Citation

Plesch M. Patterns Prejudice 2013; 47(4-05): 337-358.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/0031322X.2013.845425

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Plesch examines changing attitudes towards the gaucho as a musician in nineteenth-century Argentina through literary, musical and iconographic sources. She proposes the existence of a discursive formation gaucho, whose archive comprises travellers' writings, official reports, memoirs, visual arts, literature and music. Despised and persecuted throughout most of the nineteenth century, the gaucho was considered by Argentine elites as the epitome of 'barbarism', and his music was consistently described in derogatory terms. This attitude would be dramatically reversed towards the end of the century, when he was promoted to the role of national character and his cultural universe used as a source for the construction of a distinctive Argentine high culture that included the visual arts, literature and music. Plesch analyses the dominant discourse on the gaucho from colonial times to the publication of Martín Fierro (1872) and identifies four strategies of Othering at work: debasement, homogeneity, timelessness and Orientalism. They constitute, in the symbolic realm, the counterpart to the larger strategy of domination of the gaucho. In the second part of the article she examines the use of the gaucho and his world in the aesthetic production of Argentine cultural nationalism, isolating three key features: use, nostalgia and distancing. These are connected to the xenophobia unleashed by mass immigration and the modernization of the country, and the consequent need for elites to create a distinctive type of Argentine identity. The antithetical representations of the gaucho and his music, Plesch concludes, can only be understood in relation to the changing needs and political agendas of hegemonic society.