Part 2

Borges: A Life
by Edwin Williamson

(Page 2 of 4)

The tyrant was finally deposed in 1852, when his many enemies united to defeat him at the Battle of Caseros. But the victor of Caseros was yet another caudillo, General Urquiza, the boss of the rival province of Entre Ríos, who managed to topple Rosas with the support of Brazil, Uruguay, and the exiled unitarios. Being himself a federal, Urquiza passed a new constitution providing for a confederation of provinces, though under a strong presidentialist regime. The unitarios refused to accept this federal arrangement, but they were defeated by Urquiza at the Battle of Cepeda in 1859. Two years later the unitarios rebelled again, and this time their leader, Bartolomé Mitre, overthrew Urquiza at the Battle of Pavón, and Buenos Aires was at last accepted by the provincial caudillos as the de facto capital of the nation.

With Buenos Aires at its head, Argentina was set upon the road of stability and modernization. In the course of the 1860s and 1870s, successive liberal presidents, Mitre, Sarmiento and Avellaneda-all former unitario leaders-put in place the machinery of a modern nation-state: an integrated judicial system, a central bank, a professional army, a system of public schools and libraries, an academy of science and other technical institutions. The Argentine economy was geared toward the export of wool, meat, and wheat for the industrial centers of Europe, and this required the progressive privatization and enclosure of land in the pampas. Successive governments actively promoted European immigration with the aim of developing a rural middle class to replace the gauchos and the Indian hunters on the open range. Foreign capital was invested in the construction of a modern infrastructure of communications and transport. The British in particular would build new docks in Buenos Aires and a railway network across the pampas designed to consolidate the export economy by linking up the hitherto fractious provinces to Buenos Aires and, through the port city, to the world outside.

Domingo Sarmiento, who became president in 1868, was a prominent liberal intellectual and the author of one of the most influential books in Argentine history, Facundo: or, Civilization and Barbarism, a book in which the liberal vision of the nation's destiny was most fully expressed. Originally published in 1845, at the height of the struggle against Rosas, Facundo takes the form of a biography of Facundo Quiroga, a famous caudillo who pursued a violent career in the aftermath of independence until he was killed in 1835, almost certainly on Rosas's orders. Sarmiento argued that Argentina could be saved from this chaotic "barbarism" only by adopting the modern "civilization" of the European Enlightenment.

By "barbarism" Sarmiento meant the lack of stable government based on legitimate authority. He argued that barbarism was rooted in the pampas because the great plains were so underpopulated that the people who lived there lacked the habits of social coexistence that provide the basis for civilized values. In this sense the gaucho was a barbarian because he led a life of anarchic individualism in which he resorted to force in order to assert his will. This made him the ideal tool for the ambitions of regional caudillos, whose power struggles had led to the anarchy that had engulfed the entire viceroyalty of the Río de La Plata in the aftermath of independence.

How could this barbarism be tamed once more? There were two forms of civilization available to the rulers of Argentina: there was the clerical civilization of Catholic Spain, which had been successful in ensuring order during the colonial period, and the civilization of the Enlightenment. The former, in Sarmiento's view, was incapable of turning back the tide of barbarism. He portrayed the inland city of Córdoba, a bastion of Hispanic traditionalism, as a somnolent relic, its venerable buildings reflected on the stagnant waters of an ornamental lake. By way of contrast, he described the vitality of Buenos Aires, standing at the mouth of the river system of the Plata, a thriving port equipped to trade in goods and ideas with the world at large. Having initiated the wars of independence, Buenos Aires could claim a historic right to lead the nation toward modernity.

The plight of Argentina was encapsulated by Sarmiento in the vivid image of a gaucho's dagger stuck in the heart of liberal Buenos Aires. But even in Facundo one encounters an ambivalence toward the gaucho, for when Sarmiento wrote about the gaucho's skills as horseman, tracker, and wandering troubadour, he could not help but display a certain admiration for this authentic son of the native soil. The fact was that even though the gaucho might have been a "barbarian," he also represented whatever distinctive identity the young republic could claim to possess in relation to Spain. And yet, by the logic of his own argument in favor of progress and modern civilization, Sarmiento had to accept that the gaucho's traditional way of life was condemned eventually to disappear.

It was during Sarmiento's term of office as president that a book appeared which was to become the other great classic of Argentine literature. Published in 1872, The Gaucho Martín Fierro is a narrative poem by José Hernández written in a style based on the gaucho dialect. It tells the story of Martín Fierro, an innocent gaucho press-ganged into the army to serve in a frontier garrison against the Indians of the pampas. After being mercilessly exploited by the authorities, Fierro deserts and roams the pampas as an outlaw, killing a black gaucho in a senseless brawl and later claiming another victim. Pursued by the police, he is forced eventually to seek refuge with the Indians.

Hernández conceived the poem originally as a critique of Sarmiento's Facundo and as a protest against a modernizing government that had broken faith with the gauchos. However, by the time a sequel was published seven years later, Hernández himself had bowed to the inevitability of modernization. Accordingly, in Part II, Martín Fierro is repelled by the barbarism of the Indians and decides to return to Christian "civilization," but he finds that nothing has changed, and all that society can offer him is work as a hired hand on an estancia. Caught as he is between white "civilization" and Indian "barbarism," Fierro has nowhere to go, so the narrative draws to an inconclusive end with the protagonist riding off into the unknown, a rootless fugitive at the mercy of chance.

The two classic books of the nineteenth century, Facundo and Martín Fierro, represent a division that would become ingrained in the Argentine psyche. Facundo expressed the desire of the Argentines to build a modern liberal nation, while Martín Fierro crystallized an ambivalence about modernity, for even though the march of progress appeared to be unstoppable, there lingered a fear that the country might lose its soul to the devil of new ideas and foreign commerce. The figure of the gaucho thus came to embody the unresolved question of national identity, a question that would gnaw away at the Argentine conscience and would resurface periodically in a violent impulse to hold on to or to retrieve some vital essence that might be lost as Argentina acquired the trappings of a modern nation.

As a triumphant Buenos Aires monopolized the resources of the young republic, the interior provinces entered a long-term decline that has lasted to this day. Even so, there remained pockets of resistance to this rapid modernization. In the 1860s and 1870s, Indian raids on white ranches on the pampas became a menace that threatened further development, and there occurred also several rebellions of gauchos, particularly in the province of Entre Ríos after its caudillo Urquiza was defeated by Buenos Aires in 1861.

Borges's grandfather, Colonel Francisco Borges, played a leading role in the suppression of these vestiges of provincial "barbarism." In 1870 he commanded the troops sent by President Sarmiento to suppress the gaucho rebellion in Entre Ríos. After defeating the rebels, he was appointed commander of the garrison at Junín on the Indian frontier and in 1872 led his troops at the Battle of San Carlos, a major encounter that served to contain the Indian threat on the pampas. The following year he defeated a second rebellion in Entre Ríos. The colonel's brilliant career, however, was cut short in 1874, when he met his death on the field of battle. This untimely end was to rob his family of the fruits of his exploits, for the armed forces of Buenos Aires, under the command of General Julio Argentino Roca, would five years later embark on the "Conquest of the Desert," a full-scale campaign to expel the Indians from the pampas once and for all, and in a matter of months, the pampas of west-central and southern Argentina were cleared of Indian nomads.

The Conquest of the Desert was to be a decisive turning point in the history of Argentina. The defeat of the Indian tribes released vast tracts of land for conversion into estancias, massive ranches for the production of meat and wheat for export to Europe. A feverish boom ensued as established landowners, army officers, speculators, financiers, merchants, even some canny immigrants, acquired land and began to form a new oligarchy of estancieros that would rapidly overshadow the old patrician elite that had secured the independence of the republic. This land boom was shortly followed by a tremendous acceleration in the rate of immigration. Attracted by high wages, huge numbers of foreigners came to Argentina. In 1870 the population was less than 2 million, but over the following fifty years approximately 3.5 million immigrants would settle in the country.

Copyright © 2005 Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Edwin Williamson is the King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish at Oxford University and a fellow of Exeter College. His books include The Penguin History of Latin America.