Alternative Communities in Hispanic Literature and Culture

Edited by Luis H. Castañeda and Javier González

Edited by Luis H. Castañeda and Javier González

This book first published 2016

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-9494-X ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9494-4 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...... viii

Introduction ...... ix Luis H. Castañeda and Javier F. González

Marginality and Community

Chapter One ...... 2 An Alternative Nation Building Project: The Depiction of Ángel Vicente Peñaloza in Eduardo Gutiérrez’s Historical Folletines Gisela Salas Carrillo

Chapter Two ...... 20 Transnational Panic: Criminal Cults in “Elena Garrigó” and René’s Flesh Pilar Cabrera Fonte

Chapter Three ...... 37 La Montaña Mágica: Representations of HIV/AIDS from the Sanatorium Óscar A. Pérez

Chapter Four ...... 61 Víctor Hugo Viscarra: The Dog Life of the Human Pack—Reflections on the Limits of Community as a Promise of Emancipation Irina Feldman

Chapter Five ...... 87 Street Dwellers and Youth Gangs as War Machines in Colombian Literature and Film Carlos-Germán Van Der Linde

Chapter Six ...... 110 Into the Matrix of Contemporary Spanish Squatter Communities: Navigating Through Utopian Landscapes of Hospitality and Dystopian Landscapes of Hostility in Okupada by Care Santos Diana Palardy vi Contents

Chapter Seven ...... 135 Alternative Communities in Lavapiés: (Dis)Encounters between Spain and Cuba Ana Corbalán

Intellectuals: Rethinking Community

Chapter Eight ...... 152 “Anarchy is a Literary Thing”: Mateu Morral, Pío Baroja and the Ephemeral Community of 1906 Xavier M. Dapena

Chapter Nine ...... 174 Deciphering Macedonio: Macedonio Fernández’s Project to Found an Alternative Community in Museo de la novela de la Eterna (Primera novela buena) Federico Fridman

Chapter Ten ...... 197 Transient Communities: Authority and Emancipation in Alberto Fuguet’s Tinta Roja Juan García Oyervides

Chapter Eleven ...... 215 Two Peruvian Circles of Artists: Artistic Communities and Globalization in the Novels of Iván Thays and Rodrigo Núñez Carvallo Luis H. Castañeda

Chapter Twelve ...... 236 A Cellular Literary Model: Globalization and Transnational Flows in Latin American Contemporary Fictions Carlos Yushimito

Chapter Thirteen ...... 257 Cultura Profética: Across Communities of Resistance and Insistence Geraldine Monterroso

Alternative Communities in Hispanic Literature and Culture vii

The Mexican Case: Counterculture

Chapter Fourteen ...... 280 The Literature of the Onda: Imagined Alternative Communities in 1960s Mexico Javier F. González

Chapter Fifteen ...... 309 The Representation of the Mexican Counterculture Movement in Pasaban en silencio nuestros dioses by Héctor Manjarrez Salvador Fernández

Chapter Sixteen ...... 333 From Manifesto to Manifestation: The Infrarrealista Movement on the Margins of Mexican Literary Culture John Burns

Chapter Seventeen ...... 357 Porn-themes of Dominance and Submission: Perverse Communities in Alberto Chimal’s Los esclavos Salvador L. Raggio ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors wish to thank Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Middlebury College for the financial support that made this publication possible. INTRODUCTION

LUIS H. CASTAÑEDA MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE AND JAVIER F. GONZÁLEZ CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, CHANNEL ISLANDS

This book studies the literary and cultural representation of a diverse group of social organisms that, despite their vast historical and geographical differences, can all be described as “alternative communities” operating within the open, fluid borders of the Hispanic world between the nineteenth century and the present. In more precise terms, the seventeen chapters that comprise this book study the depiction—mostly in novels and narrative texts, but also in film, poetry, music, etc.—of certain artistic communities or circles or artists, along with a handful of more marginalised, even criminal groups, all of which challenge a plethora of set notions regarding national, cultural, and artistic identity, as well as other elements of the accepted status quo. But what, specifically, are alternative communities, and why should critics of Hispanic literature and culture explore them? In short, alternative communities are small and subversive groupings; transgressive associations that differ from society at large and threaten it with the possibilities of transformation. A first attempt at a definition conjures up two images: the secret society, and the circle of artists. Secret societies can be defined as bands that meet clandestinely to devise plots that usually involve overturning the established order in a radical way.1 A motif of popular literature and film, the secret society gains a metaphysical status in the work of Jorge Luis Borges as it becomes entangled with ruminations about the nature of reality, language, and literature. In Borges’ seminal short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940), a secret society of conniving intellectuals devotes generations to imagining a whole planet— Tlön—and writing forty volumes of an encyclopaedia that describes every possible aspect of this invented world. Significantly, in Tlön reality is not grounded in objectivity but exists as a system of idealistic constructions in which language is the ultimate fabric of things. The story’s final twist is x Introduction

Tlön’s slow but steady invasion of our world, a colonisation that changes everything, from history to objects themselves, and that resembles the advance of totalitarianism in the Western world at the time Borges published it. The lonely and mournful narrator bears witness to this inevitable conquest and finds in the work of translation a source of quiet resistance. Secret societies can be understood as the dark cousins of alternative communities. Borges’s Tlön incorporates a key element that we must take into consideration when we study the latter: the idea of a collective and systematic invention, supported by a handful of seditious agents, that entails an intellectual and political project of conquest, replacement, or transformation. There is a utopian drive here as well as a deep faith in the transformative potential of words. In the arena of language, two confronted worlds engage in conflict: the status quo and a possible, alternative reality. Two communities fight against each other: society as we know it and the group of plotters. In Borges, the use of imagination and language as tools of coercion has a problematic authoritarian undertone that cannot be overlooked. Not all alternative communities have this aggressive, tyrannical trait, but most of them can be said to be intrinsically violent in their bold and often unequal struggle with reality as it is. Never satisfied with any given state of affairs, especially when inequality and oppression prevail, the majority of alternative communities never reach such a level of power that enables them to do what the heresiarchs of Tlön accomplish, because they often survive on the edges of society. Nevertheless, in Spanish American literature, it is perhaps Borges’ contribution (even though Roberto Arlt had already published his masterpiece The Seven Madmen/The Flamethrowers in 1929 and 1931) to bring together insurgence, intellectualism, and linguistic imagination in the shape of a secret society:

This bold estimate brings us back to the basic problem: who were the people who had invented Tlön? The plural is unavoidable, because we have unanimously rejected the idea of a single creator, some transcendental Leibniz working in modest obscurity. We conjecture that this “brave new world” was the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, mathematicians, moralists, painters and geometricians, all under the supervision of an unknown genius. There are plenty of individuals who have mastered these various disciplines without having any facility for invention, far less for submitting that inventiveness to a strict, systematic plan. This plan is so vast that each individual contribution to it is infinitesimal. To begin with, Tlön was thought to be nothing more than a chaos, a free and irresponsible work of the imagination; now it was clear that it is a complete cosmos, and that the Alternative Communities in Hispanic Literature and Culture xi

strict laws which govern it have been carefully formulated, albeit provisionally. (Borges 1962, 22)

In Borges’ world, secret societies are not only destructive forces, they are also creative ones, artistic and systematic in essence. This second characteristic makes it possible to summon another archetype that embodies the aesthetic thrust of alternative communities: the circle of artists, such as the poets and painters that Borges mentions, but also the engineers and mathematicians, because the definition of art at stake here is wider than the mere production of beautiful objects. Indeed, circles of artists are small communities of aesthetes embarked on the pursuit of radical collective experiences that involve the transformation of their own social bond into a work of art; or, more precisely, an artistic event that projects itself utopically as the seed of a large-scale social revolution. Predominant in the historical avant-garde and often revisited by neo-avant- garde movements, the circle of artists has a long and important history in Spanish American literature.2 In fact, it makes a surprising appearance in the most influential Latin American novel of the past century, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), a text seemingly saturated by family, genealogy, and territory—the stuff of nations, not alternative groupings. In García Márquez’s magnum opus, Aureliano Babilonia, the last member of his dynasty and exegete of Melquíades’s scrolls, leaves the family home for the first time to join a circle of young écrivains spearheaded by a Catalan sage who owns a bookshop. 3 Exclusively comprising male subjects, the group’s main activities are byzantine literary discussions and recreational sex with prostitutes, and its experience is as intense as it is short-lived: a few pages after its inception, this circle of artists is disintegrated and Aureliano Babilonia meets his demise through the conflation of reading and disaster. It is crucial that García Márquez’s cenacle needs to first sever all ties with the home and the family—the spaces of filiation, according to Edward Said4—in order to build an artificial environment where identity, estranged from its traditional foundation, is only determined by books, and where sex, unlike mirrors, does not increase the number of men, as Borges wrote in his famous short story. In fact, literary dialogue and sexual relations represent two sides of the same coin, since both of them materialise the vanguardist dream of fusing art and life into a single sphere where reality is the offspring of literature—collective reality, it is essential to clarify, because what becomes aestheticized is the actual connection between colleagues and friends, their togetherness in a context of dialogue, communication, and equality. In this example, the Buendía family, with its xii Introduction history of identitarian duplications, is akin to the narrator’s cherished reality in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”; that is, the basis of tradition, repetition, and belonging to a specific locale, the town of Macondo. In this manner, One Hundred Years of Solitude adds two important features to the definition of alternative communities: first, the target of their transformative intervention is the rootedness of identity itself—family, town, nation, culture, etc.—a statement that García Márquez’s model grounds in terms less philosophical than those of Borges. Second, the creation of an alternative collective identity is an aesthetic project that endows its members with artistic capital and has a historical referent—it harks back to the utopian experiments of the avant-garde and, just like them, has an ephemeral life. Indeed, the premature dissolution of alternative communities is an event that many examples collected in this book highlight, maybe because this type of association is resistant to all forms of duration, structure, and institutionalisation. Alternative communities merge the clandestine side of secret societies and the artistic nature of circles of artists. It is clear, then, that they share a marginal peculiarity that sets them apart from all things official, conventional, or customary; it may therefore seem unexpected to encounter the names of Borges and García Márquez, the two most canonical contemporary writers of the Spanish language, in association with them. This apparent contradiction unveils a set of tensions present in the constitution of such communities, a certain uneasiness that can be explained as the différance of structure and communitas, to use the classical dichotomy of Victor Turner in his book The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1995). As an anthropologist of performance, Turner posits that both traditional and modern human societies alternate between two basic modes of interaction: one in which there is a rigid system of power with fixed positions, relationships, and rules (structure), and another in which hierarchy is suspended, giving way to a fluid solidarity and deep communication between equals (communitas). 5 Communitas can only be accomplished under special circumstances and for short periods, for instance in the heterochrony of the ritual, the party, or the happening. Any further prolongation of communitas would require the implementation of order, hierarchy, and power, thus distorting its essence and becoming structure. To clarify this point, one could imagine the breaking point of communitas as similar to the transformation of a subculture, an underground movement, into official culture: this is precisely the process that deprives avant-gardes of their transgressive flare. The reader may be tempted to identify alternative communities with communitas, but despite the fact that they do have a strong link, it is Alternative Communities in Hispanic Literature and Culture xiii necessary to acknowledge, as in Borges’s short story, that these groups also harbour a desire of structure, a will to persist and establish themselves in reality. The paradox here is that, by doing so, they may lose their alternative edge. Different degrees of communitas and structure mix to produce the groups studied in this volume. Rather than an opposition between these poles, what we find is an unstable, uneven exchange that reflects a changing nature and multiplicity that could be characterised as rhizomatic, following Deleuze and Guattari in their now classic second collaborative work A Thousand Plateaus (2010). According to them, space can be inhabited in two ways and thus transformed into completely different media. Dominated by the state and its machinery, striated space is marked by vertical control and observation; within it, all forms of movement conform to deep-seated pathways, and capitalism equates reality, with no external possibilities. In a way, striated space is the spatial consequence of the imposition of structure as defined by Turner. In permanent conflict with striated space, there is also smooth space, an open landscape with no centre or borders in which displacements follow the randomness of the rhizome, a metaphor of multiplicity.6 In striated space, the protagonist is the “war machine,” an agent that is both metaphor and subversive band that threatens the state by reminding it of its contingency, of being in competition with other modes of organisation. To pursue the analogy, smooth space is the habitat of communitas. In their purest form, when empty of structural desires, alternative communities are like war machines roaming around the desert, freely creating their own paths at ground level and plotting against the state’s need to conceal its fragility by disseminating its rule—the law of striated space. A couple of important conclusions can be derived from Deleuze and Guattari: firstly, that alternative communities may not be that different from structured, striated ones, since what differentiates them is their kind of mobility, a certain style of moving around space; and secondly, that space itself, with its territorial and national connotations, is a crucial aspect to our discussion. Alternative communities tend to be at odds with nation states: as a matter of fact, the national state seems to be their nemesis, their inverted image in the mirror. This antagonism is rooted in the very definition of modern nations, which can be described loosely and perhaps restrictedly as collectivities that picture themselves as units of kinship and belonging endowed with a homogeneous territory (a homeland) and a dense sense of history (an ancestral origin), and which may or may not be coupled with a state apparatus that safeguards their claim to identity, unity, and sovereignty. Nations, according to Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities (2006), xiv Introduction are not a matter of objective reality but of perceived or imagined comradeship, and this is why they need to sustain and reproduce themselves through a pedagogical system of history, values, rituals, symbols, and other paraphernalia. Nations, moreover, require the control of a definite space—striated space—in which to remain for a long time, thus generating a sense of continuity between a fabricated beginning, a solid present, and a calculable future. It is therefore easy to gauge the extreme opposition between nation states and alternative communities, the latter defined by the swiftness of war machines, the ensuing lack of a territory, and an ephemeral duration, as well as by an often multicultural and postnational make-up. Alternative communities, on the other hand, could not be readily attached to a bureaucracy, with its structure and hierarchy, without risking self-annihilation. Finally, nations rest on imaginary connections between fellow citizens, whereas alternative communities are more concrete and direct social forms in which agents know each other: presence is, in fact, a prerequisite of their collective experiments in communitas, but it precludes property over land.7 The tense relationship between alternative communities and nations dates back to the nineteenth century, a time in which most Spanish American nations gained their independence from Spain, and the resulting countries—Spain included—needed to begin thinking of themselves as modern collectivities. In this regard, it has become common in criticism to portray this century as a homogeneous time of nation building, as if there had not existed dissenting voices that questioned the unifying project of the liberal elites. As Doris Sommer shows in her study Foundational Fictions, nation building was a hegemonic ideological current that found its narrative counterpart in the “foundational romance,” a novelistic form in which the trope of the heteronormative wedding embodies the harmonisation pursued by the national community. Thus, reproductive sexuality and (presumed) private happiness become the allegory of a longing—that of unattainable cohesiveness. Notwithstanding this, it is worthwhile to note that the desire of unity presupposes a reality of heterogeneity that is not hidden, but rather exposed by other, more marginal and transgressive genres of fiction since the colonial period: contragoric texts, as Gustavo Faverón-Patriau argues in his book Contra la alegoría [In Opposition to Allegory] (2011), such as The First New Chronicle and Good Government by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, or even María by Jorge Isaacs, usually depicted as a textbook example of national writing. Contragoric texts not only illuminate existing social, racial, and cultural rifts in Spanish American nations; they also give literary form, achieved through their own textual fragmentation, to a Alternative Communities in Hispanic Literature and Culture xv profound criticism of the exclusivist, hierarchical program brandished by the newly-formed lettered cities. In other words, the nation-building projects supported by foundational romances must be put in the context of conflictive literary fields in which other—and othered—formulations took hold. Alternative communities are those imagined outside of the confines of the nation state, and not only in our contemporary world, but also in times when the power of the national is thought of as monolithic, with its illusion of wholeness, sameness, and integration. Exploring alternatives to the nation in the nineteenth century brings us back to the present and to a consideration of denationalisation—the loss of power of nation states—and postnationalism—the upsurge of identities that move beyond the nation. Originally, the postnationalist scholarly paradigm was invoked in the 1980s by political theorists such as Jürgen Habermas (2001), who has used the term constitutional patriotism to connote European citizenship. More recently, sociologist Saskia Sassen (2002) has called attention to global cities in an increasingly denationalised world landscape. Literary postnationalism is a desire to write outside of traditional canons and publish beyond national markets. In non-Euro-American contexts, it is more a utopian project than a reality. Since the Spanish American modernismo movement, there has been a cosmopolitan trend in Hispanic letters to abandon self-definitions of national or regional particularism in order to embrace World Literature, as Mariano Siskind posits in Cosmopolitan Desires. José Martí’s call to transcend oneself in his chronicle “Oscar Wilde” is echoed by Rubén Darío’s fascination with French Literature as a gateway to the globe. Although the novela de la tierra and indigenismo promoted an inward look at modernisation, figures such as Borges and, in the 1960s, the Boom writers were widely translated and consciously self-fashioned themselves as international voices speaking to audiences at home and abroad. In the 1990s, Chilean author Roberto Bolaño was described by critics as a truly global Hispanic author whose fiction maps an interconnected transatlantic world. The past fifteen years have seen an emergence of post-Bolaño Hispanic writers who, despite hailing from Spanish America (or Spain, or both), are not attached to nations and, most importantly, offer artistic performances of the postnational condition, as Héctor Hoyos argues in his recent book Beyond Bolaño (2015). In similar terms, in Aquí América Latina (2010) critic Josefina Ludmer characterises twenty-first century Spanish American literature as a “postautonomous” space—a mixture of fiction, non-fiction, reality, and virtual words—in which old national belongings are anathematised and discarded as useless. In sum, the xvi Introduction alternative communities of the present showcase certain qualities of denationalisation, postnationalism, and postautonomy. In order to better organise this heterogeneous material, this book is divided in three sections: “Marginality and Community,” “Intellectuals: Rethinking Community,” and “The Mexican Case: Counterculture.” We invoke the categories of “marginality” and “intellectuals” because they resonate with secret societies and circles of artists, as discussed in this introduction. In the first section, we analyse seven cases of communities that are marginalised in political, economic, national, gender, and sexual orientation terms; living on the fringe of society, they may resort to criminality. Their situation of oppression and alienation makes their radical project all the more poignant. In the second section, we turn to six other groups that assume an explicit intellectual perspective, in the sense that they are populated by writers and artists who often partake in the circles of cultural hegemony—only to better criticise them. Finally, the third section zooms into a study of Mexican counterculture—a particular form of “alternative community”—focusing on the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. By studying a specific case, this third section complements the broader outlook found in the two previous ones. In “Marginality and Community,” we will begin by looking at the roots of alternative communities in the nineteenth century. In chapter one, Gisela Salas Carrillo suggests that in Argentine writer Eduardo Gutiérrez’s fiction, the interior of the country, traditionally described by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento as the locus of barbarism, offers an alternative nation populated by liberal gauchos. Moving to Cuba and to the twentieth century, Pilar Cabrera Fonte (chapter two) proposes a reading of the work of Virgilio Piñera (a novel and a play) as the site of violent cults and sects that demand social change while cynically denying its possibility. Also in Cuba, Oscar A. Pérez (chapter three) studies the literary workshop “The Magic Mountain,” a community that uses creative writing to question the HIV/AIDS-related stigma under the Castro regime. This first section then travels to South America and to spaces of urban poverty: in Irina Feldman’s analysis of Bolivian writer Víctor Hugo Viscarra’s narrative texts (chapter four), a “community of losers” surviving on the streets of La Paz rebuffs the “good” capitalist life. As Carlos-Germán van der Linde (chapter five) explains for the case of Colombian literature and film, the criminals and gangsters of Bogotá form bands that expose the interstices of the nation state, and even attempt to replace it, like Tlön. Finally, the section discusses alternative communities in present-day Spain through the study of novels where communities of okupas [squatters] (Diana Palardy, Alternative Communities in Hispanic Literature and Culture xvii chapter six) and of immigrants (Ana Corbalán, chapter seven) find their very sense of identity at odds with their origins as well as with their new environment, and are forced to reinvent and redefine themselves. In “Intellectuals: Rethinking Community,” we will present intellectuals that organise themselves in ways that defy social conventions. Thus, Xavier Dapena (chapter eight) provides a new understanding of the Spanish Generación del 98 by paying attention to its margins, where the figure of the anarchist Mateu Morral lurks. Meanwhile, in chapter nine, Federico Fridman studies Macedonio Fernández and his connection to the Argentine avant-garde of the 1920s as an experiment in deindividuation. Moving to Chilean society after Pinochet, Juan García Oyervides (chapter ten) interprets Alberto Fuguet’s novel Tinta roja from a political perspective, by analysing the relationship of writers and journalists to language and authority. In their respective chapters, Luis H. Castañeda (chapter eleven) and Carlos Yushimito (chapter twelve) explore the image of the “writer” in twenty-first-century Latin American literature, a cultural milieu where the globalisation of literary markets reshapes affiliations and self-definitions. Finally, Geraldine Monterroso (chapter thirteen) takes us to the world of popular music and the Hispanic Caribbean, where the Puerto Rican reggae band Cultura Profética cultivates a pro-independence sentiment. Section three pays attention to four different manifestations of the Mexican counterculture, from the Onda of the 1960s to other more “perverse” and recent groups. Thus Javier González (chapter fourteen) suggests that the rock ethos present in Onda authors like José Agustín, Parménides García Saldaña, and Margarita Dalton nourishes a veritable alternative community, defining a new cultural identity in opposition to long-held notions of national identity and literary writing as defined by the ruling PRI party and the cultural establishment, respectively. In Salvador Fernández’s chapter fifteen, dedicated to the novel Pasaban en silencio nuestros dioses [Our Gods Lived Silently] by Héctor Manjarrez, we witness the end of utopian discourses and ideologies associated with the 1968 student movement, depicting the contradictions and eventual demise of the counterculture in the 1970s. For his part, John Burns (chapter sixteen) studies the infrarrealista neo-avant-garde poetic movement and highlights how social media and independent publishing have aided its prolongation beyond its initial statements against the Mexican literary elite. Finally, Salvador Luis Raggio’s reading of Alberto Chimal’s novel Los esclavos [The Slaves] (chapter seventeen) sheds light on how violence, pornography, and sadomasochism permeate not only alternative communities, but also society at large. xviii Introduction

Notes

1 For a definition of secret societies in the context of Spanish American literature (with a particular emphasis on Roberto Arlt’s The Seven Madmen), see Speck, Paula Kathleen. Roberto Arlt and the Conspiracies of Fiction. Diss. (Yale University, 1978. Photocopy of typescript. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1979). 2 For more about circles of artists in Spanish America, please refer to Luis H. Castañeda’s monograph Comunidades efímeras. Grupos de vanguardia y neovanguardia en la novela hispanoamericana del siglo XX (New York: Peter Lang, 2015). This book explores circles of artists in six canonical novels by Roberto Arlt, Leopoldo Marechal, Julio Cortázar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Fernando del Paso, and Roberto Bolaño. In this study, the definition of circles of artists as alternative communities is grounded in Peter Bürger’s classical assertion that the historical European avant-garde sought to fuse art and life into a single sphere in order to fight the perceived evils of modern capitalist society. 3 As we know, this group is a fictional version of the one formed by the Catalan writer Ramón Vinyes, and the younger Colombian writers Alfonso Fuenmayor, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, Germán Vargas, and García Márquez himself: the so- called “cenáculo de Barranquilla,” a circle of writers that, according to Ángel Rama, must be credited with the renovation of Colombian literature by combining popular culture and modernist narrative. See García Márquez: edificación de un arte nacional y popular (Montevideo: Universidad de la República, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias, 1987). 4 In the introduction to The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said claims that horizontal affiliation is a mode of social belonging that becomes intensified in modernist literature, offering an alternative to filiation and biological reproduction as symbolised by the traditional family. Thus, new institutions, associations, and communities are generated. 5 “It is as though there are two major ‘models’ for human interrelatedness, juxtaposed and alternating. The first is of society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of ‘more’ or ‘less.’ The second, which emerges recognizably in the liminal period, is of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders” (Turner 1995, 96). 6 “Smooth space is precisely the space of the smallest deviation: therefore it has no homogeneity, except between infinitely proximate points, and the linking of proximities is effected independently of any determined path. It is a space of contact, of small tactile or manual actions of contact, rather than a visual space like Euclid’s striated space. Smooth space is a field without conduits or channels. A field, a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities that occupy space without ‘counting’ it and can ‘be explored only by legwork.’ They do not meet the visual condition of being observable from a point in space external to them; an Alternative Communities in Hispanic Literature and Culture xix

example of this is the system of sounds, or even of colors, as opposed to Euclidian space” (Deleuze and Guattari 2010, 30). 7 Furthermore, not only are alternative communities and nations different, but they are also enemies. In “Teoría del complot,” Ricardo Piglia argues that alternative communities such as the one found in Macedonio Fernández’s The Museum of Eterna's Novel are in fact counter-statal conspiracies that attempt to unmask the state’s fictions and lies, and complot against its citizens. This is why such groups and the texts that house them narrate alternative stories, and constitute a counter- complot.

References Books

Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1962. Ficciones. Trans. Emecé Editores. New York: Grove Press. Bürger, Peter. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Castañeda, Luis H. 2015. Comunidades efímeras. Grupos de vanguardia y neovanguardia en la novela hispanoamericana del siglo XX. New York: Peter Lang. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2010. Nomadology: The War Machine. (Originally in A Thousand Plateaus. Massumi, Briad trad.) Seattle: Wormwood Distribution. Faverón-Patriau, Gustavo. 2011. Contra la alegoría. Hegemonía y disidencia en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XIX. Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag. Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Trans. Max Pensky. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press and Blackwell Publishers. Hoyos, Héctor. Beyond Bolaño. 2015. The Global Latin American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. Ludmer, Josefina. 2010. Aquí América Latina. Una especulación. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia. Rama, Ángel. 1987. García Márquez: edificación de un arte nacional y popular. Montevideo: Universidad de la República, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias. Said, Edward W. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. xx Introduction

Siskind, Mariano. 2014. Cosmopolitan Desires. Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Sommer, Doris. 1993. Foundational Fictions. The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley, Los Angeles: California University Press. Turner, Victor. 1995. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Journal article

Piglia, Ricardo. 2002. “Teoría del complot.” Ramona. Revista de artes visuales 2 (3): 4–14.

Chapters from edited collections

Sassen, Saskia. 2002. “Towards Post-national and Denationalized Citizenship.” In Handbook of Citizenship Studies, edited by Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner, 277–88. London, Thousand Oaks, New Dehli: Sage Publications.

Dissertation

Speck, Paula Kathleen. 1978. “Roberto Arlt and the Conspiracies of Fiction.” PhD diss., Yale University. Photocopy of typescript. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1979.

MARGINALITY AND COMMUNITY CHAPTER ONE

AN ALTERNATIVE NATION BUILDING PROJECT: THE DEPICTION OF ÁNGEL VICENTE PEÑALOZA IN EDUARDO GUTIÉRREZ’S HISTORICAL FOLLETINES1

GISELA SALAS CARRILLO UNIVERSIDAD PERUANA DE CIENCIAS APLICADAS, UPC

Unlike any other nation-building project from Latin America during the first half of the nineteenth century, the invention of Argentina was imagined from scratch. Since Esteban Echeverría, a patriarch among its founding fathers, Argentina was conceived and represented as a desert, that is, as a barbarised plain to be conquered and settled by civilised pioneers im- ported from the United States and Europe. For those founding fathers, prominent porteños (natives from the port of Buenos Aires), Unitarists, and members of the Lettered City, Argentina, as it was at the beginning of the Republic, was a blank page. Therefore, they made up the Argentine nation, “as a cohesive political unit derived from the Enlightenment and the founders of the U.S. independence” (González Echevarría 2003, 4). Nevertheless, the Interior, the territory composed of the rest of the provinces, so disdained as the cradle of barbaric forces interfering with the development of the new republic, was neither deserted, unpopulated, and available to be settled by foreigners, nor as savage as they depicted it.2 Despite those facts, it was erased from the national foundational narrative written by those men. By 1880, nobody had ever disputed the monolithic national discourse by the Unitarist lettered founding fathers. However, on the verge of a new crisis, a mirror image of the one at the end of 1820, Eduardo Gutiérrez started at the periodical La Patria Argentina as the most popular Argentine writer of the nineteenth century, and addressed the crisis from an unexpected front. As I intend to demonstrate, in his histori- An Alternative Nation Building Project 3 cal works he depicted an alternative national community from the Interior to compete against the one imagined before in order to make sense of the failure of that nation-building project and propose a new one. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse, in the group of folletines devoted to Chacho Peñaloza―El Chacho (1884), Los montoneros [The Gau- cho Army] (1886), El rastreador [The Tracker] (1886), and La muerte de un héroe [The Death of a Hero] (1886)―the representation of the Interior as a politically organised nation as well as the reservoir of national values before the Generación del Centenario’s [The Centennial Generation] re- covery of it at the beginning of the twentieth century. I will present how, in this cycle of serialised books published in newspapers, Gutiérrez revisits the history of Argentina as it was written by the country’s founding fathers to assess their hypothesis about Argentina’s cursed fate. Instead of the traditional porteño approach in the context of the factional conflict, he claims that the actual events are the outcome of Rosas’ two governments as well as the same people who were pursuing Argentina’s desideratum.3 Thus, Gutiérrez presents an alternative way out of factional thinking and represents Argentina as a space populated by patriotic gauchos instead of an emptiness, as in Esteban Echeverría’s works. In fact, as we may see, Gutiérrez’s gauchos are intrinsically liberal, since Gutiérrez reveals coin- cidences between the republican discourse and the Argentine rural culture’s values. As a result, in his historical folletines, Argentina, as an imagined community, already exists before the establishment of the nation state in 1880, and is separated from it. Gutiérrez (1851–89) began as a folletinista in 1879, when Argentina was at the beginning of an era of modernisation,4 at the end of a long period of civil wars, just before the federalisation of the Buenos Aires province and the definite establishment of the national state. By 1880, he had already become a true mass phenomenon whose second folletín, Juan Moreira (1879), turned him into the most popular writer of that decade.5 In the middle of all this, on one hand, Gutiérrez, as Eugenio Cambaceres, reformed the novel genre (Laera 2004) and, on the other, inspired the Ar- gentine movimiento criollista [creole movement] (Prieto 1989). Despite those achievements, when the Generación del Centenario finally consoli- dated the canon of Argentine novels, Gutiérrez was excluded. His work is monumental. This stems from the quantity of volumes he published in periodicals, but also because of what is addressed within them and what may be concluded based on his premises. Gutiérrez attempts a comprehensive effort to make sense of the present from an unexpected tribune outside of the circuit of the Lettered City, the traditional lieu where this matter was discussed. In his 30 very diverse folletines, Gutiérrez cre- 4 Chapter One ated, for the first time, a narrative world that covers all the dimensions of the entire history of Argentina after the colony (Dabove 2010, 300). His- torically, he reviews the history from the May rebellion’s prolegomenon in 1810 to the end of Julio Argentino Roca’s first government in 1886. Geo- graphically, their characters go across the entire Argentine territory con- trolled by the state. Among that voluminous repertoire, his historical books focus on the history behind the establishment of the national state in 1880, from the fights against Juan Manuel de Rosas’ dictatorship to the resistance to Roca’s federalisation. In doing so, Gutiérrez scrutinises the reorganisational period after the Caseros Battle (1852) between those events.6 This corpus is compounded by his two historical sagas devoted to two prominent caudillos [regional warlords], namely the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas and Ángel Vicente Peñaloza, also known as el Chacho, warlord of La Rioja province. There is also a volume titled La muerte de Buenos Aires [The Death of Buenos Aires] (1882), dedicated to the defeat of porteño forces by General Roca. Despite the aforementioned texts and the fact that important treatises, such as Adolfo Prieto’s El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argen- tina moderna [Creole Discourse in the Formation of Modern Argentina] (1988) and Alejandra Laera’s El tiempo vacío de la ficción [The Empty Time of Fiction] (2004), were written about Gutiérrez’s true position and contribution to Argentine literature, since the publication of Ricardo Ro- jas’ Literatura argentina [Argentine Literature], this author has routinely been studied as the personality who merely links José Hernández’s epic cycle with narrative and theatre about the gaucho. However, even the sim- plistic style and modest approach of the folletín make sense when one dis- covers that its episodic and reiterative formula dramatizes―because it emphasises―an unresolved situation linked to the fact that Argentina, despite its brand new status as a national state, is not yet a cohesive nation. As a matter of fact, the Argentine folletín phenomenon is not linked to the emerging working class, as it is in Europe, but to the debate about the nation and national identity instead. As a literary project, Gutiérrez’s corpus is a very complex one. In his series of historical books, the author reflects on the state of Argentina during the 1880s while, at the same time, criti- cising the fate of the liberal project of nation building. In these books, he writes about an unforeseen enemy of the Argentine Lettered City—itself. In his books about Rosas and Peñaloza, he proposes that the nation dis- solves inside both the liberal state and Roca’s, since it is disconnected from national history. Surprisingly, he names Peñaloza the as true restorer of the national order opposing Rosas. That comes as a surprise if one con- siders that Facundo Quiroga’s successor in La Rioja is the last link in An Alternative Nation Building Project 5

Rosas’ lineage, according to the literature of the Argentine founding fathers. Gutiérrez’s cycles may be read as a diptych, as each of their protag- onists represents a way to construct the nation, and none of them corre- sponds entirely to what was proposed by the factional historiography and narrative. Gutiérrez’s choice of both Rosas and Peñaloza as the central characters of his historical folletines is very significant. First, one may think of Rosas as having a double origin. This means that Argentine literature developed around his figure (Viñas 1964, 4; Ludmer 1999, 21). The dictator was a motive to think about the country for the men of the Generation of 1837 as well as their starting point to reflect and construct the unitarist―later liberal―nation building project. Second, although the literature around Pe- ñaloza is not as abundant as that around Rosas, this caudillo from La Rioja was an important historical figure since he was one of the most prominent popular leaders who rebelled against the rosismo. Furthermore, Chacho’s character combines both acceptations of what “popular” means in Gutiér- rez’s works: on one hand its popular lineage, and on the other its success among the Argentine nineteenth-century mass culture (Laera 2004, 25). As Jorge B. Rivera,7 author of the first comprehensive study about this folletinista, stated, Gutiérrez writes against Roca.8 In fact, he began publishing once Roca’s rise was imminent as his army was encircling Buenos Aires. He was a professional writer from 1879 to 1888; that is, from Ro- ca’s first administration (1880–6) until the middle of the term of his successor Miguel Ángel Juárez Celman (1886–90). In fact, as Josefina Lud- mer says, his second folletín Juan Moreira carried on the confrontation and violence to their limits as a way to impose popular justice. For her, his violent hero incarnates the voice of the national opposition from the mi- trismo inside the liberalism (229). That political gesture rescued by Lud- mer is a trace of what one may find in all his folletines: from his gau- choesque popular serial books to his military dramas such as Juan sin patria [Juan Without a Homeland] or Ignacio Monges, which recount the despairing and sacrificed journey of two veterans from the national army during the military conflicts in the 1860s and 1870s. Nonetheless, that gesture only becomes a project in his historical cycles devoted to Rosas and Peñaloza, and La muerte de Buenos Aires. Each one addresses the crisis that precedes each major decisive moment of Republican Argentine history. For instance, Los dramas del terror [The Dramas of Terror], the four folletines about Rosas and rosismo, are devoted to its gestation during the feliz experiencia, as the happy and prosperous years of Bernardino Rivadavia’s government of Buenos Aires are known, to Rosas’ defeat in 1852. Likewise, Chacho Peñaloza’s books 6 Chapter One review that same period plus the years of the Argentine Confederation until the Battle of Pavón in 1861, and the years of the resistance against the national government of President Bartolomé Mitre until Peñaloza’s assassination in 1863. In both series, very important notions such as desierto [desert], gaucho, and caudillo are de-territorialised and revisited. Finally, La muerte de Buenos Aires, his chronicle about Carlos Tejedor’s rebellion, dramatizes the thesis that Roca’s new state established a violent antagonist against the country in the province’s capital city.9 There, Bue- nos Aires works as a metaphor for Argentina, which is why his pledge for his province’s cause is a truly patriotic sign instead of a secessionist one. Gutiérrez scrutinises those three crucial events in Argentine Republican history during the context of a new foundational moment, 1880. That year is, as Maristella Svampa has argued, a symbolic year—“the political moment” for the Generation of 1880 (2006, 52). In this saga, Gutiérrez transforms Peñaloza into a unitarist hero. With- out doubt, it is a curious appropriation that precedes another interesting one: Olegario de Andrade’s poem about Peñaloza, published as a homage to the emblematic unitarist hero Juan Lavalle. It was compiled as part of Andrade’s first collected poems, published in 1887. For Gutiérrez, Chacho represents a sincere republican calling, which, in his folletines, makes Rosas the most prominent member of a lineage represented as ideological- ly heterogeneous, since it is composed of Bartolomé Mitre, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Nicolás de Avellaneda, and Julio Roca.10 Peñaloza, on the other hand, descends from José de Urquiza’s lineage, broken after Caseros. In addition, as is the case in La muerte de Buenos Aires and Los dramas del terror, where Buenos Aires and the country are also mirror images, in these books La Rioja is another symbol for the port city. Both provinces, La Rioja and Buenos Aires, are synecdochic, and their pillaging represents Argentina’s devastation by what the folletines identify as Rosas’ breed. One may find a clue about these identities suggested by the names of two important titles of this corpus: La muerte de Buenos Aires and La muerte de un héroe, the final volume about Chacho. That coincidence shows how this writer represents the people as a political subject and makes them the other protagonist of the cycle, along with Peñaloza. This is also why it is important to note that Rosas and Peñaloza are the main characters. As a result, when one compares the sides involved in the civil wars that the volumes cover, one finds that the caudillos belong to both of them. Therefore, the opposition between civilisation―the lettered men―versus barbarism―the caudillos―is no longer a functional hypothesis to explain the difficulties around imagining Argentina as a community. On the con- An Alternative Nation Building Project 7 trary, Peñaloza’s montoneros [his gaucho army] are civilised warriors fighting the barbarian hordes of the different national governments. In- stead, only when one compares Rosas and Chacho may one begin to see the differences. According to Gutiérrez, Rosas represents a state without a nation since it is disconnected from the national history, as happened in 1880 with Ro- ca’s. It is the reason why not only his but also Mitre’s, Sarmiento’s, Avellaneda’s, and Roca’s governments are represented as tyrannies. In Gutiérrez’s version, although Chacho supported Rosas and Mitre, he was actually honouring a principle: the state. In fact, every time he rebelled against both of them, Peñaloza did so because Rosas and Mitre, in their own moments, had betrayed the state.11 Peñaloza’s popular roots and values along with his submission favouring the state as an ideal principle re- cuperate the relationship between national history and a politically organised nation. When one reads Los dramas del terror and Chacho’s folletines together, it becomes clear that, for Gutiérrez, Peñaloza is an inverted mirror image of Rosas. So it makes sense that Rosas’ biography’s main events imply secession and abandonment, while Peñaloza’s is defined by continuity. It is significant, thus, that his lineage is symbolic since he represents a “desideratum”; that is, a national ideal. There is a very symbolic moment in Juan Manuel de Rosas, the first volume of Los dramas del terror, in which Rosas’ character, after having proven himself as a fine soldier by the side of Santiago de Liniers in 1807, turns his back on the patriotic cause at the very moment in which 1810’s rebellion bursts into being. At 14, the tender age of a main character from a bildungsroman, the young Rosas retires to the country to live as a gaucho. From that moment, his life runs parallel to Argentina’s path. Peñaloza’s fate, on the other hand, is always the same as those of his men and his homeland. In general, Gutiérrez’s folletines are engaged with the education of citizens in a context in which an elevated percentage of the population ig- nores the formative discourses of the founding fathers. As gaucho is another de-territorialised word, allowing to both articulate contemporary conflicts and be read as a metaphor for integration (Dabove 2010, 307). Therefore, for this excluded population, Gutiérrez’s gauchos work as a symbolic surrogate for their non-political being in the real life. If one reads these historical folletines, along with the corpus of the founding books of Argentine literature that inform them, it becomes clear that Gutiérrez summarises the reflection about what Argentina is and refreshes it within the context of the historical events that determined the outcome of 1880. Indeed, Gutiérrez takes another look over critical issues such as Unitarian- 8 Chapter One ism, federalism, liberalism, authoritarianism, Buenos Aires, and the Interi- or, but mainly gaucho and caudillo. As we have seen, Gutiérrez writes within the context of a new crisis. Therefore, the caudillo, the natural main character of the crisis, reappears now that Argentina has again strayed far from the path of progress. Gutiér- rez does not evoke Facundo Quiroga’s terrible spectre this time, but his eyes are firmly nailed on La Rioja, and he rescues and redefines Chacho Peñaloza, Quiroga’s lieutenant. Like Sarmiento decades before during the antirosista time, when the enterprise of the Argentine nation-building project is lost after Roca, Gutiérrez revisits the meaning of the caudillo in 1880.12 Interestingly, at the time of this new crisis, he is not the only one doing so. Sarmiento also published Conflicto y armonía de las razas en América [Conflict and Harmony of the Races in the Americas] (1883), written under the influence of nineteenth-century positivism. Gutiérrez, in its place, follows another path: he looks at the factional literature that defined the collapsed project after Roca’s victory. As in those books, he also focuses on the caudillo, but with a significant twist. While in that corpus caudillo is a disruptive figure, in Gutiérrez’s folletines Peñaloza and his montonera are a righteous mirror image of the state and its army. Moreo- ver, they are an alternative imagined community. In Gutiérrez’s depiction, they do not stand as a parallel power, but as a model that exemplifies the legitimacy that the current state, like that of Rosas and Mitre, and its national army lack. Gutiérrez relies on the caudillo again: Roca, as in La muerte de Buenos Aires; Rosas, as in Los dramas del terror; and Peñaloza. For him, it is a notion that still encodes the mystery of “the hidden life and the inner con- vulsions that tear at the bowels of a noble people” (Sarmiento 2003, 31). As in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845), Gutiérrez proposes that the caudillo is still the needed clue to resolve the puzzle of the Argen- tine national reality. However, Gutiérrez does not subscribe to Sarmiento’s thesis about the caudillo as the embodiment of barbarism. Instead, while Sarmiento states that he is a criminal outlaw and thinks of himself as a contradiction (Dabove 2007, 59), Gutiérrez argues that Peñaloza holds the secret to resolving the Argentine sphinx’s enigma. This author looks at Chacho as a natural leader whose real and symbolic powers come from the people he leads: gauchos as patriotic and liberal, like Sarmiento’s lettered men. Moreover, as has been argued, a caudillo like Peñaloza embodies the same principles defended by the nation-building project carried on by the Generation of 1837. It is clear, thus, in Gutiérrez’s folletines, that there are two meanings for caudillo: one that is spurious and another that it is con- sidered genuine.13 On one hand, men like Juan Manuel de Rosas from An Alternative Nation Building Project 9

Buenos Aires, Facundo Quiroga from La Rioja, Fray Félix de Aldao from Mendoza, and General Iseas or Colonel Ambrosio Sandes, who served in Mitre’s army, belong to the first group. On the other hand, Chacho, the rosista General Nazario Benavides and mitrista Colonel José Miguel Arre- dondo are called true caudillos. Naming Rosas or the others is an illegiti- mate appropriation because it distorts the kind of link it describes among the leader and his followers. A caudillo like Rosas maintains a superficial and utilitarian relationship with the gauchos. All of them are caudillos without what Max Weber calls charisma. But, if it is used to name Pe- ñaloza, Benavides, or Arredondo, then it describes a sincere and empathic link, since they truly are charismatic leaders. Because of the symbolic weight of a word like caudillo, Gutiérrez’s process to give it a new meaning needs to be executed carefully. In order to transform Chacho into the immaculate hero Buenos Aires was lacking, it was also necessary to create a distance from any other criminal affiliation. Also, in order to make Peñaloza a righteous hero and transform the confrontation between the montonera and the national army in a battle that challenges the moral fibre of the opponents instead of the hunt for a criminal horde, Gutiérrez must separate and distance Peñaloza from the out- laws. So, Chacho is a gaucho, but he is not a gaucho malo (that is, gauchos with criminal tendencies) like the characters of Gutiérrez’s gau- choesque serial books. The difference between gauchos malos like Moreira, Hormiga Negra [Black Ant], or Pastor Luna and Peñaloza is that the latter is an exemplary one. Like Sarmiento, who made Rosas an epitome of barbarism, Gutiérrez forges Chacho as a national archetype em- bodying an idealised gaucho. So, while gauchos malos run their lives as an individual race, Peñaloza’s vicissitudes transcend his biography and become relevant events of the national history instead. Therefore, in the context of this new comprehensive approach to Argentina’s nation- building project, Chacho’s character works as an educational role model since Gutiérrez’s folletines are a vehicle to divulge stories and national values to a population that is foreign to the foundational moment of the Argentine nation and its mythology. As Rivera says, Gutiérrez brings this up with the immigrants who are not familiar with them (1967, 37). It should be clear by now that gauchos like Moreira and Peñaloza are not identical, and do not have the same role in Gutiérrez’s corpus. The difference rests on how they both bond with the community (Dabove 2010, 303). For instance, Moreira just belongs to it, while Chacho identi- fies with it. As Dabove explains, the gauchos malos establish horizontal relationships with others like them: Moreira and Andrade, Santos Vega and Carmona, Pastor Luna and Mataco, and Juan Cuello and his men. 10 Chapter One

They also establish vertical relationships with their superiors: Moreira with Alsina and Marañón, Luna with Areco, the Tiger of Quequén with Martínez de la Hoz, and Juan Gómez with Galindez. However, the gaucho malo never leads, represents, or functions as a role model. His misfortune comes from his fall off la pendiente del crimen [the cliff of crime] due to a personal problem, a motif that starts all of Gutiérrez’s stories. His cause―although excusable from his community’s point of view―is strict- ly the quest of one lonely man. Chacho, on the other hand, falls off the cliff rebelling against the authority due to solidarity instead of a personal interest, as he summarises his story in front of Quiroga:

— If Agenor were a burglar,—he concluded,—I would not have defied an- ybody on his behalf; but he certainly is a good fellow and a very honorable man that never had any trouble with the authorities: the Major was courting a girl that was in love with Agenor. That was the only reason he has to tie the poor lad under the sun as if he were a criminal. Because of that, I de- cided that freeing him was the only right thing to do. That is why the Major and the Judge forced me to teach them a lesson. (Gutiérrez 1884, 31)14

He pursues an act of justice because “where would we end up if every mayor had the right to lay a man out to dry in the sun to the stocks every time he needs for favor his private business or for revenge.”15 One may say then that the gaucho malo reclaims an individual resistance, while Peñaloza does what is possible to impart justice within the limits of an extremely precarious official legality. Peñaloza is the undisputed champi- on of his community that later becomes the La Rioja province (Dabove 2010, 304), which, as we have seen, is also Buenos Aires and Argentina. Because Chacho is a patriotic epitome, Gutiérrez rescues him from the innate paradox related to the social bandit, which is that of a criminal who is at the same time a hero. Therefore, while his Moreira-like characters have the profile of what Eric Hobsbawm called the avenger, Chacho re- mains an incorruptible figure from any perspective. This attribute of his character is tested first after his daughter’s death, and then after his friend’s. At the beginning of 1840, while Chacho is rising up against Rosas, he is forced into exile after his defeat. Without him, his beloved province is left unprotected and sacked by Fray Félix de Aldao’s men, the ferocious ruler of Mendoza. One of those men, the one-eyed Bárcena, after killing his mother takes Anita, Peñaloza’s only daughter, for himself to the Banda Oriental, modern-day Uruguay. When they are at Oribe’s campsite, a young and noble officer takes pity on her, rescuing her from Bárcena, and ends up marrying her. Once Peñaloza returns to La Rioja and learns of his