vol. 21 of Obras de D. F. Sarmiento, pp. 260-67; Shelton, “The Gaucho,” p. 44; Miguel Angel Cárcano, Evolución histórica del régimen de la tierra pública, 1810-1916, pp. 142-43; Elda Clayton Patton, Sarmiento in the United States (Evansville, Ind.: Univ. of Evansville Press, 1976), pp. 68-69, 127, 140.

5. Quotation from Sarmiento, Discursos, p. 266; Sarmiento, Informes sobre educación, vol. 44 of Obras de D. F. Sarmiento, pp. 313-14, 319.

6. Quotation from Sarmiento, Campaña en el Ejército Grande, vol. 14 of Obras de D. F. Sarmiento, p. 159; also Facundo, translated as Life in the Argentine Republic, p. 12; and Discursos, p. 258; Enrique Williams Alzaga, La pampa en la novela argentina, p. 97.

7. Sarmiento, Facundo, translated as Life in the Argentine Republic, pp. 25-26, 35-39, 41.

8. Luis C. Pinto, El gaucho y sus detractores, pp. 99, 112.

9. Esteban Echeverría, Dogma socialista y otras páginas políticas, pp. 21, 116; José Ingenieros, “La formación de una raza argentina,” Revista de filosofía 1 (Nov. 1915): 473, 475-77; see also Wilbert E. Moore, “Rural-Urban Conflict in Argentine Sociological Theories,” Rural Sociology 6 (June 1941): 138-41.

10. Alistair Hennessey, The Frontier in Latin American History, p. 47.

11. Frederick Gerstaecker, Gerstaecker's Travels, p. 50; Tobal in La nación, Mar. 2, 1886; Walter Larden, Estancia Life, p. 49; Sarmiento, Facundo, translated as Life in the Argentine Republic, p. 6.

12. Silvio R. Duncan Baretta and John Markoff, “Civilization and Barbarism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (Oct. 1978): 592, 611.

13. Alberdi quoted in Gladys S. Onega, La inmigración en la literatura argentina, 1880-1910, p. 50; Manuel Gálvez, La Argentina en nuestros libros, pp. 43-44.

14. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Muerte y transfiguración de Martín Fierro, 1:303; Donald A. Yates, “The Model of Martín Fierro,” in Martín Fierro en su centenario, pp. 14-15; Arturo Costa Alvarez, “Nuestro preceptismo literario,” Humanidades 9 (1924): 85-164.

15. Horacio Jorge Becco, ed., Antología de la poesia gauchesca, pp. 28-32; Henry Alfred Holmes, Martín Fierro, p. 26; Edward Larocque Tinker, The Horsemen of the Americas and the Literature They Inspired, pp. 33-51; Williams Alzaga, La pampa, p. 93; Horacio J. Becco et al., Trayectoria de la poesia gauchesca, pp. 37-80.

16. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, “Lo gauchesco,” Realidad 1 (Jan. 1947): 45-48; Walter Sava, “A History and Interpretation of Literary Criticism of Martín Fierro,” pp. 16-17; n. 32, p. 218.

17. Costa Alvarez, “Nuestro preceptismo,” pp. 109-10; Ernesto Quesada, “El criollismo en la literatura argentina,” Estudios 1:3 (1902): 277-78; Fernando E. Barba, Los autonomistas del 70, pp. 66-67; Ricardo Rodríguez Molas, “Elementos populares en la prédica contra Juan Manuel de Rosas,” Historia 9 (Jan. 1963): 70, 72.

18. José Hernández, The Gaucho Martín Fierro, trans. Ward, pp. 185, 191, lines 65-66, 151-52; see also Martínez Estrada, Muerte, 1:31, 35-36.

19. José Hernández, Vida de Chacho, p. 19.

20. José Hernández, The Gaucho Martín Fierro, trans. Ward, p. 33, lines 412-14; see also Alvaro Yunque, “Prólogo,” in José Hernández, Instrucción del estanciero, pp. 23-26.

21. Speech repr. in Antonio Pages Larraya, ed., Prosas de Martín Fierro, p. 282.

22. El Río de la Plata, Sept. 9, 14, 1869; also Hernández, Martín Fierro, trans. Ward, esp. pt. 1, sect. 5.

23. Quotation from El Río de la Plata, Sept. 1, 1869; Hernández, Instrucción del estanciero, pp. 30-31, 35.

24. Letter reprinted in Páges Larraya, Prosas, pp. 230-33; quotation from Hernández, The Gaucho Martín Fierro: Adapted from the Spanish, p. 294; Hernández, Instrucción del estanciero, p. 35; see also Ricardo Rodríguez Molas, “José Hernández,” Universidad 60 (Apr. 1964): 101-3.

25. Barba, Los autonomistas, p. 115; Páges Larraya, Prosas, pp. 79-80; Horacio Zorraquín Becú, Tiempo y vida de José Hernández, 1834-1886, pp. 228, 233-34; quoted in Rodríguez Molas, “José Hernández,” pp. 95-97.

26. Hernández, The Gaucho Martín Fierro, trans. Ward, lines 4631-36, 4643-72, 4745-50, 4851-52, 1395-1460, 2167-68; Emilio Alonso Criado, El “Martín Fierro”, pp. 33-34.

27. Adolfo Bioy Casares, Memoria sobre la pampa y los gauchos, pp. 20, 32, 40.

28. Enrique de Gandía, “La mitología del gaucho en la literatura argentina,” in Cultura y folklore en América (Buenos Aires, 1947), pp. 170, 172; quotation from Herbert Gibson, “The Evolution of Live-Stock Breeding in the Argentine,” in Censo agropecuario nacional … 1908, 3:73; Prudencio de la Cruz Mendoza, Historia de la ganadería argentina, p. 180.

29. Ricardo Güiraldes quoted in “Encuesta,” Crítica, Aug. 26, 1926, p. 6 (repr. 1931), and “Encuesta,” Nativa 3 (Mar. 31, 1931), unpag.; José A. de Basualdo, El gaucho argentino, p. 152; Latham quotation from Wilfred Latham, The States of the River Plate, pp. 325-27, 333.

30. Juan José de Lezica, “Lo que dice un gaucho viejo,” Revista nacional 31 (Mar. 1901): 296-97; Revista de policía 2 (June 1902): 389-90.

31. Quesada, “El criollismo,” pp. 295-97; Emilio Zuccarini, “Los exponentes psicológicos del carácter argentino: Evolución del gaucho al atorrante,” Archivos de psiquiatría y criminología aplicados a las ciencias afinas 3 (Mar. 1904): 189-91; see also Manuel Bernárdez, Tambos y rodeos, p. 69.

32. Leopoldo Lugones, El payador, p. 81; Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism, p. 141; Sava, “A History and Interpretation,” pp. 30, 36-37; Ricardo Rojas, La restauración nacionalista, pp. 172-83, 339, 343.

33. Ricardo Güiraldes, Don Segundo Sombra, pp. 134, 203; Williams Alzaga, La pampa, p. 217; Carlos Astrada, El mito gaucho (Buenos Aires: Cruz del Sur, 1964), pp. 33-34.

34. Charles Darbyshire, My Life in the Argentine Republic (London: Frederick Warne, 1918), p. 78.

    On the gaucho's continuing political and cultural significance through 1978, see Richard W. Slatta, “The Gaucho in Argentina's Quest for National Identity,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 12:1 (1983).