POEMAS Y ENSAYOS (Spanish Edition)

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Sarmiento was an educator, a civilized man who was a militant adherent to the Unitarist movement. During the Argentine civil war he fought against Facundo several times, and while in Spain he became a member of the Literary Society of Professors. Exiled to Chile by Rosas when he started to write Facundo, Sarmiento would later return as a politician. During his presidency, Sarmiento concentrated on migration, sciences, and culture. His ideas were based on European civilization; for him, the development of a country was rooted in education.

Facundo begins with a geographical description of Argentina, from the Andes in the west to the eastern Atlantic coast, where two main river systems converge at the boundary between Argentina and Uruguay.

Selección. Cuentos, ensayos y poemas by Jorge Luis Borges

This river estuary, called the Rio de Plata, is the location of Buenos Aires, the capital. Buenos Aires failed to spread civilization to the rural areas and as a result, much of the rest of Argentina was doomed to barbarism. Sarmiento then describes the four main types of gaucho and these characterizations aid in understanding Argentine leaders, such as Juan Manuel de Rosas. The peasants gather at taverns, where they spend their time drinking and gambling.

They display their eagerness to prove their physical strength with horsemanship and knife fights. According to Sarmiento, these elements are crucial to an understanding of the Argentine Revolution, in which Argentina gained independence from Spain. Rural people participated in the war to demonstrate their physical strengths rather than because they wanted to civilize the country. In the end, the revolution was a failure because the barbaric instincts of the rural population led to the loss and dishonor of the civilized city—Buenos Aires.

Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga. Despite being born into a wealthy family, Facundo received only a basic education in reading and writing. As a youth Facundo was antisocial and rebellious, refusing to mix with other children, and these traits became more pronounced as he matured. Sarmiento gives a physical description of the man he considers to personify the caudillo: His killing of two Spaniards after a jailbreak saw him acclaimed as a hero among the gauchos, and on relocating to La Rioja, Facundo was appointed to a leadership position in the Llanos Militia.

In , when Unitarist Bernardino Rivadavia became the governor of the Buenos Aires province, he held a meeting with representatives from all provinces in Argentina. Facundo was present as the governor of La Rioja. Rivadavia was soon overthrown, and Manuel Dorrego became the new governor. Sarmiento contends that Dorrego, a Federalist, was interested neither in social progress nor in ending barbaric behaviour in Argentina by improving the level of civilization and education of its rural inhabitants. During the ensuing civil war between the two ideologies, Facundo conquered the provinces of San Luis, Cordoba and Mendoza.

He went to Buenos Aires to confront Rosas, who sent him on another political mission.

According to Sarmiento, the murder was plotted by Rosas: By setting France against Argentina—representing civilization and barbarism respectively—Sarmiento contrasts culture and savagery:. The social results of the French blockade, however, had been fruitful for the Argentine Republic, and served to demonstrate in all their nakedness the current state of mind and the new elements of struggle, which were to ignite a fierce war that can end only with the fall of that monstrous government. However, Facundo cannot be classified as a novel or a specific genre of literature.

The book is partly fictional, as well: Sarmiento draws on his imagination in addition to historical fact in describing Rosas. To make his case, Sarmiento often has recourse to strategies drawn from literature. Literary critic Sorensen Goodrich argues that although Sarmiento was not the first to articulate this dichotomy, he forged it into a powerful and prominent theme that would impact Latin American literature. He explores the issue of civilization versus the cruder aspects of a caudillo culture of brutality and absolute power. Facundo set forth an oppositional message that promoted a more beneficial alternative for society at large.

Although Sarmiento advocated various changes, such as honest officials who understood enlightenment ideas of European and Classical origin, for him education was the key. Caudillos like Facundo Quiroga are seen, at the beginning of the book, as the antithesis of education, high culture, and civil stability; barbarism was like a never ending litany of social ills.

They are the agents of instability and chaos, destroying societies through their blatant disregard for humanity and social progress.

Florante: Versión castellana del poema tagalo con un ensayo crítico (in Spanish and Tagalog)

If Sarmiento viewed himself as civilized, Rosas was barbaric. In linking Europe with civilization, and civilization with education, Sarmiento conveyed an admiration of European culture and civilization which at the same time gave him a sense of dissatisfaction with his own culture, motivating him to drive it towards civilization. Conversely, Latin America was connected to barbarism, which Sarmiento used mainly to illustrate the way in which Argentina was disconnected from the numerous resources surrounding it, limiting the growth of the country.

In this context, Latin American literature has been distinguished by the protest novel, or dictator novel; the main story is based around the dictator figure, his behaviour, characteristics and the situation of the people under his regime. Writers such as Sarmiento used the power of the written word in order to criticize government, using literature as a tool, an instance of resistance and as a weapon against repression.

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