Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Liam McGinty
HIST 388
03/11/12
Prof. Walker
and horses to occur atop an immense, 620 mile wide, flat, grassy plain; the pampas1.It
was only in the late 1776, with a growing Portuguese threat from the north, that Buenos
Aires received a Vice Royal2. Thus marks the beginning of a roughly 100- year span of
time from which gaucho culture and legend emerged3.
The base of this culture was the horse; its economic basis, the cow. The sheer
vastness of the treeless pampas made horses the primary form of transportation; walking
would get one nowhere, and so man became equestrian4. The ubiquity of cattle meant
an abundant food supply, such that it became possible to survive on the pampa without
work and with relative comfort5, leading to an feeling of independence and self-reliance.
And though cattle would soon come to play a growing economic role, it was the horse
that truly makes gaucho culture.
Usually with the hardy compact creole horse 6 as partner, together they formed
a half man half horse7. It is impossible to imagine the gaucho horseless; without it, he
simply doesnt exist. Cattle may have been the fuel for the gaucho, but the horse was the
engine, the vehicle that granted freedom and dignity. Gauchos were notorious for their
determination to prefer all tasks on horseback8, including making butter, fishing,
bathing and drawing water from a well9. Developing and maintaining horse- riding skills
was of paramount importance, with games such as pialar even practicing falling off,
teaching how to land correctly10. It was said they ranked their horses above women11,
whose experiences have been, unfortunately, marginalized in such a masculine mythos.
As the horse meant mobility, thus did the accoutrements of the gaucho lifestyle
develop; the gaucho carried everything he needed with him. His recado saddle was soft,
and used for sleeping, his facon (knife) could kill and skin, along with the more primitive
bola thrown at wild rheas. Almost everything he owned was obtained from horses and
cattle, and there was plenty to obtain12. Simply cooked meat on an open fire, asado, was
his food, the yerba mat his drink. Being neither Spanish nor Indian, the gaucho
presented an autochthonous development13, though many argue for an essentially Iberian
origin14. Gauchos are most accurately viewed as a cultural group with a mixed-race
mestizo core.
At any rate, these horsemen, so clearly well adapted to their environment, bursts
into history as the gaucho because of the peculiar political economy of late 18th Century
Latin America. The region being so poor, cattle hides were the only valuable commodity,
yet colonial Spanish regulations prevented their direct export, leading to a cross-national
contraband culture in which, along with cattle hunting in the unpropertied pampas, the
gaucho was the means whereby the community received the goods it needed15. Thus,
10
gauchos were a necessary part of the economy, but they also had an outlaws taint about
them.
This status changed when frustration at continued economic stagnancy helped
mobilize support for independence; a tenuous Argentine identity was forming, and for it
to survive it needed a skill-set only gauchos could provide. The resulting wars of
independence during the 1810s expelled the Spanish, but they opened a long, brutal
process of intra-American struggle over borders, ideology, and the future; what kind of
nation was Argentina going to be? Gauchos had sprung form a specific place and time,
and both were changing rapidly. A roving, battle- hardened banditti untethered from the
formal economy did not bode well for future stability.
In a short time, the political differences within Argentina found expression in two
distinct groupings, the Federalists and the Unitarians. Federalists believed in a federal
system with strong state governments. Their base was rural, with a traditional patronclient paternalism not wholly in tune with the republican spirit of the times. Opposing
them were the urban- based Unitarians, who sought a strong centralizing government
bent on modernization and development.
At first, the Federalists were dominant, with Juan Manuel de Rosas acting as
dictator from 1835, partly by disciplining the rootless and marginal lower classes,
thereby transformingpeons into political followers16- gauchos. As modernity
encroached upon the pampa, and the hunting, hide and contraband economy gave way, a
core aspect of gaucho identity began to suffer, that of unlimited mobility. The freedom of
16
Ariel de la Fuente, Children of Facundo: Caudillo and Gaucho Insurgency During the
Argentine State Formation Process (La Rioja 1853-1870) (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2000). Pg. 3.
the pampas was disappearing, and it is a core paradox of Argentine history that the very
forces of reaction that abetted this process, the rural caudillo oligarchy as personifies by
Rosas, were the same forces to which the gaucho class gave its loyalty. Increasing
political, military, and legal restrictions17, such as forced conscription and harsh
vagrancy laws, combined with economic competition from increased sheep farming18,
had a devastating impact on gaucho culture. Rarely has the gap between romantic ideal
and harsh reality been so great.
So why did gauchos behave they way they did, eagerly following charismatic
caudillos to war? Defining caudillismo as a social system in which groups of patrons
and clients use violence to compete for power and wealth19, such relations actually
provided many gauchos with material goods otherwise unobtainable in the shrinking hide
economy of old20. Further, caudillos, numerous provincialists that they were, shared
bonds of identity with gauchos far closer than that of a distant, cold state, a state whose
policies would not have treated gauchos any better. Unitarians had a far less nuanced
explanation.
Writing in Chilean exile, Domingo Sarmiento published a work that vaulted the
gaucho to the forefront of Argentine identity. Entitled Facundo: Civilization and
Barbarism (1845), the work is dividing line in Argentine history and historiography.
Sarmiento envisioned two distinct civilizationson Argentine soil: one reproducing
the nave popular effects of the Middle Ages; the other, ignoring what lies at its feet, is
17
21
Hernandez idealizes the old life of gaucho freedom, ringing out as an indictment against
its cultural defenestration. Several excerpts demonstrate its power
I am a gaucho, and take this from me
As my tongue explains to you:
For me the earth is a small place
And it could well be biggerThe snake does not bite me
Nor the sun burn my brow.28
..
It is my glory to live as free
As a bird in the sky:
I make no nest on this ground
Where theres so much to be suffered,
And no one will follow me
When I take to flight again.29
..
And listen to the story told
By a gaucho whos hunted by the law;
Whos been a father and husband
Hard- working and willingAnd in spite of that, people take him
To be a criminal.30
..
And sitting beside the fire
Waiting for day to come,
Hed suck at the bitter mate
Till he was glowing warm,
While his girl was sleeping
Tucked up in his poncho.31
28
Jose Hernandez, The Gaucho Martin Fierro, trans. C.E. Ward (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1967). Pg. 9
29
Ibid. Pg.9
30
Ibid. Pg. 11.
31
Ibid. Pg. 13.
existential crisis for many. Europeans without a strong Argentine identity to assimilate to
might not grow into the nation. A nationalist impulse was about the place, connected to
the soil and tradition, celebrating the spurned, populist in sentiment, and weary of
unceasing change. As one author states, the gaucho was coming to signify a proud
cultural identity applicable to anything native to the Argentine, Uruguayan, or Rio
Grandense countryside, an identity particularly defined by clothing, speech, and the
habits and skills of rural life32. Another, Tavia Quaid, states the monomania for
imitation33 of Europe had stirred something in Argentine souls, a search for who they
were, and that in the gaucho Hernandez had found those character traits that establish a
national personification34. At the same time, the work is a lamentation of ultimate
submission35, perhaps echoing a now clich Latin American fatalism.
Though the dark side to such nationalist rhetoric is often a demonization of the
foreigner, and a concomitant glorification of anti-democratic, reactionary traditions, two
immigrant authors of nationalist bent provide an interesting way to explore how a
traditionalist iconography was adopted to propagate universal notions of freedom,
allowing a close interaction and mutual cultural modification between immigrants and
gauchos36.
First, Alberto Gerchunoffs Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas (1910), a series of
fictionalized accounts of Jewish-Gaucho interactions, shows an acceptance of the gaucho
32
John Charles Chasteen, Heroes on Horseback: A Life and Times of the Last Gauchos
Caudillos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). Pg. 120.
33
Tavia Quaid, American Frontiers: Historical and Literary Representations of Gauchos
and Cowboys (Reed College, 2006). Pg. 17
34
Ibid. Pg. 19.
35
Ibid. Pg. 3.
36
Ariana Huberman, Gauchos and Foreigners: Glossing Culture and Identity in the
Argentine Countryside (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011). Pg.4.
as authentically Argentine; the native gaucho represents Argentine nationality for the
newly arrived population37. Gauchos are not seen as menacing civilization, but rather a
conquered people who are full of vigor, instinctual freedom, and generosity38. One
story, The Herdsman, tells of gaucho who kills his own for retreating from a fight,
representative of a people who had worked so hard on these plains and who forgave all
sins but cowardice39. Of note here is Gerchunoffs own nationalism, Zionism, looking
admirably at a distant identity, aiding its definition of the authentic Argentine as gaucho.
Second, Edmundo Murray examines several works by Irish immigrants in turn of
the century Argentina. Most are desirous to look down on swarthy Argentines of
uncertain race, eager to exploit their assigned British identities for social acceptance and
financial gain. Yet one sticks out from the rest, William Bulfin. Author of Tales of the
Pampas (1900), Bulfins collection of short stories portrays the gaucho positively, and
with an insight that few gringos have equaled40 and a profound knowledge of the lives
of Argentine gauchos41. Based on his experiences as a ranch hand, Bulfin leans toward
admiration of the gauchos, and dislike of the English42, seeing himself in the former and
urban, European Argentine elites in the later. Also unlike most Irish immigrants in
Argentina, Bulfin had embraced the emerging separatist Irish nationalism of the era.
These two admiring representations of the gaucho by nationalist, European authors
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indicate an acceptance of and respect for a uniquely Argentine gaucho identity, bolstering
its idealization to the world at large, and continuing its
Murray wrote that the invention of history is a process intimately related with the
construction of popular narratives43, and in this vein the gaucho is surely an invention,
yet one grounded in historical truth. The external symbols of gauchos are everywhere, in
urban mat drinkers, asado lovers, but also in the deep sentiment that from the vast
pampas came forth not a mere construct but a real, new person, and a new culture,
something distinct. The half man half horse still rides out.
To conclude, a return to the cover painting is needed. Located in the Museo
Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Gauchos a caballo demonstrates several
Gaucho traits discussed above. Painted by the Italian-Argentine Angel Della Valle, the
work displays a nobility in the Gauchos posture, along with a fluidity between
themselves and their horses. The tone and color, however, is foreboding, conspiratorial,
infused with a cautionary romanticism. It is hard to determine if it is sunrise or sunset, or
for what purpose they have gathered. A sense of unease, of threat, permeates the painting,
yet dignity too. Indeed, so strong is the gauchos presence, it is as if, had they not been
real, someone would have invented them. And, in a way, they did.
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