Everyday Reading: Print Culture and Collective Identity in the Rio de la Plata, 1780-1910

2. Words, Wars, and Gauchos: Print Culture and Cattle Civilization (1830-1870)

Chapter 2 Words, Wars, and Gauchos Print Culture and Cattle Civilization (1830–1870)  Like the strands of a good lasso, Rioplatense print culture and cattle civilization are braided together during the second key moment in the development of our story, spanning from the end of the wars of independence around 1830 roughly up to 1870.1 The 1820s through the early 1860s were by far the most profitable years for the estancieros (owners of large estates) and saladeristas (proprietors of beef-jerky factories). The prominent figures of cattle culture—the caudillos, who were often also owners of estates or beef-jerky plants—cultivated relationships based on patronage to become powerful figures in new, emerging political parties. As such, they were able to foster attachments to their brands of collective identity and their factions. In the Plata, the caudillo and patrón who stood out from all the others was Juan Manuel de Rosas, a towering figure in the historiography of both Uruguay and Argentina. Depending on the author (and his or her political leanings), Rosas was either a tyrannical dictator or a hero who championed all things American and stood up to the meddling Europeans with imperial designs on the material resources of South America. What is certain for both sides, though, is that Rosas was a product (and a principal promoter) of cattle civilization, and that almost everything written between 1830 and 1870 revolved around him and the politics of cattle culture. With Rosas’s rise to the position of governor of Buenos Aires in 1829, a long war of words began over cattle culture in all its manifestations on both sides of the Plata River. In previous years, revolutionary words in the region ’s first newspapers, public ceremonies to inaugurate libraries and cele43 brate independence, and the elaboration of national symbolic repertoires through print media had defined the emergence of a culture of print in the region. There was some hope for calm following the liberation of the Banda Oriental from Brazil in 1828. But the peace was fleeting. The dust on the battlefields of Uruguay and Argentina was about to be stirred again by war, this time between new, opposing political factions—in Argentina, by Rosas-led conservative Federalists on one side and liberal Unitarians on the other, and beginning in the late 1830s the corresponding Blanco and Colorado Parties in Uruguay. Economic and ideological interests tied to a world based on raising cattle and exploiting animal products drove the war, as did those opposed to that world. Simply put, talking about cattle was synonymous with talking about politics, and vice versa.2 At stake in the battles of the pen, lance (sheep shears tied to the ends of cane poles), and rifle were the ways of life of landowners, gauchos, peasants, Afrodescendants , and urban liberals, as well as the primacy of the combatants’ particular vision for the nation. The focus of this chapter is the continued development of a special relationship between print, politics, and the public sphere in the Plata, though with a distinctive twist. During this second stage, popular literature fueled this relationship, primarily in the form of gauchesque verse and prose appealing to country folk and marginalized urban populations. Since its debut during the wars of independence, the gauchesque writing that appeared in newspapers and on loose leaves had been unique to the Plata. Nowhere else in nineteenth-century Latin America was there a similar type of literature that negotiated the meeting of oral and print cultures and allowed the popular consumption of print media on the scale seen in the Río de la Plata. The corridos sung and written across Mexico, the joro­ pos that plainsmen improvised throughout the Colombian and Venezuelan llanos, the dueling poetry of Brazilian backlands, and the verses gaúchos improvised in southern Brazil—these functioned in similar ways, but their reach and impact was minimal in comparison to gauchesque writing in the Plata. Aside from the sheer volume of the popular literature of this period, what is crucial about its import in our story is that such writing became part of daily life. It was meant to be exactly that. Popular literature’s quotidian character allowed it to influence thoughts and behaviors and to operate in the public sphere in ways writing in Latin America had not previ44  Everyday Reading ously achieved. Writing as a daily experience was thus able to play a major...