Sarmiento the Geographer: Unearthing the Literary in Facundo

This paper reads Facundo alongside and against the formation of Argentina's geographical institutions. I argue that Sarmiento seeks authority in European texts, particularly those of Alexander von Humboldt. He models Humboldtian geographical discourse in order to construct a marketable geography—a brochure of sorts—designed to illustrate the productive Argentine terrain to potential European and North American immigrants. This reproduction is not exact, however. Rather, Sarmiento revises Humboldt's rendition of Latin American terrain through a uniquely Argentine lens, which appeals to the unification of form and content—to the language of Vico's primitive man—in order to simulate national consolidation.