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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2024
“But in the history of cross-breeding, the union effected outside marriage was of infinitely greater importance. The tales of the chroniclers and missionaries often paint a dark picture of the relations between conqueror and Indian woman—rape, kidnapping, sale and exchange of women, a system of concubinage and harems etc.” (Angel Rosenblatt, La Población indigena de América)
“There is racial conflict in Latin America and racial harmony which can be seen only by those who have eyes. The governments and the people themselves see them only very late.” (Sarmiento, Conflicto y Armonías de las razas en América)
The colonial period left no fertile seeds for a culture in the soil of South America. As Ricardo Rojas assures us, “We do not find a single imaginative work in prose in these three hundred years.” “All of our colonial literature is confined within the limits of the historical genre…everything in it is the unfolding of a chronicle. To fix the memory of social facts, memorials were written to military conquests and hagiographies of spiritual ones, poems on the English invasions and the emancipation of America. Even the brief erotic and religious poems are only monuments in verse, and so are Tejeda's works whose autobiographical character cannot be denied.” (La Literatura Argentina)
1 "If today one of those human beehives that are called colonies came to be located in these independent territories on the usual condition that they be worked and populated, it is natural that Spain, the mother country, would not look kindly at her sons diverting themselves in the new world with the reading of songs and books of chivalry which, before dying under the pen of your namesake Cervantes, had already been forbidden in America so that their im portation would not foster the quixotic spirit of chivalry. In spite of those prohibitions, we have not been free from books for the guitar or from romances in which the deeds of evildoers are sung as if they were feats of prowess by Christian heroes." Letter of Juan Maria Gutiérrez to Dr. Alejandro Magariños Cervantes, Oct. 28, 1858.
2 "These novels which sought to entertain by exalting fraud, theft and bluff as national prototypes were the most vigorous manifestation of the Spanish genius and at the same time the most original, as witnessed by the influence they enjoyed for two centuries over European literature, both through the large number of translations and the imitations they inspired. The Spanish picaresque novel became an international genre and owed its success as much to its con trasting effect with the champions of chivalresque fiction as to the realistic elements of which it was composed." (Leopoldo Lugones, El Imperio Jesuítico)
3 "There could be no American literature while Spanish rule lasted; no colony can have its own literature, for the existence it enjoys is not its own and literature is no more than the expression of the conditions and elements of social existence. The colonial mind, like colonial arms and the colonial soil, produce only for the mother country and receive from her their customs and laws, preoccupations and beliefs. If some intellectual light illuminates it, it is only a reflection—pallid, however brilliant it may be—of the great luminary of which it is a satellite. What did we hear, on the banks of our Plate River prior to 1810? Faint echoes of the songs rising from the shores of the Manza nares." (Florencio Varela, Informe de la comisión clasificadora del certamen de Mayo, 1841, Montevideo)
4 I cannot take the time in this work to develop the theme, which is here adumbrated, of the fixation of an ideology constituted by "idols," the very idols of the great English philosopher—idola tribus (of the species and the race), idola fori (of language and its myths), idola theatri (of philosophy, dogmas and beliefs) and idola specus (formed by the individual by himself). But I must warn the reader about the terminology to be employed in what follows—that of psychoanalytic complexes which in other aspects are correlated with prejudices, as they are with the conditioned reflexes of Pavlov. After studying the historical processes and the strange phenomena of life in Argentina, I have deduced, from the existence in our social life of such a powerful ideology (as already noted in my Radiografía de la Pampa, 1933) certain essential characteristics which ma nifest themselves in the long lines of our cultural, and especially our literary, evolution and among which are to be found fear, domestic reserve, vanity, haughty behavior, uprootedness, disenchantment, etc. I will reexamine them presently in a summary fashion and strictly with reference to literature alone. To show that this is not something arbitrary on my part or a collective mental state proper and peculiar to my country, I will only cite Hans Barth's explanation, in his book Truth and Ideology: "In the eyes of the men of the French Enlight enment, prejudice had a twofold effect. In the first place, it kept the subject from knowing the state and society since he saw himself obliged beforehand to select, interpret and evaluate the fact in a certain way, in accordance with the preconceived opinions of his estate and profession. In the second place, prejudice also impeded knowledge on the side of the object; for society and the state have an interest in the ways and means of presenting themselves. Finally, both func tions unite in concealing the true rational order of human existence."
5 "During the whole colonial period, the aristocrats, or as they were then called, the men of figure and soil drifted off into a soft slumber and could not be roused. They lived in brutish static repose while the lower classes stirred and led a stubborn fight for the most elementary necessities of life. They fought against Indians, half-wild animals, against the same lord of the village who persecuted them and took three quarters of the fruits of their labor." (José Maria Ramos Mejia, Las multitudes argentinas)
6 It may be added that Sarmiento, Avellaneda, Mansilla, Estrada, Groussac, Larreta, Lugones, Banchs, Borges and many more, possibly the best, were exotic in another sense.
7 Our prehistory, that of the three hundred years as a colony, should be studied not so much in its agricultural and commercial aspects (the influence of the missionary chroniclers of Paraguay) as in its ethnological and anthropological aspects, for this is the period of cross-breeding which fixed the "basic personality" of all of America in a greater or lesser degree and led in our country to very complex and delicate variations. To quote Ramos Mejía : "The masses from which Artigas, Ramirez, Rosas, Quiroga and all the other leaders came differed anthropologically from those that were being formed in the cities and the neighboring countryside. I am saying this to distinguish the latter from the former, much more remote from the centers of population, and consequently, more barbarous and primitive." (Op. cit.)
8 The most important works are the following: Brother Reginaldo de Lizárraga, Descripción breve del reino des Perú, Tucumán, Rio de la Plata y Chile (1605), which paints an interesting picture of Argentinian society in its infancy (chs. 62 to 72), on a trip on foot from Lima to Chile and from San tiago to Cordoba and thence by cart to Buenos Aires, on which he observes everything. This is the most meritorius work after Ulrico Schmidl, Derrotero y Viaje a España y las Indias. The now classical accounts of Centenera and DÍaz de Guzmán might be included, along with other chronicles. But the best observer and the most agreeable one is unquestionably Concolorcorvo, in his Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (from the end of the eighteenth century), on a trip from Buenos Aires to Lima.
9 "In the history of Argentina from its origins to Rosas, there are two elements which constitute the axis of the evolutionary process. It is the family which, together with the economic factor, provide, as the main influences, the key to its results. In the old Argentinian society, on the coast as well as in the interior of the country, the individual did not exist in the full sense in which we now conceive of him."
"The May Revolution and the wars reacted on the family. The men went off to fight and left the women with all duties and responsibilities, and since the women performed their new functions well, they in fact acquired the privileges of their position. The mother occupied an eminent place in the home, and this change was translated into laws appointing her the heiress of her husband, to the exclusion of his brothers and other collateral relatives." (J. A. García, La Ciudad Indiana)
10 One of the taboos is the ecclesiastical one, no less protected than the epic and the racial ones—our Mother the Country and the Holy Mother Church, a coalition of religion and politics. These are themes that preoccupied Sarmiento in his old age (Conflicto y Armonías). I pointed out that it would be necessary to complement history with ethnology and with prehistory and its aberrations: "The lack of intellectual communication between the men and women of the early period has been extending into our own days." (J. B. Terán, El nacimiento de la América Española) "One need only look over the trials of the inquisition to see with what acts of lewdness the commissioners of the Holy Office accused bishops like Vitoria, Cádenas or Mercado, and with what horrendous sins the Jesuit brothers and fathers were charged. Continuous sacrilege, adulteries, witch-craft, concubinage, polygamy, all this entered, if not into the customs, then at least into the private lives of those times which we like to think of as so dif ferent from the present." (Ricardo Rojas, La Literatura Argentina) The italics are mine.
11 "Argentinian patriots can, nevertheless, bless the original forsaken state of this region, for though it fell to the conquerors poor and denuded, it was clear of that permanent mortgage, the Indian race, which always had to gra vitate towards the historical fortunes of other, apparently more favored, races. On this immense tabula rasa— which coincidentally resembled and anticipated that of the United States where the scarce native population was as dispensable as the fauna—began in obscurity and under the dual action, both of shaping and of being shaped, between the environment and the colonists the greatest and most prolonged experiment in naturalization ever instituted among the Latin races—an experiment which, after the hazardous test of independence, has finally reached a decisive and triumphant conclusion." (Groussac in the Preface to Mendoza y Garay)
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