Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

civilized folk defeat the barbarians 191
Semioticians reject these debates and approach Facundo from an alternative
perspective. They argue that Sarmiento’s civilization/barbarism dichotomy
was a discursive construct that invented Argentina’s and, by extension,
Latin America’s identity rather than revealed it. They do not ask whether
the civilization/barbarism dichotomy is accurate but from what sources it
originated as an idea. These theorists take particular interest in Sarmiento’s
portrayal of Argentina’s gauchos, the semi-itinerant cowboys who inhabited
Argentina’s vast interior plains. Renowned for knife wielding, horsemanship,
and herding the wild cattle that roamed Argentina’s plains, the gaucho
was about as close as Argentina came to an indigenous culture outside of
its small Indian populations. Sarmiento dedicates the fi rst third of his book
to a demographic and geographic survey of Argentina, which includes an
extended description of the gaucho. The study of the caudillo Facundo consumes
the remaining two-thirds.
Seminomadic, lacking in formal education, and racially mixed, gauchos
were the author’s nemesis. Sarmiento portrays them as “half-breeds” driven
by passion rather than intellect. 2 They represented the type of mindless people
who allowed caudillos like Facundo to rise to power. While Sarmiento
believed in the rehabilitative powers of education, he was also highly practical.
He desired to uplift the impoverished masses in Argentina but placed
priority on the need to promote civilization at all costs. Thus, the gaucho
ultimately had to be exterminated. Sarmiento wrote in a letter in 1861:
“Do not try to economize the blood of gauchos. It is a fertilizer, like the
blood of animals from the slaughterhouse, that must be made useful to the
country.” 3
But Sarmiento’s hatred for the gaucho placed a potentially dismantling
paradox at the center of his argument. How could he at once espouse the
destruction of an indigenous culture while promoting Argentina’s distinct
national identity? How could he promote the United States and Europe as
models for Argentina’s future while simultaneously promoting Argentina as
a unique and viable nation? Facundo is an attempt to resolve these contradictions.
The gauchos would be remembered in song and lore, incorporated
into the collective memory of Argentines across the ages, but eradicated as
living, breathing people.
Semioticians fi nd Sarmiento’s compromise revealing and see it as a classic
example of a text speaking against itself. Instead of Facundo resolving
its own paradox, it is trapped inside itself. Instead of revealing Argentina’s
unique essence, Facundo offers a distillation of racialist and nationalist
discourses that were swirling throughout intellectual and political circles
both at home and abroad. In particular, they see Sarmiento’s nationalism as
prototypical of romanticism. At its core, romanticism struggled with this