1 Civilization and Barbarism
The dichotomy between the rural and the urban has long been a source of cultural and political factionalism in Latin America. At the heart of this debate is Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an Argentine writer and journalist who, prior to a political career that saw him named the seventh president of Argentina, wrote the hugely influential Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845). Drawing on the racist and unilinear logic of colonialism, Facundo proposes an antagonism between the âindigenous barbarismâ of the Argentine interior and the âEuropean civilizationâ of cities such as Buenos Aires (Sarmiento 33). A typical passage reads:
The man of the city wears European dress, lives a civilized life as we know it everywhere: in the city there are laws, ideas of progress, means of instruction, some municipal organization, a regular government, etc. Leaving the city district, everything changes ⦠All that is civilized in the
(Sarmiento 53)city is blockaded, banished outside of it, and anyone who would dare show up in a frock coat, for example, and mounted on an English saddle, would draw upon himself the peasantsâ jeers and their brutal aggression.
The ultimate triumph of civilization over barbarism, Sarmiento insists, can only be achieved by opening Argentinaâs doors to âthose in Europe who study the needs of humanityâ (35). The underlying assumption is that, with the influx of European peoples and ideas, the Argentine nation will become more modern, more progressive, and, indeed, more urban.
Facundoâs influence on the Latin American imagination cannot be overstated. As Roberto González EchevarrÃa notes, â[i]n proposing the dialectic between civilization and barbarism as the central conflict in Latin American culture it gave shape to a polemic that began in the colonial period and continues to the present dayâ (2). In Sarmientoâs case, this polemic was directed against the figure of the gaucho: a horseman, normally of mestizo ancestry, who drifted between provinces raising cattle and living off the land. Comparable to the figure of the North American cowboy, the gaucho was renowned for his bravery, independence, and legendary knife-wielding skills. Suffice to say that this rustic way of life â though ânot without its attractionsâ (Sarmiento 58) â was at odds with Sarmientoâs Eurocentric vision of progress, which coalesced around the image of the lettered cosmopolis. On the one hand, this Eurocentric vision proved achievable, with immigration skyrocketing both during and after Sarmientoâs presidency (1868â1874). As Eleni Kefala has noted, â[b]y the end of the 1910s Buenos Aires was the biggest and most cosmopolitan city of Latin America as a result of the massive influx of immigrants arriving from Europeâ (35). Equally significant for my purposes, however, is the colonial conception of Argentine âtraditionâ with which the gaucho went on to be associated. âIn trying to eradicate the gaucho,â writes González EchevarrÃa, âSarmiento turned him into a national symbol ⦠a lost origin around which to build a national mythologyâ (15).
The aim of this chapter is to trace the shifting contours of this national mythology across periods of upheaval in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Argentina. As Dianna C. Niebylski has suggested, âeach key revaluation of the figure of the gaucho ⦠is and always has been tied to the great political-economic conflicts in the history of the countryâ (162, my translation). Via a comparative analysis of âThe Southâ (1953) by Jorge Luis Borges and âThe Insufferable Gauchoâ (2003) by Roberto Bolaño, I analyze the changing face of the gaucho in relation to two such conflicts: the contentious rise to power
Borgesâs âThe Southâ tells the tale of Juan Dahlmann, a librarian who returns to his family home in the Pampas following an accident in his Buenos Aires apartment building. This journey back to the countryside culminates in a standoff with a young thug at a rural bar-store, with the story ending just as Dahlmann is about to become embroiled in a knife fight. The protagonistâs mythologization of the Argentine interior, I show, can be read as both a response to and a refraction of criollismo â the nationalist movement, centered around José Hernándezâs epic poem The Gaucho MartÃn Fierro (1872), that dominated Argentine literature and culture in the first half of the twentieth century. As Edwin Williamson has suggested, for Borges, âthe right-wing form of Argentine nationalism which emerged as a considerable force at the end of the 1920sâ represented âa major ingredient in the ideology of Peronismâ (278n10). It is against this backdrop, Williamson continues, that Borges sought to convert the gaucho from a repository of nationalist sentiment into âthe unwitting champion of individual liberty against the Stateâ (280). Borgesâs libertarian repackaging of the gaucho, I contend, is suspect on two accounts: firstly, it tells us very little about the material realities of actual rural subjects, either historical or contemporary; and, by extension, it obscures the extent to which a story like âThe Southâ upholds the colonial insistence upon Argentina as a white, European nation.
In the second half of the chapter, I turn to Bolañoâs âThe Insufferable Gaucho,â which not only reads like a pastiche of âThe South,â but directly references Borgesâs tale on a number of occasions. Mostly taking place in the aftermath of the December 2001 crisis, âThe Insufferable Gauchoâ revolves around a retired judge, Manuel Pereda, who â feeling angered and emasculated by the ravages of globalization â swaps his comfortable life in Buenos Aires for a dilapidated ranch in the Pampas. In contrast to Borgesâs Dahlmann, however, Peredaâs clichéd expectations of the rural are challenged at every turn, destroying the
2 Gilding the Golden Age
One of the difficulties in writing about the figure of the gaucho is that its cultural significance cuts across lines of class and political affiliation. This is especially evident in the first half of the twentieth century â the period when Borges came to prominence â during which various groups molded the archetype to fit their respective ideals. Given the debates surrounding Borgesâs position within this labyrinth of competing attitudes towards the gaucho, it is important to contextualize his intellectual journey in the years leading up to âThe South,â which was first published in La Nación in 1953. This intellectual journey began with a literal one: Borgesâs return to Buenos Aires from Europe in 1921.
âBorgesâs return to his native city after a prolonged absence ⦠overwhelmed him,â Eleni Kefala notes, âas he was now called to rediscover this rapidly expanding urban sprawlâ (36). The writerâs excitement at this urban expansion, one of the most significant effects of which was to produce a newfound hinterland between the city and the countryside (las orillas), stood in stark contrast to the prevailing literary mood of the period. In a series of lectures in 1913, the celebrated poet Leopoldo Lugones canonized Hernándezâs MartÃn Fierro, lauding the work as the archetypal epic of Argentina. The cultural renovation of the gaucho that resulted from these lectures betrayed an antagonism towards the changing socioeconomic situation in Argentina â particularly with regard to mass immigration:
Lugones sustained that the poem celebrated the free-spirited criollo gaucho of the Pampa and offered a true image of Argentineness in an age when the Pampean rural life was being replaced by the spread of modernization ⦠[H]e promoted the formerly âbarbaricâ gaucho to the status of national signifier and contrasted his âessenceâ with âla plebe ultramarinaâ [the overseas masses].
(Kefala 37â38)
One could be forgiven for feeling blindsided by Borgesâs hinterland leanings, given the avowedly rural trajectory of âThe South.â As we shall see in a moment, the storyâs protagonist, Dahlmann, is enchanted not by âthe semi-rural/semi-urban liminal topography of the orillasâ (Kefala 39), but, rather, by âthe elemental earth ⦠not disturbed by settlements or any other signs of humanityâ (Borges 2000b: 150). It is important to remember, though, that âThe Southâ was written more than three decades after Borgesâs return to Buenos Aires. Not only did the intervening years see the Argentine capital become even more industrialized, they were also marked by the rise to power of Juan Perón, who, after participating in the military coup of 1943, was elected president in 1946. Horrified by what he perceived as the manipulation of the masses by a fascist-adjacent regime, Borges decided to âre-interpret the emblematic significance of the gaucho in order to play the nacionalistas at their own gameâ (Williamson 280). What is so curious about âThe South,â however, is the way its anti-Peronist bravado indulges rather than contests a revisionist history of the Pampas that erases the centuries-long war against indigenous and mestizo subjects. As I argue below, whilst the nationalist overtones of the story might be dismissed as tongue-in-cheek, they also implicitly point to the corruption of an urban-orillas imaginary that â despite Borgesâs initial optimism â now housed the (racialized) base of the Peronist movement.
The opening of âThe Southâ is at once typical and untypical of Borges. The reader is introduced to Juan Dahlmann, âsecretary of a municipal library on Calle Córdoba,â who considers himself âprofoundly Argentineâ (146). The classic Borgesian association between the library and the universal is undercut by an admission of national pride, suggesting a deviation from the cosmopolitanism for which Borges is renowned. Such pride, we are told, can be traced back to Dahlmannâs maternal grandfather, Francisco Flores, who died whilst fighting against âthe Indians under Catrielâ on the outskirts of Buenos Aires province (146). Beguiled by his ancestorâs âromantic deathâ (146), Dahlmann commits himself to saving the Flores family home in the Pampas, where he vows to settle one day.
Dahlmannâs return to the South comes sooner than expected. Whilst rushing up the stairs of his apartment building â eager to begin reading Arabian
Dahlmannâs discharge establishes a motif of duality that structures the rest the story: âReality is partial to symmetries ⦠Dahlmann had come to the sanitorium in a cab, and it was a cab that took him to the station at Plaza Constituciónâ (148). Ostensibly, such duality signals the chasm between reality and dreams that creates a fault line within the narrative from the moment of Dahlmannâs apparent recovery. It is strongly insinuated that Dahlmannâs journey to the South is a deathbed hallucination â an unconscious attempt to grant himself a heroic end, like that of his grandfather. At the conclusion of the story, for instance, when Dahlmann is about to enter into a knife fight with a local hoodlum, the narrator states that â[a]s he crossed the threshold, he felt that on that first night in the sanitorium ⦠this is the death he would have dreamed or chosenâ (153). It is my sense, however, that this thematic of doubleness also points to the spatial, temporal, and affective rupture through which Dahlmann is able to imagine an uncontaminated split between the rural and the urban. As I argue below, not only does this imagined rupture obscure the capitalist conditions through which rurality is produced, it also seems to draw from the same reactionary playbook as Lugones and his contemporaries, for whom the gaucho represented a (symbolic) return to the heyday of Spanish colonialism.2
Dahlmannâs perception of the rural â which he himself admits is the product of a ânostalgic, literary knowledgeâ (150) â hinges on the existence of a definitive, almost metaphysical frontier that promises an escape from the transience of modernity: âEveryone knows that the South begins on the other side of Avenida Rivadavia. Dahlmann had often said that was no mere saying, that by crossing Rivadavia one entered an older and more stable worldâ (148). The spirit of the rural idyll underlying such a belief is later emphasized by the protagonistâs intuition that âhe was traveling not only into the South but into the pastâ (150). In his famous examination of literary imaginations of rural and urban life, The Country & the City (1973), Raymond Williams outlines the âpermanent and indeed timeless idea of the tranquillity of life in the countryâ (27).
Consider the moment when Dahlmann enters the rural bar-store. The old gaucho he sees âcurled against the barâ (151) seems to be caught in a temporal no manâs land where history and radical permanence exist side by side:
The many years had worn him away and polished him, as a stone is worn smooth by running water or a saying polished by generations of humankind. He was small, dark, and dried up, and he seemed to be outside time, in a sort of eternity ⦠[O]nly in the South did gauchos like that exist anymore. (151)
How are we to square this old manâs vulnerability to time with the statement that âhe seemed to be outside time, in a sort of eternityâ? It as though Dahlmann wants to have his time and transcend it too; he emphasizes the gauchoâs link to a fading golden age whilst simultaneously granting him immortality. Indeed, the narratorâs switch to the present and future tenses in the storyâs final sentence places Dahlmann and his rural counterparts in suspension, as it were: âDahlmann firmly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to manage, and steps out into the plainsâ (153). As Mac J. Wilson has shown, â[s]hifting voice in the last instance leaves the story in a kind of eternal present ⦠[A]s with Zenoâs paradox, only a penultimate resolution existsâ (54). As an imaginative rejoinder to Dahlmannâs walk from the station to the bar-store earlier in the story, when the sunâs âfinal splendour brought a glory to the living yet silent plains before they were blotted out by nightâ (150), this conclusion points to the eternal splendor of a past becoming present, teetering on the cusp between expectation and the everlasting. We cannot overlook, however, the anachronizing effect of Dahlmannâs description of the old gaucho in the passage above (âHe was small, dark, and dried upâ), which reflects the colonial framing of indigeneity as a relic of history. â[C]onfining nonwhite presences to Argentinaâs colonial past,â writes Ezequiel Adamovsky, âhas been a common device for rendering them invisible in the presentâ (175). Borges seems more than happy to âpreserveâ the figure of the gaucho, provided that this is a purely mnemonic process that remains at the level of lip service.
Williams is unequivocal on the kind of âidealist retrospectâ (50) deployed by Borges here. In his view, there is no ground zero of innocence at any point
And yet, there is the lingering sense that such cosmopolitan brushstrokes are insufficient; that Borgesâs attempt to âliberateâ the gaucho does little to challenge nationalist revisionism, replacing as it does the material history of the Pampas with what Beatriz Sarlo calls âthe imaginary landscape of Argentine literatureâ (20). As pristine as this imaginary landscape may appear, it is in reality caked in epistemic violence. Contrary to what the story would have us believe, the gaucho did not emerge or exist in a rural vacuum; their mestizo ancestry can be directly linked to colonial expansion, and their reputation as a stoic wanderer is invariably bound up with capitalist developments both at home and abroad. As Silvio R. Duncan Baretta and John Markoff suggest, â[f]rontier populations came to be considered as âbarbariansâ by the spokesmen of the same civilization that had created them out of its clash with Indian societiesâ (597). Following this initial genocide, the ever-dwindling land rights of âpeople of the frontiersâ coincided with the â[r]azionalization of production resulting from the rising prices of hides in the international market and from the prominence of jerked beef as an export industry in the first years of the nineteenth centuryâ (Baretta and Markoff 588). Such histories belie the âtimelessnessâ of both the gaucho and the Argentine interior, revealing instead the racialized violence that this fiction erases. It is no coincidence that the framing device of âThe Southâ â the story within a story that results from Dahlmannâs hospitalization â points to the realm of dreams, and perhaps even the precipice of death. The protagonistâs âbland romanticization of the criollo pastâ
The racial implications of this fantasy cannot be overlooked. If the nationalist (re)vision of the gaucho provided Lugones and his contemporaries with âan alternative myth of white Argentina to compete with the âcosmopolitanâ white Argentinaâ (Chamosa 120), then certain strands of anti-Peronism represented a third iteration of this trend. As Eduardo Elena suggests, âanti-Peronist sectors mocked the popular base of the Peronist movement with racially charged slurs such as âcabecitas negrasâ [little blackheads] or simply ânegrosâ ⦠[I]n the eyes of many observers, to be a negro was almost by definition to be a Peronistâ (189). Gáston Gordillo, meanwhile, clarifies this association by noting how the
industrialization and urban expansion that Argentina experienced in the 1930s and 1940s ⦠attracted to the city and suburbs of Buenos Aires working-class multitudes from rural areas that had not been Europeanized. These male and female migrants brought with them a nonwhiteness that had officially been declared extinct. (248â249)
Whilst Borges may not have used such language himself (at least not in the story), his growing trepidation towards the laboring masses â combined with his questionable deployment of the gaucho trope â speaks to a political and intellectual culture in which indigeneity was perceived as a threat, and in which this threat was transposed onto the working class. Considered in this context, âThe Southâ begins to resemble a form of delayed onset elitism â a conditional cosmopolitanism that does not extend as far as the Peronist majority.4
3 âCows ⦠Where Are You?â
As a counterpoint to this idealized, anti-Peronist rendering of the gaucho, I now turn to Roberto Bolañoâs âThe Insufferable Gauchoâ: a story about a retired judge who returns to his family ranch in the Pampas following the December 2001 crisis in Argentina. The crisis in question resulted from the accelerated neoliberalization of the country in the wake of the 1976â1983 military dictatorship, which, instead of demonstrating the merits of the free market, produced widespread unemployment, crippling austerity, and ultimately, mass protest.
Like Borges, Bolaño is not the first Latin American author to come to mind when thinking about the rural. The Chilean is primarily known for his depiction of urban spaces, most famously his representation of Mexico City in the 1998 novel The Savage Detectives. Bracketing the storyâs title for a moment, âThe Insufferable Gauchoâ shows no early signs of bucking this trend. The protagonist, Manuel Pereda, is a retired judge and avowed anti-Peronist who â in spite of the sudden death of his wife some years earlier â lives a contented life in Buenos Aires with his two children, Cuca and Bebe: âItâs hard not to be happy, he used to say, in Buenos Aires, which is a perfect blend of Paris and Berlinâ (11).5 The European flourishes of the Argentine capital, which call to mind Sarmientoâs prescription for civilization in Facundo, seem to pervade every aspect of Peredaâs daily routine, from the âbuttered French breadâ that he eats for breakfast every morning to the âtwo teachers with Italian surnamesâ that come to the house to give English and French classes to Bebe (10, 11). In a clear nod to Borges, this cosmopolitan existence takes on a more literary form when Cuca and Bebe eventually grow up and move out (which happens a few pages into the story), leaving Pereda to dedicate his time to âorganizing his huge, chaotic libraryâ (12).
It is during this period of newfound solitude that the âcivilizedâ (i.e. white, European) veneer of Buenos Aires begins to crack. Whenever Bebe comes home to visit, he drags his father along to a local literary gathering, but Peredaâs experience of these meetings is markedly ambiguous. âWhen they talked about literature,â the narrator informs us, âhe was completely bored ⦠But when they talked about national and international politics, the lawyerâs body grew tense, as if under the effect of an electric currentâ (12). The suggestion that something ominous is in the air becomes even stronger when Pereda has lunch with a fellow judge and a retired journalist. He laughs throughout the
A few days later ⦠the Argentine economy collapsed. Accounts in American dollars were frozen, and those who hadnât moved their capital (or their savings) offshore suddenly discovered that they had nothing left ⦠That was when Pereda decided to go back to the country. (13â14)
This allusion to the fall of the Fernando de la Rúa government in December 2001 points to a critical moment in the neoliberal experiment that had been forced upon Argentina during the military dictatorship. As Mario E. Carranza notes, âFourteen million Argentines â over a third of the population â lived below the poverty line ⦠The neoliberal model had reached a crisis stageâ (70). Bolañoâs portrayal of the eruption of this crisis stage also represents an early turning point in the narrative, with the rest of the story charting Peredaâs relocation and adaptation to the Pampas.6
The similarities between âThe Insufferable Gauchoâ and âThe Southâ are plain to see. At one point, Pereda even claims that âhis destiny ⦠would be to meet his death like Dahlman [sic]â (22). In this instance, however, the Argentine interior represents a safe haven not from the corrupting influence of mass immigration and/or Peronism, but from the humiliating and bankrupting effects of globalization â at least from the perspective a white, upper-middle-class citizen who sees financial crisis and the waning of masculinity as two sides of the same coin. âWe have fallen,â Pereda announces midway through the story, âbut we can still pick ourselves up and go to our deaths like menâ (28). The rural, in this configuration, becomes a gendered site of redemption where the âpride of the nationâ â code for bourgeois comfort and status â can be symbolically restored. And yet, Peredaâs arrival in the countryside produces a disjuncture between expectation and reality that he is unable to close, despite his continuous efforts. On the side of expectation lies anachronism and rusticity: a countryside that is âno place for a man like him, a cultivated family manâ (14), but this is not what appears on the side of reality. Beginning with the âpart Indian ⦠reading a Batman comicâ (15) that Pereda encounters on the train (who challenges the supposed antagonism between rurality/indigeneity and modernity), the Sarmiento-inspired split between civilization and barbarism is incessantly eroded.
The sticking point for Pereda is what Raymond Williams calls the âconsciousness of real processesâ (48). Bolaño is less interested in indulging his protagonistâs preconceptions about the rural than in registering their susceptibility to capitalist transformation. It seems important, for instance, that the story brims with hired hands, housekeepers, local merchants, and even the landless: âthey spotted the shell of a ranch house on the horizon ⦠five or six malnourished children came out to greet them, and a woman wearing a very wide skirtâ (33). The impoverishment of such subjects, which the woman attributes to the fact that âthe owners of the ranch had gone off to the city a long time agoâ (33â34), represents the flipside to the incursion of Batman, bicycles, and Monopoly. It registers the devastating effects of what Ericka Beckman calls âthe dynamics of uneven rural modernization, caught between logics of dispossession and abandonmentâ (821).
On this point, we must attend to Peredaâs anger and disgust at learning about the gauchosâ political alignment â a reaction that signals an ignorance about the lived realities of subalternity. â[T]hey were nostalgic for General Perón,â the narrators informs the reader. âThis is where we part company, said Pereda, and pulled out his knifeâ (35). In addition to further highlighting the ludicrousness of the protagonistâs macho pretentions (âthe old guys recoiled in fear and asked what he was doingâ [35]), Bolaño alludes here to the part played by Peronism in improving indigenous and mestizo lives. As Oscar Chamosa shows, the folklore policies introduced during the first Peronism (1943â1955) marked a âstep
The key difference between the Peronists and the Conservatives was that the celebration of criollo folklore under Perón accompanied sweeping reforms such as unionization of sugar and wine workers, as well as the regulation of rural day labor, that empowered the rural criollo ⦠[T]he Peronist embrace of criollo folklore can be understood as a significant revision of the official discourse on Argentine ethnicity. (123)7
Pereda is unwilling to entertain this Peronist inflection of criollismo. It is as though the near eradication of gauchos over the course of the nineteenth century were not enough: now it is the mores, values, and even political desires of their ancestors that require taming.
Crucially, such is Peredaâs desperation to maintain the illusion of what the narrator calls âplaces that remain steadfastly faithfulâ (34) that, instead of abandoning his revisionist fantasy, he projects it inwards, expressing it at the level of reconfigured subjectivity. For all of his disappointment with his rural surroundings, over the course of the story, Pereda undergoes a radical, almost cellular transformation from cosmopolitan city-dweller to gaucho stereotype. During his first encounter with a local after alighting from the train, he notices that âhis voice ⦠sounded off, as if the air of [the town] Capitán Jourdan had invigorated his vocal chordsâ (18). This personal metamorphosis is well under way by the time Bebe comes to visit, with the protagonist sporting âa beard, long tangled hair, and a bare chest tanned by the sunâ (28â29). On the one hand, Peredaâs obsession with rural cliché is as banal as it is insufferable. As Williams shows, the essentialization of country life has become a default position when it comes to capitalist critique. But Peredaâs disregard for his actual rural surroundings suggests a version of this position that is specific to the neoliberal moment, in which the voiding of the gauchoâs mythic content does not necessarily translate into reconsideration or disavowal.
There are resonances here with Fredric Jamesonâs claim that, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, âthe producers of culture have nowhere to go but to the pastâ (1984: 65). In âPostmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalismâ (1984), Jameson famously indicts the âdepthlessnessâ and âweakening of historicityâ that dominates cultural production under globalization (58).
It is worth reiterating here the âvirile image of the gauchoâ that Pereda seeks to restore (Niebylski 173, my translation), which he proposes as an antidote to Argentinaâs reputational and financial ruin. Not only does this assumption highlight the gauchoâs role in mediating masculine, upper-middle-class anxieties about the loss of capital and status, it also prepares the ground for the storyâs violent denouement, when the protagonist is accosted by a writer outside a Buenos Aires café after returning to the capital to sign some papers related to the sale of his house: âBefore Pereda knew what was going on, the writer was upon him ⦠[Pereda] took a step forward and, without anyone noticing that he was armed, planted the point of the blade, though not deeply, in his opponentâs groinâ (40). At the same moment that the civilization/barbarism binary proposed by Sarmiento is undercut (insofar as it is the writer rather than the gaucho who instigates the confrontation), Bolaño refrains from simply inverting the model, which would involve presenting Pereda as a rational, irreproachable victim. Rather, in keeping with the general cynicism of Bolañoâs fiction, barbarism is reframed as a pervasive, perhaps inescapable condition that encompasses the city and the countryside alike, as well as the âemasculatedâ men who lay (phallic) claim to such spaces.
The dream that Pereda has leading up to this encounter, in which he imagines himself as a Christ-like figure riding a horse into Buenos Aires, is emblematic of this refusal to sanitize the rural:
He imagined people thronging the sidewalks as he made his entry ⦠All of us enter Jerusalem sooner or later, he thought as he tossed and turned. Every single one of us. And some never leave. But most do. And then we are seized and crucified. Especially the poor gauchos. (37â38)
The allusions to Christian sacrifice and cosmopolitan betrayal are reminiscent of the fascist weaponization of the countryside, or what Williams describes as âthe offensive against democracy in the name of blood and soilâ (51). In fact, one wonders whether, had âThe Insufferable Gauchoâ come to Bolaño earlier in his career, Pereda might have made it into his mock anthology of fascist writers, Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996). The point is that the ridiculousness
4 Conclusion: the Future of the Rural Past
In the late 1990s, a group known as los piqueteros (âthe picketersâ) began protesting against the government of Carlos Menem (1989â1999). Comprised of disaffected youths who had had enough of the poverty and unemployment brought about by Menemâs neoliberal reforms, los piqueteros set up road blockades in urban centers of Argentina, demanding reassurance and support in the face of their uncertain futures (Gordillo 254). The conservative newspaper La Nación would later denounce âThe Savagery of the Piqueterosâ (qtd. in Gordillo 255), positing them, in Gordilloâs words, as âdirect heirs to the indigenous savageryâ denounced by Sarmiento in 1845 (255).
This rendering savage of deprived, subaltern populations echoes the material and epistemic violence against rural subjects that I have examined in this chapter. Much like the figure of the gaucho, which Sarmiento associated with the âdevastations of barbarismâ (35), los piquetoros are framed in terms of a non-white, non-urban encroachment that âthreatens the spatial integrity of White Argentinaâ (Gordillo 256). And, like the gaucho, whose historical eradication paved the way for the figureâs nationalist rebirth, the voices of los piquetoros have been drowned out by those of the (predominantly white) middle and upper classes.
As I have shown, Borges and Bolaño approach this nationalist (re)vision of the gaucho in radically different ways. Whilst âThe Southâ revolves around a libertarian dreamscape that obscures the histories and legacies of settler-colonialism, âThe Insufferable Gauchoâ highlights the impossibility of maintaining such a façade in the context of globalization. And yet, both texts also point to a socio-political tendency that is difficult to reject wholesale: the idea that the future â in whatever progressive or perverted form one envisages it â might be located in the past. Williams describes this tendency as an âescalatorâ moving backwards through time, one which at first glance seems to be âa single escalator, a perpetual recession into history,â but âturns out ⦠to be a more complicated movementâ (16â17). As we have seen, this movement gives rise to representations of the countryside that are as idyllic as they are dangerous. But it also creates the opportunity for excavating alternative, anti-colonial
Peronism is a form of corporatism in which the state serves as intermediary between bosses and workers.
Adamovsky notes: âif the criollo traditions embodied in the figure of the gaucho ⦠were considered to be of pure Spanish heritage, then these expressions of cultural nationalism posed little threat to the idea that the true Argentine people were white and Europeanâ (160â161).
In âThe Argentine Writer and Traditionâ (1951), Borges famously proclaims that âour patrimony is the universeâ (219).
Swansonâs analysis of âConjectural Poem,â written by Borges in 1943 (the same year as the military coup in which Perón participated), reaches a similar conclusion (86â87).
Gordillo notes: âthere are few things that white Argentina finds more gratifying than hearing Europeans or North Americans refer to Buenos Aires as âThe Paris of South Americaââ (248).
Though Peredaâs decision to leave Buenos Aires is driven by a general dissatisfaction with urban life following the crash, there is also a practical dimension to his departure â namely, that his money is âall frozen in the bank â in other words, as good as lostâ (14).
Chamosa is careful to point out that the âPeronist discourse on criollo culture had its share of ambiguities, showing the lasting pull of Eurocentrism on Peronist policymakersâ (125).
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