Women in Argentina


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Women in Argentina


Early Travel Narratives - Monica Szurmuk






















Copyright 2000 by M6nica Szurmuk
Printed in the United States ofAmerica on acid-free paper
All rights reserved

05 04 03 02 01 00 6 5 4 3 2 I

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Szurmuk, M6nica.
Women in Argentina: early travel narratives / M6nica Szurmuk.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8130-1889-7 (alk. paper)
1.Women-Argentina-Social conditions-19th century. 2.Women travelers
-Argentina-Attitudes. 3. Sex role-Argentina-History-19th century.
4. Travelers' writings, Argentine-History and criticism. I. Title.
HQ1532.98 2001     00-053665

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For Moti, Eyal, Martin, and Adriel

In memory of my grandmother Sara Zaritsky dejaitman



















Contents


List of Figures viii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction i

PART I. FRONTIER IDENTITIES, 1837-1880     15

1. A House, a Home, a Nation: Mariquita Sanchez's Recuerdos del Buenos
  Ayres Virreynal 17
2. Queen of the Interior: Lina Beck-Bernard's Le Rio Parana 39

PART 2. SHIFTING FRONTIERS, I880-1900 53

3. Eduarda Mansilla de Garcia's Recuerdos de Viaje: "Recordar esVivir" 55
4. Interlude in the Frontier: Lady Florence Dixie's Across Patagonia 67
5. Traveling/Teaching/Writing:Jennie Howard's In Distant Climes and
  Other Years 78

PART 3. SHIFTING IDENTITIES, 1900-1930 87

6. Traveler/Governess/Expatriate: Emma de la Barra's Stella 89

7. Globe-Trotting Single Women 94
8.The Spiritual Trip: Delfina Bunge de Gilvez's Tierras del MarAzul 117

Notes 123
Bibliography 131
Index 143



















Figures





1. Johann Moritz Rugendas, Maria Sanchez de Mendeville 1 8

2. Johann Moritz Rugendas, El rapto de la cautiva 19

3. Julius Beerbohm, "An Indian Camp" 70

4. Julius Beerbohm, "Indian Camp" 71


















Acknowledgments


During the years I worked on this book, I received the support and interest of
many people. I thank the Office of Research at the University of Oregon for
the financial means to spend two consecutive summers conducting research in
Argentina.A grant from the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the
University of Oregon made it possible for me to complete the writing of this
book. An earlier version of part of chapter 7 appeared in Monographic Review/
Revista Monografica 12 (1996). I am grateful to the publishers for permission to
reprint portions of this piece.
   I thank my colleagues at the University of Oregon, especially Carlos Aguirre,
Barbara Altmann,Jacqueline Cruz,Jesns Diaz Caballero,Juan Armando Epple,
Lisa Freinkel, Leonardo Garcia Pab6n, Amalia Gladhart, Evlyn Gould, Karen
McPherson, Judith Raiskin, Arlene Stein, and Julian Weiss, for the stimulating
intellectual environment they provided. The generosity and mentorship of
Jaime Concha, Susan Kirkpatrick, and Mary Louise Pratt guided me through
the beginning stages of this project. For careful and enlightening readings that
challenged my own preconceptions and forced me to reconsider what I needed
to say, I thank Debra Castillo, Francine Masiello, Mary Elene Wood, and an
anonymous reader for the University Press of Florida. For stimulating ques-
tions, I am grateful to Luis Circamo, Maria Elva Echenique, Kate Jenckes,
Fernanda Macchi, Silvana Meta,Ana Miramontes, and Raquel Rinc6n Rodri-
guez, graduate students I have worked with at the University of Oregon. I
thank Amanda Holmes for the very careful translations of the Spanish quota-
tions in chapters 1, 3, 6, 7, and 8, and Suzanne Kocher for the equally careful
translations of French quotations in chapter 2. Since I had the final say, any
inaccuracies are my own responsibility.
   Women inArgentina was written in a continuous and sometimes chaotic flow





x   Acknowledgments

between Argentina and the United States. I have therefore benefited from the
friendship and warmth of those who made me feel at home wherever I was: Ian
Barnard, Patricia Chomnalez,Teresa Figueroa, Guadalupe L6pez Bonilla, Claudia
Minoliti, Sayo Murcia, Maria Negroni, Anne Shea, Nancy Solomon, Nora
Strejilevich, Rauli Susmel, and Silvio Waisbord. Virginia L6pez Grisolia and
Adriana Novoa have been my most constant friends, wherever I am. For her
confidence, intellectual guidance, and good humor, I thank Ileana Rodriguez.
   This book about the intersections of home, families, and nation owes its
largest debt to my own family: my parents, Daniel Szurmuk and Matilde
Jaitman, and my grandparents whose choice ofArgentina as "their place in the
world" has been with me through the writing of this work. Marcelo Bergman's
partnership in life and work has been the backbone of this project. Our chil-
dren Eyal, Martin, and Adriel are present in every page; it is through the
rhythms of life with them that I started to think about travel and displacement.


















Introduction


As the trees shed their leaves and the heat of summer dies down, children in
white pinafores start school in March every year. From March to May, they
learn to salute the flag, sing patriotic songs, and dance several traditional dances
from the countryside.They are introduced to a 1910 painting by Pedro Suber-
casseaux that depicts an early 181os literary soir6e at the home of Misia
Mariquita Sanchez, and they learn the verses of the national anthem, which
Misia Mariquita is singing for the very first time in the portrait.' On May 25,
they celebrate the birth of the nation in plays that combine references to the
minuet-dancing commercial elites of the cities, who are dressed in top hats and
elaborate dresses, and the gauchos and chinitas, who perform traditional re-
gional dances such as cielitos, chacareras, and gatos. The gauchos wear boots, the
hair of the chinitas is contained in long black braids. On June 20, the children
commemorate the creation of the flag. For the next month, before the winter
break, they paint pictures of the little house in the northern province of
Tucumin where independence was proclaimed on July 9, 1816. Inside the
house, men in top hats have heated debates on the future of the nation. Out-
side  the children might imagine-are the gauchos wrapped in their ponchos
alongside all the women. Holding babies, nursing newborns, pregnant with the
future soldiers of the nation, the chinitas and the upper-class women wait.
Black slaves light the city lamps and protect the ladies."Where are the Indians?"
a child might ask. "In the desert, in the pampas, in Patagonia, in the frontier,"
others might answer.
   This version of elementary-school enactments of Argentina stresses not
only the points of consensus privileged by narratives of the nation but also the
points at which the sense of communion breaks down. It is in these points that
otherness appears in the form of women, indigenous peoples, blacks, and gau-





z - Women in Argentina


chos.What would a story of the nation that included the alternative narratives
of subaltern groups look like? Can narratives of nation include subalterns, or
must they always be based on a politics of exclusion and disenfranchisement?
These questions lie at the heart of my inquiry into a hundred years of women's
travel writing in Argentina.
   In this book, I trace the development of women's travel writing inArgentina
from 1830 to 1930 in order to show the complexity of women's inclusion in
discourses of collective identities. I argue that women-and the feminine
took on different roles at different moments ofArgentinean history. I show how
white women's access to print culture and political life was argued in terms not
only of gender but also of ethnicity. I therefore delve into questions of white-
ness and debate how whiteness as a characteristic which was gendered was
paramount in the opening of spaces for women's political and cultural partici-
pation. Rereading the expansion ofArgentina into the frontier that character-
izes this historical period, I show how forces of civilization responsible for the
creation of the nation were coded as white and female, while the forces of
barbarism were embodied by mestizo maleness. White women writers took
advantage of their privileged space within the narrative of civilization to inter-
vene into debates of nationhood. Yet they also used this discursive space to
criticize key elements of the project of nation building such as immigration
policies, emphasizing the places where the new nation would not only enfran-
chise but also disenfranchise.
   This book unearths a rich tradition of travel writing by women.Travelogues
on Argentina by French, English, and North American women are read along-
side texts by Argentinean women travelers who wrote about the interior of
Argentina, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. I explore the in-
terconnections between personal and collective identities and argue that travel
narratives both shape and are shaped by the model of Argentina as a white
country. Reading texts by women who belong to different literary and cultural
traditions and breaking down the divisions between writers in colonized and
colonizing contexts, I challenge the widely held assumption that women's
travel writing is a purely personal interior venture, and I show how women
used the genre to discuss highly charged political issues. This book not only
discusses the relationship between nation building and gender in Argentina
but also invites a comparative reading of the relationships of the roles of gender
and ethnicity in the creation of print culture in the United States and Europe
at that time.
   During the period from 1830 to 1930, which marks the transition from
independence to modernization, women's roles in society went through drastic
changes: women entered the workforce in record numbers and gained access to





Introduction - 3


all levels of the educational system.Women's definitions of self changed in order
to accommodate changing social and political realities. My study focuses on
travel writing as a genre that requires constant positionings of self in order to
document these transformations and account for both continuity and change.
While I am interested in stressing the increased participation of women in
social and political life, I also focus on the relevance of certain categories such
as home, body, nation, and region in travel accounts written by women born in
France, England, the United States, and, of course,Argentina. I am interested in
sorting out the ways in which these writers discuss belonging and non-belong-
ing, selfhood and otherness.The locus in which these issues are discussed is the
frontier, that imaginary space where civilization breaks down and barbarism
takes over.The frontier is also the space where the myth of "white Argentina"
gives way to the realities of racial diversity.
   The categories of civilization and barbarism were brought into the forefront
of Argentina's political and cultural life with the publication of Domingo
Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo in 1845 and are still prevalent in our understand-
ing ofArgentinean history and culture at the end of the millennium. In Facundo,
Buenos Aires and the cities of the Argentinean littoral are presented as beacons
of civilization. The surrounding pampas, in contrast, are the repositories of
barbarism that threaten the civilizing enterprises originating in the cities. In
order for a modern nation to emerge, the forces of civilization would have to
defeat the barbaric elements lodged in the pampas, such as the Indians and the
gauchos, and include these geographical areas within a capitalist economy. As
Francine Masiello has demonstrated in her book Between Civilization and Bar-
barism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina, the conflict
between civilization and barbarism was metaphorized in clearly gendered
terms. The space of civilization was represented in feminine and ethnic terms
with white middle-class women being both the icons of civilization and the
creators and guardians of civilized and civilizing spaces such as private homes,
schools, and hospitals.
   While domestic spaces within cities were the repository of civilization, the
open spaces of the countryside were the stronghold of the forces of barbarism.
The intellectuals of the generation of 1837 described these areas as dangerous
and menacing, the habitat of barbaric masculinity. The countryside was espe-
cially dangerous for civilized women: they could become cautivas, slaves to the
Indians.Venturing beyond the frontier threatened white women's safety. The
frontier was the space beyond the ever moving imaginary line where the natu-
ral forces of barbarism defied the organizing principles of European civilization.
In El genero gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria, Josefina Ludmer shows how the
countryside, perceived as the space of barbarism, was co-opted into the nation





4    Women in Argentina


through the actual enclosing of the land and the symbolic incorporation of the
gaucho to the law of the state. Lettered culture mediated this process.
   As I have already mentioned, the categories of civilization and barbarism
were not only gendered but also strongly racialized. I will argue that the
conflation of whiteness with femininity enabled discursive possibilities that
allowed multiple substitutions within the discourse of the subaltern with
women occupying similar spaces to that of other subaltern groups such as
Indians, gauchos, and mulattos.2 A certain model of femininity, embodied in
the white angel of the hearth, made its way into the discourse of nation building
within the traditional roles of respite of the warrior and republican mother-
hood. Male and women writers alike discussed politics within the realm of
domesticity. Other aspects of life important to women writers which had no
place within family romances, such as desire, work, gender relations, and
education, frequently found their way into women's texts through references
to the subaltern other. Travel narratives therefore provided the occasion to
discuss these other concerns displaced from the actual locations where women
lived their everyday lives.
   In the first part of the book, "Frontier Identities," which treats the period
of 1837 to 188o, I study narratives of the countryside before land enclosures
and the extensions of the railroads to show how the space of the frontier
coded as masculine is used by women to explore the limits of the liberal
modernizing project of the male intellectuals.Women writers such as Juana
Manuela Gorriti, Rosa Guerra, and Mariquita Sanchez align themselves at
different points with the liberal modernizing project and with those excluded
from this project such as gauchos and Indians.European women use the space
of the Argentinean landscape to discuss gender relations in their countries of
origin, while Argentinean women use Europe to participate in debates on
ethnicity and immigration in Argentina. Mariquita Sanchez's personal letters
and her memoirs, Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres virreynal, discussed in chapter 1,
provide a fertile locus from which to problematize women's inclusions in
collective identities in the first half of the nineteenth century. Sanchez's writ-
ing shows an arduous relationship to her representation by the male writers
of the time as the compendia of civilized characteristics. Sanchez's own writ-
ing shows how men intellectuals paid lip service to women's rights by insist-
ing on the feminine as a metaphor for republicanism and democracy while
they excluded women from the rights of citizenship. In chapter 2, I read
Alsatian writer Lina Beck-Bernard's Le rio parana (1864), a narration offBeck-
Bernard's stay in the province of Santa Fe during the mid-185os, while her
husband was setting up Swiss colonies in the region. Beck-Bernard's text
highlights the points of dissension in the discourse of the "white nation" by





Introduction - 5


focusing on the complexity of class and race relations that projects such as her
husband's were attempting to erase.
   Part 2, "Shifting Frontiers," focuses on women's travel writing during the
period 188o-i900.This period is marked by two complementary processes:
the massive genocide of indigenous populations represented by the Cam-
paign to the Desert (1878-79) and the establishment of immigration policies
to attract millions of European immigrants. National unification and mod-
ernization are constructed on the basis of these absences (the Indians) and the
hope of the new presences (the Euroargentineans).Women travel writers during
this period grappled with issues of resistance to and intervention in moderniza-
tion. Eduarda Mansilla's Recuerdos de viaje (discussed in chapter 3) and Florence
Dixie's Across Patagonia (discussed in chapter 4) are interventions into the
debate on the destiny of indigenous populations and veiled critiques of the
Argentinean extermination model. In Across Patagonia (1881), for example,
Florence Dixie, an English aristocrat, describes blissful marital relationships
and child-rearing practices among the Tehuelches of Patagonia. I argue that in
her descriptions of the Tehuelches, Dixie establishes an underlying contrast
with family relations in Britain: the pastoral image of the Tehuelches she
records highlights the problems of family relationships in her native country.
Her descriptions also point to a very active and ebullient community life in
contradiction with the prevalent portrayal of indigenous communities as al-
ready lifeless, condemned, and doomed. During the same period,Argentinean
socialite Eduarda Mansilla uses her travelogue Recuerdos de viaje (188o) to
criticize the model of the Indian reservation in the United States at a time
when similar structures were being discussed in the Argentinean Congress.
The travelogues by Dixie and Mansilla bear witness to the reality of the life
of the indigenous populations of Argentina when narratives of nation were
wiping out all traces of their existence. In chapter 5,I discuss In Distant Climes
and Other Years (1931) by Jennie E. Howard. Howard, a North American
teacher imported by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, documents the creation
and expansion of the normal school system in the country. Howard's travel
writing marks the emergence of a new model of femininity embodied in an
independent professional woman. The shift from Dixie's and Mansilla's texts
to Howard's is symptomatic of a larger process taking place at the beginning
of the twentieth century: otherness ceases to be represented by Indians. Im-
migrants, homosexuals, transvestites, mestizos,Jews, and the urban poor take
their place.3 In the imaginary of the nation, the myth of the "white Argen-
tina" emerges with all its force.
   Part 3, "Shifting Identities," is devoted to travel narratives by modern
women in the modern nation in the period 1900-1930. In chapter 6, I offer a





6    Women in Argentina


reading of Stella, a 1905 novel by Emma de la Barra which became the first
best-seller in the history ofArgentinean literature. In Stella, de la Barra uses the
tropes of travel literature to explore the role of white women in the nation.
Chapter 7 focuses on two professional women who used teaching within the
public school system to legitimize nontraditional lives. Cecilia Grierson, the
first Argentinean female medical doctor, wrote a 1902 report for the govern-
ment detailing her experience as a government envoy in Europe; Ada Maria
Elflein wrote travel articles on the Argentinean interior for the newspaper La
Prensa in 1918. These women negotiated participation in the public sphere
while incorporating the discourse of the white nation into their writing. The
pampas for them become a symbol to be included in the narrative of the nation
but one that, in reality, is ultimately dangerous for modern women. Delfina
Bunge's Tierras del mar azul (192?), treated in chapter 8, questions the successes
of the modernizing project and poses the religious pilgrimage as the only
possible trip for women.The foreign others of Bunge's text-Jews,Arabs, and
poor Italians-are also the domestic enemies of the intellectual generation that
provided the discursive rationale for the military coup of 1930 which ushered
in a period of fifty years of political unrest and drastic social and economic
changes.

Travel Writing and Narratives of Otherness
In her influential book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary
Louise Pratt explains the key role of travel writing in the creation of the "rest
of the world" for European readers. Travel writing as a genre became increas-
ingly engaged in scientific codification, which in turn legitimized the inter-
vention of Europeans overseas.4 Although this project was undertaken mainly
by men, European women were involved in imperial travel from very early on
in the colonial expansion of Europe. Travel writing, like colonizing, however,
was mostly a male endeavor. The proliferation of travel texts by nineteenth-
century women notwithstanding, an overwhelming majority of travel writers
were men, and the genre was defined within marked male categories such as
the privileging of the gaze and freedom of movement. European women travel
writers had to contend with this tradition and participate in it within the limits
imposed by gender. Their interventions were often marked by an emphasis on
certain subject matters such as private lives, and feminine spaces such as homes
and harems.5
   In Argentina, after independence, former colonial subjects wrote travel
books to narrate their own incursions back into the metropolitan centers.
Argentinean intellectuals traveled to Europe as a means of preparing them-
selves for participation in political life. On their return, they wrote travelogues
that documented not only their experiences in Europe but also their participa-





Introduction - 7


tion in the genre of travel writing. As No6 Jitrik observes, these two endeav-
ors-traveling to Europe and writing about traveling to Europe-have always
been paramount for Argentinean intellectuals interested in entering the public
sphere, since the recognition of Europe is "one of our most impotent traumas"
(Viajeros 12). The initiatic trip to Europe that male intellectuals took was care-
fully documented in their travelogues written for publication. As DavidViias
and Adolfo Prieto show, these travelogues were meant to be read dialogically
against each other.6 In careful detail, writers, politicians, and future presidents
wrote about being reclaimed by mother Europe and rebirthed for success,
modernity, and power.
   While travelogues written by men were immensely popular in the new
Latin American republics during the nineteenth century, very few women
writers in Latin America actually published travelogues. Many of them, how-
ever, wrote about traveling in different forms. As Susan Kirkpatrick shows in
her study of women's writing in Spain in the nineteenth century, Romanti-
cism endowed women with a "particular kind of subjectivity, one designed for
nurturing children and maintaining the affective ties of the nuclear family"
(Las Romanticas 25).Within the context of this subjectivity, women writers pro-
duced novels and short stories that addressed issues of nation building within the
limits of the bourgeois family.Traveling appeared profusely in these texts because
exile was one of the major issues at stake throughout most of the pre-188os
period in Argentina.The first travelogue written by a woman to be published
in the country, however, was Eduarda Mansilla's Recuerdos de viaje, which ap-
peared in 18 8o after national unification.
   There is a powerful reason why Argentinean women writers did not pro-
duce travelogues. For upper-class women in Argentina in the nineteenth
century, traveling was a mark of class position, and familiarity with European
social and domestic ways was a given. Travel writing requires a positioning of
otherness that these women could not accomplish in relationship to Europe. It
is therefore not surprising that the first travelogue published as such by an
Argentinean woman in the nineteenth century described the author's trip not
to Europe but to the United States. Eduarda Mansilla traveled extensively in
Europe, yet she reserved the genre of travel writing for her experience some-
where else. In Western Europe, she blended in. Being a white woman of the
upper class in nineteenth-century Argentina was synonymous with "passing"
for European. Traveling to Europe was therefore another form of being at
home.Well into the 1950s when Victoria Ocampo writes about her youth in
the early decades of the twentieth century, she reserves the descriptive dis-
course of travel writing for the working-class neighborhoods of Buenos Aires
while she describes her experiences in Rome and Paris as extensions of her
experience in the upper-class areas of Buenos Aires. Otherness resides in the





8    Women in Argentina


borders of the city of Buenos Aires embodied by immigration. In contrast, the
world of the French and Italian rich was, for women of Ocampo's class, an
extension of home and therefore could not become the subject of travel books.
Travelogues on Argentina published by European women were read avidly
because they provided a sense of how the mirror project of creating Europe in
Argentina was progressing.
   In women's travel narratives, we can observe the conflict of identity defini-
tion in very specific terms, because writing about travel requires an active
engagement with the physical space the writer is observing and describing, and
the physical spaces which are kept in mind for comparison. It is a genre that
requires constant questioning of motives and positions. Most of all, it forces the
writer/narrator to set herself in the role of "other."Yet to transform herself/
himself into a stranger, the travel writer also constructs a community of readers
who share her/his values and cultural mores.The appeal of travel writing as a
genre lies in the narrator's transformation into a stranger. It is also a genre that
requires leaving the comfort zone, as it were, traveling to other places, ques-
tioning categories which will be critical in this study, such as home, land-
scape, region, language, and nation.

Otherness
I want to spend some time now explaining how I will use the term "other" in
the context of this study. My main premise is that travel writing relies on the
existence-real or imagined-of two distinct communities. On the one hand,
the travel writer necessarily imagines a community of readers who share his or
her values, worldview, language, and an understanding of the landscape. The
other community is that of those described who are presented as foreign, with
a different understanding of the world and its values, some or major differences
in language, and a different relationship with their own habitat.
   It is my contention that unless a travel writer constructs otherness, he/she
cannot construct the community of readers for her/his text. This is dialectic
since the construction of self is generated and reproduced by the construction
of otherness. In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva argues that "[t]he foreigner,
as it has often been noted, can only be defined in negative fashion. Negative
with respect to what? The other of what group? If one goes back through time
and social structures, the foreigner is the other of the family, the clan, the tribe"
(95). In travel writing, I want to argue, being a traveler is resignified as being
home, as having the authority for writing and describing. Those who are de-
scribed, in contrast, are the foreigners, foreigners to the community of readers
that the travel writer is creating in his/her text.
   The creation of the community of readers is fundamental for travel writers





Introduction    - 9


because they position themselves in space vis-a-vis otherness. All the writers
I treat in this book share an understanding of community of origin that is
grounded in ethnicity and class and in the spaces where upper-class white
women feel comfortable, mainly urban settings or subdued enclosed nature
such as gardens or "estancias." Bourgeois whiteness is the primary signifier in the
works of these women, alternatively set up against the realities of indigenous
men and women, men of different classes, and the physical reality of the frontier.
Since the creation of the symbolic representation ofArgentina as nation relied
heavily on white womanhood, these women writers had to also negotiate their
access to privileged spaces within the nation (in opposition mainly to non-
whites and the working class), while uttering a discourse that challenged
various premises on which their own privileged status was grounded.

Writing Landscapes/Writing Bodies
Argentinean intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Juan Bautista Alberdi,
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and Esteban Echeverria, among others, drafted
a project of nation which carefully outlined the desirable physical characteris-
tics of the future inhabitants.The bodies of women were, for the "Fathers of the
Nation," the vessels for future modern Argentineans: whiter, taller, civilized.
Alberdi himself advocated the importation of northern European women who
would whiten the native population and in turn educate children away from
the recalcitrant obscurantism of Hispanic traditions and religion. For those
who did not have a chance of being reconceived and rebirthed, traveling to
Europe was the only way to recreate themselves, whitewash their medieval
Spanish values and the dust of the gaucho-infested pampas, and come back as
quasi Europeans. Travel writing by males therefore relates public life, encoun-
ters with modernity, intellectual debates, and, in some cases, the titillating sex-
iness of Parisian nightlife.
   European male travelers to Argentina mostly concerned themselves with
the landscape and its economic potential for the metropolis. Patagonia and the
pampas were two favorite areas in which to depict the lack of sophistication
and technical advances of the natives. Onto these areas, British travelers pro-
jected their dreams of progress, looking at a mountain and imagining a func-
tioning mine, gazing down a hill into a calm river and dreaming of an active
port crowded with ships and sailors.7 Accounts of Buenos Aires ranged from
despairing reflections on lack of sophistication and cleanliness in the mid-
nineteenth century to admiring depictions of modern advances and wealth
around 191o.Women got the approval of most of the male travelers; men were
mostly discounted as too feminine, too lazy, and too vain.
   Travel writing by definition narrates encounters with otherness and re-





i o- Women in Argentina


quires the positioning of the writer/narrator within the text vis-a-vis other-
ness. While nineteenth-century male travel writers grappled with issues of
control and dramatized these in hierarchical tropes of watching and being
watched, women travel writers subverted these tropes by placing themselves
within the looked at as much as within the lookers. Florence Dixie's Across
Patagonia, for example, includes pictorial descriptions of Patagonia which
challenged the prevalent modes of representation by including the European
onlookers in the representation of an Indian camp.What becomes apparent in
Dixie's book is what male travel writers to Patagonia had hidden: the role of
the presence of the European observer in the daily life of the indigenous
populations. Dixie's undermining of the invisibility of the gaze rests not only
on her awareness of herself as an eyewitness but also on her realization that she
too is being looked at.
   The discussions that follow are informed by the mutual gaze that all these
texts share.While male travel writers often position themselves as uninvolved
witnesses, the women travel writers I study carefully place themselves within
their own narratives.They blur the dichotomy between onlooker and looked-
at by placing themselves both as objects and as subjects of the gaze. They also
address topics such as domesticity, gender roles, and family relations, which
further enhance their own participation in the exchange of gazes. There is a
sense in these texts that these women writers describe scrutinizing as much as
being scrutinized in the areas of life in which all women are expected to
participate.The topics male writers privilege, such as use of technology, imme-
diately require a dichotomic relationship between those who have access to it
and those who do not.The emphasis women writers place on categories such
as the raising of children allows for diagonal readings of the lives of the com-
munity observed and the community of origin. All the women travel writers
I study in this book-irrespective of social class, sexual preference, and marital
state choose to universalize categories such as motherhood, motherly love,
inequality between the sexes, and the frailty of women's role in society.Within
these universalized categories, women travel writers create a sense of sister-
hood between white and indigenous women. This sisterhood is frequently
extended to male subalterns such as gauchos and Indian men. While I stress
certain general identity traits that these women writers share such as whiteness
and literacy, I also address issues of difference and access to centers of power.
Women writers' constructions of themselves as protagonists of their own nar-
ratives foreground their own struggles to articulate multiple differences, not
only of gender and nationality but also of region, sexual preference, and
ethnicity. It is within this framework of multiple identity constructions that I
want to set my discussion.8





Introduction  i i


   The women I treat in this work are extraordinary women; they are women
who defied established norms of the period and who traveled into terra incognita
not in their trips but in their excursions into the world of language. I therefore
explore the strategies by which they create discursive spaces of home and away
that allow them to write accounts within patriarchal norms. "Home" will be
one of the critical spaces for the analysis of these texts.Women travel writers
negotiate binary constructions of home/away; home/not home. And inside
and outside these homes, they place bodies, their own bodies and the bodies of
others-poor women, Amerindians, mestizos.
   My study traces the connections these women establish between body,
home, language, and landscape. I look at the constructions of self and other-
ness in women's travel writing. I argue that besides being restricted to white
women, intervention in the genre of travel writing as genre is marked also
along class lines. The women who actually wrote travelogues for publication
belonged to the upper class and inscribed their own writing on travel within
the tradition of autobiographical introspection.The professional women writ-
ers I discuss in chapter 7 use narratives of travel within forms of professional
writing and therefore erase their own subjectivity from their texts. I claim,
however, that in all these different forms of writing about travel, women writ-
ers position themselves within the problematics of defining self and other
against the backdrop of the frontier.

Body/Home/Nation
Both body and home have been used throughout the history of Argentina as
metaphors for the nation. In travel writing by women, home and body become
especially concrete because they are at the very center of women's texts.Yet it
is specifically this very concreteness which allows us to glimpse into the count-
less possibilities for metaphor and metonymy, for, above all, these bodies and
these homes were the spaces for the enactment of the realities of the daily life
of privileged members of the nation.All the women travel writers I treat in this
book had a position of privilege, inherited or obtained through involvement in
professional activities.
   Feminist scholars such as Elizabeth Garrels, Francine Masiello, Ileana Rodri-
guez, and Doris Sommer have studied the encoding of discourses of nation
building within narratives of gender and domesticity. In this study, I want to
examine the complementary process, that is, how women writers' incursions
into discourses of politics and nation building are a way of securing safety in the
home. Peace in the nation therefore is a requirement for the establishment of
bourgeois domesticity. Homes in these texts are always in danger of being
attacked, intruded upon, and destroyed. The sense of precariousness of female





i z- Women in Argentina


spaces such as homes and schools, which became so painfully evident during
the period of state terrorism from 1976 to 1983,is already present in these much
earlier texts.

Feminine Spaces
The frontier is the imaginary space where identity merges into nonidentity and
where white middle-class women can become slaves.While this representation
of the frontier takes different forms throughout the hundred years I am study-
ing, it is present in these texts as the menacing space of non-belonging where
white women are in danger. The struggle between the modernizing or mod-
ern self and the regressive other is played out in the space of the frontier, the
geographical locus of the other.
   The texts I discuss in this book are vital accounts of women pushing the
limits of their assigned roles in society. Yet few of them saw themselves as
pioneers, and therein lies the attraction of their texts. In a broad sense, they were
adhering to preassigned gender roles, while they were subreptitiously using
what Josefina Ludmer has called "tricks of the weak" to subvert them ("Tretas"
53). Travel writing as a genre afforded them the possibility of playing against
the limits of acceptability while they could still pretend they were simply
performing the roles of good women, good mothers, and good teachers.
   These three roles-good woman, good mother, good teacher-are a com-
mon denominator in the works I discuss. It is from these roles that these women
embarked on the trips they would later discuss in their writings.These women,
however, do not present themselves as good wives, and they do not present
themselves as nation builders. Sinchez, Beck-Bernard, Dixie, Mansilla, and
Bunge travel with their husbands who are involved in ventures of politics and
business. The husbands are, however, absent from their wives' texts and so are
their enterprises. Cecilia Grierson and Ada Maria Elflein travel in representa-
tion of governmental agencies and of a newspaper, respectively, yet they seldom
talk about the male figure behind the enterprise. In the space of their works,
these women are alone with their pen, their paper, their language.
   In their texts, all the women writers I study establish a safe place of authority
(which does not defy male authority) and from which they construct their
voice. There is a male figure in the background, but in their texts the women
are on their own, looking on, writing, bearing testimony to difference and
sameness. The landscape that appears in the background is mostly that of the
pampas, miles of fertile flat land which by the mid-183os had been coined as a
typically Argentinean landscape by a dozen British travelers and the creole
intellectuals who used their writings as model texts.This landscape is as much
a thematic marker for the foreign women travelers writing on Argentina as it is





Introduction -113


for the Argentine-born women authors who write on other geographical ar-
eas the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Brazil.

Coming Home
I have drawn from the work of countless scholars who have placed themselves
in the midst of what Sarmiento called as early as 1845 the Argentinean riddle
and have tried to make sense of it. I have sought to contribute to this ongoing
dialogue situating myself within what is spoken and silenced within it. Hence,
I examine the ways in which narratives of nationalism include and exclude
gendered, classed, and racialized bodies. I show how descriptions of sceneries
are always subjective inscriptions of self, and I read travel narratives connecting
discussions of scenery and discussions of subjects.
   I started thinking about the issues I discuss in my book in a seminar on
writing and imperialism I took with Masao Miyoshi when I was in graduate
school at the University of California, San Diego.Texts I read in that class such
as Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other, Ong's Orality and Literacy, Ngugi wa
Thiongo's Decolonising the Mind, and Edward Said's Orientalism made me ques-
tion my own understanding of the place I grew up in a suburb of the city of
Buenos Aires. I demystified my own relationship with the miles of fertile land
that I saw when I drove with my family to the beach every summer.As a child,
I echoed my teachers' descriptions of the pampas as the source of national
wealth.As an adolescent and a college student, I argued for land reform and the
expropriation of land. In graduate school in the United States, I came to realize
how a cultural construction of the scenery of my birth province had formed
my own understanding of myself as a gendered, racialized, and classed member
of the Argentinean nation.
   I have never spent much time in the country. My family did not own land
and we did not know anyone who did.Yet the uninterrupted miles of green
pastures enclosed by barbed wire were as much a part of my definition of who
I was as the train that runs two blocks from my childhood home (a legacy of
British imperialism, nationalized by Juan Per6n and privatized by the military
junta in the early 198os and by Peronist president Carlos Menem in the 199os).
Two faces of a project: vast expanses of land, an overpopulated modern city.
   The final impetus for the writing of the book came during a celebration of
independence on July 9, 1997. My six-year-old son Martin, born in California
and raised in California and Oregon, is dressed as a gaucho and carrying the
Argentinean flag. He sings to the flag, dances with a little girl with artificial
black braids, and shouts "Viva la Patria! Viva la Libertad!" The nation is per-
formed, yet again, within the safe space of a school yard. And, as always, it is
intertwined with gender roles, ethnicity, and class. It is in the vague verses of the





14 - Women in Argentina

national anthem forever sung by Mariquita Sanchez, in the colors of the flag, in
the particular regional tones of language that enactments of nation defy ratio-
nal understanding. It is the sense of being home after a long trip and the
knowledge that for a few minutes, and in performance, community exists.This
book has been written within and against this illusion.











1

Frontier Identities, 1837-1880



















1


A House, a Home, a Nation: Maricquita Sanchez's

Recueirdos del Buenos Ayres Virreynal





A few months after landing in Buenos Aires in 1845, German painter Johann
Moritz Rugendas painted a portrait ofArgentinean socialite and writer Mar-
iquita Sinchez (figure 1). Hailed by critics as the first Romantic portrait in the
River Plate that incorporates the American landscape, the painting shows
Sinchez sitting on a sofa that merges into a wild yet contained natural land-
scape.' Her black dress demurely covers her body and a white kerchief is on her
lap. This portrait masterfully combines the elements that came to signify early
Argentinean culture. A white woman anchored within European civilization
(her mode of dress and adornment, her sofa), within an exuberant yet con-
tained natural landscape. The conflation of women and nature, the delicate
equilibrium between nature that can be contained and nature that poses a
danger becomes clear in the context of another paintings by Rugendas. In El
rapto de la cautiva (figure 2), Rugendas shows the dangers of uncontrolled nature
for white women. Placed in the frontier, these two paintings epitomize the
dangers of the frontier for white women: abduction by Indians, acculturation,
sexual violence.
   In this chapter and the next, I will read texts by Mariquita Sanchez and Lina
Beck-Bernard which challenge part of the widely held assumptions about the
frontier. Both Sanchez and Beck-Bernard interrupt the male discourse of the
frontier as the ultimate dangerous place for women. Sinchez shows how instabil-
ity and danger are also part and parcel of life in cities, and how the frontier could
also be imagined as a matriarchal space of bliss and harmony. Beck-Bernard
protests the unfairness of an order that relegates indigenous peoples to disappear-





18 - Part 1. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


Figure 1. Johann Moritz Rugendas. Retrato de Maria Sdnchez de Mendeville, 1815. Oil on
canvas, 61.5 x 51.7 cm. By permission of the Museo Hist6rico Nacional, Buenos Aires.


ance. In their works, both Sinchez and Beck-Bernard invoke a more democratic
vision of the frontier as a space of exchange and mutual enrichment. Within
their bourgeois homes and signifying the future of the nation-white, Euro-
pean, Francophile-these authors utter a mild protest which retrospectively
reminds us that capitalism, dependency, genocide, and racism are not inevitable.





Mariquita Sanchez's Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres Virreynal - 19


Figure 2. Johann Moritz Rugendas. El rapto de la cautiva, 1848. Oil on canvas, 44.5 x 53.5 cm.


A House/A Home

In a letter written from her exile in Montevideo in 1842 to her daughter
Florencia, who was still in Buenos Aires, Mariquita Sinchez, the most impor-
tant female figure ofArgentinean early republican life, describes political unrest
in both Buenos Aires and Montevideo in these terms:

   Aqui quieren que todos perezcan y ni las mujeres quieren que tengan
   miedo, de modo que es la misma cosa que ahi, con un poco mis de
   libertad. Ayer se registraron varias casas y al que se oculta lo sacan
   amarrado y le hacen soldado de linea.Todo el dia tiros, heridos, guerrillas,
   privaci6n de muchos articulos, de modo que estoy como embarcada, sin
   leche, fruta carisima, y todo esto al "nudo." Ni es mi tierra, ni esto me
   sacari del "pantano," pasando los pocos anos que me quedan en padecer y
   ver padecer, y ni el nombre de politica quisiera yo oir.Asi quisiera arreglar
   mis intereses contigo y vivir en descanso, aunque fuera en un rancho. No
   tengo ninguna aspiraci6n, ni ann vestirme como gente. S6lo lo que deseo





20  - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


   es tomar una taza de caldo y otra de caf6, sin que me hagan rabiar y sin
   asustarme. (Sienz Quesada 191-92)2

   [Here they want everyone to perish and they don't want even the women
   to be afraid, so that it's the same as there, with a little more freedom.
   Yesterday several houses were searched and whoever hides is tied up and
   carried off to become a soldier. All day there are gunshots, wounded
   people, guerilla bands, and we lack many staples, so that it's like I'm
   marooned, without milk, with very expensive fruit and it all seems
   worthless. It's not even my country, not even this can get me out of this
   quagmire, after the few years that I have left to suffer and see suffering, I
   don't even want to hear the name of politics. So I would like to arrange
   my interests with you and live in peace even if on a "rancho." I have no
   aspirations, not even to dress like people. All I want is to drink a cup of
   broth and another of coffee without it making me angry and without
   being afraid.]

Sinchez depicts in detail the relationship between the personal and the politi-
cal, and the ultimate desire for the comfort and protection of home. Political
strife had exiled her from her Buenos Aires home, where she had hosted the
most celebrated literary soir6es of the city. Politics caught up with her in
Montevideo, and her house there virtually became a ship: insecure, open to
searches, and lacking in fresh food.3 Her yearning is for the safe space of "home"
which a ship cannot provide. Neither her house in Montevideo nor her house
in Buenos Aires was giving her this security at the moment.This home stripped
to its bare minimum is the "rancho," a place where she would be alone with her
daughter, in simple clothes, drinking broth and coffee without being afraid.The
reference to the "rancho" is of course a hyperbole: to find "home" on a
"rancho," Sinchez would have to give up all her privileges of race and class, and
nothing in her writings or in her biographical data indicates that she would
have been willing to renounce that which basically constituted her as a per-
son-her class status, her whiteness, and her privileged space in the drama of
early Argentinean political life.A drama in which house, and home, family and
nation, were intricately connected.
   In the period from 1830 through 18o Argentina was a dramatically under-
populated country, a silhouette, a sparse immensity enclosed by arbitrary bor-
ders. Although the country had gained independence from Spain in 181o,
since then it had been immersed in civil strife in the fight for a definition of
a national project. The period of political unrest in Argentina from the late
182os to the early 185os set two ideas in opposition: (a) a liberal idea of nation
building based on European philosophical thought and proposed by the intel-





Mariquita Sanchez's Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres Virreynal -"21


ligentsia and the merchant classes, and (b) a "nationalistic" idea of federalism as
social pact with a strong foothold in the land and in idiosyncratic traditions.
These opposing ideas were the rallying cries of the two groups that dominated
Argentina's political arena during the first half of the nineteenth century: Uni-
tarians and Federals.The Unitarians considered the production of culture and
especially literature as fundamental to the process of nation building. They
equated the creation of a nation in a vacuum, in a desert with writing a book.
For the Federals, who saw high culture as a prerogative of the Unitarians, the
only possible cultural expression to call their own was popular culture, the
emerging expression of the nonliterate classes (vidalitas, songs, popular poems,
and plays).4
   The most prominent figure among the Federals was Juan Manuel de Rosas,
a landowner who governed Buenos Aires and represented the other provinces
in international affairs from the late 182os until his defeat at the hands ofJusto
Jos6 de Urquiza in the battle of Caseros in 1852. Rosas's r6gime had sent hun-
dreds of Unitarians into exile, among them many of the best-known intellec-
tuals of the generation of 1837. These intellectuals would therefore write the
nation in absentia using stock images from French Romanticism and British
travel literature as their source. Looking back nostalgically at the lost country,
they created it, writing down a landscape most of them had never seen.Argen-
tina was the product of an intellectual process of piecing together images and
words.The trick was to try to be as different and as similar as possible, different
enough from Europe to warrant independence but similar enough to be in-
cluded in European cultural and political traditions as a peer and not as a
subaltern. In this game of mirrors, the writers of this generation used the
conventions of Romanticism as a literary movement to write against the geog-
raphy and anatomy of the country and to imagine it otherwise.
   In her book Las Romanticas: Women Writers and Subjectivity in Spain, 1835-
1850, Susan Kirkpatrick shows how Romanticism also provided a venue for
women to express themselves.Within the context of this subjectivity, women
started to produce literature in Europe and in Latin America. Juana Manuela
Gorriti's stories are probably the best exponents of the expression of this female
subjectivity in Argentinean literature. Gorriti wrote about the pre-Hispanic
past, wars of independence, and violence during Rosas's rule. Her melodramatic
short stories provided her with a space to develop her ideas on the role of
women in the family and the nation.
   The family was used as a metaphor for the nation not only by women
writers but also by male writers. Critics such as Doris Sommer and Francine
Masiello have analyzed the use of these metaphors from different perspectives.
Sommer claims that love stories in the foundational novels of Latin America





22  - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


such as Jos6 Mirmol's Amalia and Jorge Isaacs's Maria functioned as metaphors
for national unification and nation building. The erotic tensions that weave
these stories together would end successfully in sex and procreation only if the
nation came together and provided the desiring couple with a peaceful envi-
ronment. In Part i of her book Between Civilization and Barbarism, Masiello
explains how the Unitarians in Argentina created a feminized discourse to
oppose the masculinist and virile discourse of the Federals. According to
Masiello, the generation of 1837 perceived women as a force for resistance to
tyranny which acquired a "new symbolic value in building the nation" (23).
This codification of the feminine as a space of resistance provided women with
a freedom to write much earlier than in other countries. As long as women
used the feminine metaphors of family and household, their writing was toler-
ated, praised, and published, and several women became professional writers
who supported themselves financially through their writing.
   The Unitarians' emphasis on femininity was coupled with an emphasis on
whiteness, and femininity and whiteness became interchangeable metaphors of
each other. Whereas white middle-class women became the angels of the
hearth, black and mulatto women came to stand for barbarism and for the
injustice of Rosas's r6gime.Women of color were associated with disorder and
with the dark forces of society. While this worked representationally, it also
worked concretely in terms of the political project of the Unitarians:

   Since their goal was to populate the nation with racially uncontaminated
   subjects, the bodies of women of European ancestry made their way into
   nationalist texts, serving at once as buffers between racially minorized
   groups, who were targets of repression, and as a continental model of
   citizenry that depended upon its female population for its continuity in
   history. (Masiello, Civilization and Barbarism S)

   For the Unitarians, Argentina as home was a project both of identification
and differentiation: a country "like Europe" that would work as a reflection of
the best attributes ofEurope but that would still be different enough to warrant
independent government. The generation of 1837 imagined the Argentinean
nation from exile and established a way of writing the country that required
both physical and emotional distance. The trip to Europe would therefore
become the paradigmatic initiation into public and Argentinean political life.
Travel writing was as much about the political and the programmatic plans for
the nation as about personal and intimate experiences.The personal worked as
a backdrop for the political. Traveling was a male project where Argentinean
intellectuals definedArgentinity in contrast to other imagined identities, always
staying close to the model of differentiation/identification described above.





Mariquita Sinchez's Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres Virreynal - 23


   Women's national identities in political terms-passports, identity cards
were tied to their male relatives' identities.The definition of home, lodged for
men in the tension between differentiation and identification, was even harder to
pinpoint for women whose political participation was very limited. In their
literary production, middle-class women explored the domestic space represent-
ing the space of the nation as an enlarged domestic space complete with fraternal
strife.
   The novel and the short story, and to a lesser degree the essay, became
popular genres for women writers in the mid-nineteenth century.Autobiogra-
phy and travel writing, immensely popular among men writers of the period,
were not genres practiced by women until the very late nineteenth century.
Perhaps one reason for this is indicated in Adolfo Prieto's argument about
autobiographical literature in the early nineteenth century:

   Los hombres que ejercen el poder por esos anos rara vez concluyen sus
   mandatos y sus delegaciones con el acuerdo de todos los grupos facciosos;
   y es esta falta de correspondencia entre el quehacer individual y la esti-
   mativa de uno o de varios sectores de la sociedad, la que crea, en algunas
   conciencias, la necesidad de equilibrar la fractura producida. La con-
   fesi6n piblica es el recurso habitual de casos semejantes: de ahi que no
   pueda sorprender el nimero de memorias que se escriben durante ese
   periodo. (Autobiografica 37)

   [The men who exercise power around those years seldom finish their
   mandates and delegations with the agreement of all of the factions in-
   volved; and it's this lack of correspondence between the individual task
   and the approval of one or several sectors of society that creates, in some
   minds, the necessity to balance the ensuing gap. The public confession is
   the usual recourse in similar cases: thus the number of memoirs that are
   written during that period can come as no surprise.]

Autobiographical writing in the early years of independent Argentina, after the
1810 revolution, did not textualize the private as women's autobiography in
Europe did at the time. Likewise, travel writing in the same period served
public men with an added space to compare political practices and set forth a
model of nationhood. Both memoirs and travel books referred mostly to public
life.
   Women writers of the period did much personal writing in the form of
letters, journal articles, and addresses at literary soir6es. Although their novels
and short stories were ostensibly written for publication, their personal writing
was published much later, and most of it was produced without a clear sense of





24  - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


whether it would eventually be published or not.As a matter of fact, Mariquita
Sanchez's Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres virreynal was published almost a century
after it was written. Sinchez's Recuerdos is an effort to document a particular
moment in River Plate history. Sinchez intertwines the history of the country
with her own personal history. Sylvia Molloy describes the tension between
the personal and the historical in these terms:

   A strong testimonial stance informs autobiographical writing in Spanish
   America. If not always perceiving themselves as historians-the percep-
   tion seems to wane as generic difference becomes more specific in Span-
   ish American literature-autobiographers will continue to see them-
   selves as witnesses. (At Face Value 8)

Sinchez writes from the space of authority being an eyewitness has granted her.
Lacking most of the introspective characteristics of memoirs, Recuerdos del
Buenos Ayres virreynal resembles a travelogue. I will argue that given Sanchez's
conflicted identity in nineteenth-century Argentina, it can very well be read as
one. In Recuerdos, Sinchez creates a community of differentiated readers who
are distanced from the people she writes about not spatially but by time. Co-
lonial Buenos Aires is presented as a place other than contemporary (and fu-
ture) Buenos Aires, and Mariquita Sanchez plays the role of the eyewitness
traveler who narrates this place other to her community of readers.

Mariquita Sanchez As Symbol
Mariquita Sanchez is probably the best-known Argentinean woman of the
nineteenth century. Immortalized in elementary school textbooks as the first
person ever to sing the national anthem, Sinchez has become a synonym of the
nation-in-the-making, a local Madame de StaEl, an interpreter of the best
elements that made the creation of the Argentine nation possible in the
postindependence period. The French-inspired Argentinean patriots chose
Mariquita to perform the triumphant anthem byVicente L6pez y Planes and
Blas Parera and in so doing destined her to become a symbol of the nation.As
such, Mariquita combined European sophistication and upbringing with a
birthplace this side of the Atlantic. Indeed, Sinchez was immaculately white,
the daughter of a prominent Spanish family who married first an English
captain and then a French fortune hunter who later became a diplomat.
   Born in 1786, the only daughter of one of Buenos Aires' richest and most
aristocratic families, Mariquita Sanchez grew up as an ultramarine Spaniard.
Her family was important in the milieu of Buenos Aires' Spanish colonial elite,
and during her childhood Mariquita enjoyed the privileges afforded to her as
a member of this elite. At fifteen, nevertheless, Sinchez clashed with the es-





Mariquita Sanchez's Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres Virreynal - 15


tablishment and its rules when she petitioned the viceroy for permission to
marry her cousin Martin Thompson against her widowed mother's will.5 Even
though there was an ecclesiastical procedure that children could use to resist
their parents' marriage plans, Mariquita instead appealed directly to the viceroy.
Middle-class Buenos Aires women had enjoyed much more freedom than con-
temporary women of the same social class in Spain. Some of these privileges
were intrinsic to life in the New World: more freedom of movement, more class
mobility.The success of Mariquita's plea to marry Thompson exemplifies one
of the advantages of overseas life for women: the possibility of exercising their
"right to love."6
   Exercising this "right to love," Mariquita Sanchez married Martin Thomp-
son, who was in charge of overseeing activities in the port of Buenos Aires, in
18o5.Their house became a center for artistic meetings after the revolution. In
1826, Sinchez persuaded Governor Bernardino Rivadavia to found the Soci-
ety of Beneficence, which provided a space for women of the oligarchy to
participate in public life well into the twentieth century. The Society of
Beneficence became a key element in the definition ofArgentine womanhood
and took over territories usurped from the domain of the church such as the
health and education of women. Sinchez was active in this society until her
death in 1868 at the age of eighty-three.
   Sanchez's first husband, Martin Thompson, died in 1819 when returning
from an official mission to the United States,leaving Sinchez in charge of five
children. A few months after her first husband's death, Sanchez married Juan
Washington de Mendeville, a French adventurer who later became a French
representative to the government of Buenos Aires. Mendeville was much
younger than Sinchez, and he was Sanchez's children's piano teacher when
they met. Six months after the wedding, Sinchez gave birth to Mendeville's
son, creating a small scandal in Buenos Aires society. During much of Rosas's
government, Sinchez lived in Montevideo and spent a short period in Rio de
Janeiro in preparation for a trip to Europe that never happened.After the defeat
of Rosas in the battle of Caseros in 1852, she returned to Buenos Aires, where
her house again became a center of artistic life in the soir6es she hosted.
   Sanchez's contribution to Argentine history both as a member of the Soci-
ety ofBeneficence and as the hostess of famous literary soir6es underscores the
significance of the project she wished to undertake but never really carried out:
writing a history ofArgentine women. "Voy a escribir la historia de las mujeres
de mi pais," she wrote to her daughter in 1852, adding, "ellas tambi6n son
gente." [I will write the history of the women of my country, they are also
people.] Sanchez's project was perhaps too ambitious for the time. Unable to
do the kind of writing she preferred, which from what she says in her letters





z6  - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


would be either political treatises or historical essays, she settles for this descrip-
tion of the Buenos Aires of the past in Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres virreynal. In a
letter to Juan Bautista Alberdi, she talks about her inclinations:

   Mi vida es la de un hombre fil6sofo por fuerza, mis bien que la de una
   mujer, con la desgracia de tener coraz6n de mujer, cabeza de volcin y no
   tener la frivolidad del sexo para distraerme. Mis afecciones dispersas por el
   mundo y en una profunda soledad en medio de la mis numerosa sociedad.
   (235)

   [My life is one of a philosophical man by necessity, rather than that of a
   woman. I have the misfortune of having the heart of a woman, the head
   of a volcano and not having the frivolity of the sex to distract me. My
   loved ones scattered around the world and I find myself in a profound
   solitude amidst the most numerous society.]

Caught between broad political and cultural interests and the narrow space her
society provided for women's public endeavors, Sinchez is trapped between
identities as well. The subtext of her discussion of pre-independence Buenos
Aires, which I will discuss in the next section, is her knowledge of European
ways learned as a European "in exile." Even though Buenos Aires is the place
where she was born and where she lived most of her life, she can write about
using the years past as the distancing element whereby colonial Buenos Aires
becomes a place other than postindependence Buenos Aires.
   In Sanchez's writing, the relationship between the public and the private is
overdetermined: no domestic life can exist until political pacification provides
an adequate environment. Peace in the nation is a prerequisite of domestic
harmony. It is in the bodies of white middle-class women that national identity
is inscribed and performed. The hopes of the generation of 1837 of"salvar la
civilizaci6n europea, sus instituciones, hibitos e ideas en las orillas del Plata
... " (Facundo 356) [saving European civilization, its institutions, habits, and
ideas on the shores of the River Plate . . .] take form in the private life of a
woman who actually realized the dream of becoming English and French
while never having left South America. Mariquita Sanchez embodies the
allegiance to France and England so close to the heart of the intellectuals of
the generation of 1837, and in her marriages she actually carries out the physi-
cal blending of herself, a creole woman of Spanish origin, with white men
from the admired metropolitan centers.The generation of 1837's dreams of
transformation and metamorphosis take place in Mariquita Sanchez's private,
yet very public, life. While the laws of the time excluded women from full
citizenship, Sanchez acquired, through marriage, nominal citizenship in the





Mariquita Sanchez's Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres Virreynal - 27


two most desired nations of the world for her River Plate contemporaries:
England and France. In the European lives of her children, Sinchez vicari-
ously lived the dream of European belonging and recognition.
   Ideas of nationality and citizenship were very unstable inArgentina well into
the 188os. For women, national identity was even more precarious since their
citizenship was tied to their male relatives. Sinchez's letter protesting Juan
Manuel de Rosas's accusation that since her marriage to Mendeville she had
become "French" exemplifies this anxiety. In this letter, Sinchez establishes a
comparison between her marriage to Mendeville and Rosas's marriage to
Encarnaci6n Ezcurra and how women are always dependent on their hus-
bands' political and national projects:

   No quiero dejarte en la duda de si te ha escrito una francesa o una
   americana.Te dir6 que, desde que estoy unida a un franc6s, he servido a
   mi pais con mis celo y entusiasmo ain, y lo har6 siempre del mismo
   modo, a no ser que se ponga en oposici6n con la Francia, porque mi
   marido es franc6s y esti al servicio de su naci6n. T6, que pones en el
   "cepo" a Encarnaci6n si no se adorna con tu divisa debes aprobarme,
   tanto mis cuando que, no s6lo sigo tu doctrina, sino las reglas del honor
   y del deber. aQu6 harias si Encarnaci6n se hiciera unitaria?Yo s6 lo que
   harias. (Quoted in Mariquita Sanchez y su tiempo 168)

   [I don't want to leave you in doubt as to whether a French or an Ameri-
   can woman is writing to you. I will tell you that ever since I married a
   Frenchman, I have served my country with even more fervor and enthu-
   siasm, and I will always serve it in this way unless it is put in opposition
   to France, because my husband is French and is in the service of his
   country. You, who put Encarnaci6n in the stocks if she does not wear
   your red ribbon, you should approve of me, for not only do I follow your
   doctrine, but I also follow the rules of honor and duty.What would you
   do if Encarnaci6n became Unitarian? I know what you would do.]

Here Sanchez explicates the different levels of allegiance women had to ob-
serve: loyalty to the cause of their country and conformity to the rules that
governed women's behavior and which established women's identity as depen-
dent on that of their male relatives. She can have allegiance to both the "pais"
where she was born and at the same time show her preferences for the cultural
project France represents. If this double allegiance is widespread among the
members of the generation of 1837, Sanchez also justifies it in the context of her
marriage. She stresses this when she brings Rosas's personal situation into play:
Sanchez's respect for her husband's citizenship is compared to Encarnaci6n





z8  - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


Ezcurra's adherence to her husband's policies. Sinchez masterfully alludes to
Rosas's reign of terror when she uses the word "cepo" (stocks, an instrument of
torture) ironically in connection to Rosas's relationship to Encarnaci6n. The
"cepo" functions as an implied answer to the rhetorical question Sinchez asks
Rosas at the end of her letter, a question which is left unanswered but to which
Sinchez claims she knows the answer.The "cepo" appears in connection to the
"divisa punz6" [a red ribbon], which Rosas required be worn to show alle-
giance to the government-and metonymically to the social order. Here the
"divisa" is taken out of the context of Rosas-ruled Buenos Aires and down-
graded to the level of a domestic issue, a tug-of-war between husband and wife.
The "divisa" is therefore "tu divisa," not the symbol of the country but a capri-
cious adornment a husband imposes on his wife as a symbol of his power and
of her subservience.7
   Mariquita Sanchez's double allegiance is extended when she-who has
never left the River Plate region-brags to her daughter that Countess Walewska
thought she was French:

   La CondesaWalewska decia que no podia creer que no fuera francesa, la
   primera vez que estuve con ella. Al irme, me pidi6 de volver a verla
   pronto y entrando un amigo mio enseguida le dijo:"Yo me figuro que
   he tratado mucho a Madame Mendeville, tanta es la confianza que me
   ha inspirado y tanto me gusta su modo y maneras ... " S.S.Vino al soplo
   y yo tan chocha.Todos sus vestidos, moldes y camareras estaban en mi casa
   todos los dias. (Mariquita Sanchez y su tiempo 203)

   [Countess Walewska said that the first time that I was with her she couldn't
   believe that I wasn't French.When I left, she asked me to come back and
   see her soon and since a friend of mine was coming in she said to the
   countess immediately: "I figure that I have dealt a lot with Madame
   Mendeville, she has inspired so much confidence in me and I like her
   manner and style so much ... "The countess came to visit shortly and I
   was so happy. All of her dresses, patterns, and maids were in my house
   every day.]

Here again nationality and citizenship for women are associated-as in Sin-
chez's letter to Rosas-with female adornment and with the interior of house-
holds and all that they meant for bourgeois women. Sinchez is very aware of
the connections between female sexual conduct and the legitimation of gov-
ernment, as her letter to Rosas suggests. In the letter to her daughter above, she
goes back to the issue of female decorum (her "modo y maneras") to validate
her position as aWestern woman.Thus she transcends her identity as "americana"
and is able to fit into "civilized" society everywhere.





Mariquita Sanchez's Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres Virreynal - 19


Fashion and Nation

I have often encountered smirks, laughter, and puzzled looks from Argen-
tineans when I mention that I am working on Mariquita Sanchez's writing.
The most sympathetic of my compatriots protest that they never knew she
wrote.A discussion follows of how much we all remember about her dress and
posture in the famous portrait by Pedro Subercasseaux, which shows her sing-
ing the national anthem in a low-cut red dress in the midst of the elegance of
her French-inspired house. In countless reenactments of the scene, schoolgirls
perform Mariquita Sanchez as the angel of the hearth, the respite of the war-
rior, the hostess who provided the heroes of the nation with food and shelter.
Her active intellectual and political life has been mostly forgotten.8
   Mariquita Sanchez did produce texts, although not political texts as she
would have wanted. Nor did she write novels like other women writers of her
period such as Juana Manuela Gorriti, Rosa Guerra, or Eduarda Mansilla. The
texts we still have access to include hundreds of pages of personal letters, a few
poems, memos from the Society of Beneficence, and a short account of life in
colonial Buenos Aires entitled Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres virreynal. This text will
be at the center of my discussion of Sanchez's work. I argue that Recuerdos
requires the reading strategies more often associated with travel writing since
the narrator positions herself in the conflictive in-betweenness that travel writ-
ers construct.
   My analysis is also informed by Sanchez's correspondence with her family
and public figures such as Esteban Echeverria, F6lix Frias,Juan Maria Guti6rrez,
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and Florencio Varela. Sanchez's writing fore-
grounds the relationship she has with the city where she grew up: it is the city
where she was born but it is also the city where she grew up as a Spaniard in
exile. Sinchez writes of Buenos Aires in the interstitial space of not quite being
a local and not quite being a foreigner. I want to investigate the ways in which
defining herself as an "americana" as opposed to a Spaniard in exile benefited
her as a woman, and how the American continent provided her with a freedom
of movement potentially inaccessible to her in the metropolis. This tension
between societies, nationalities, and, ultimately, worlds defines her writing.The
tension is not a dichotomy between Spain andAmerica but a multiple confron-
tation of subject positions in which Spain is set off against America but also
against France and England.
   Recuerdos was written for a single reader, Santiago de Estrada, and kept in his
family's archives until a descendent with literary inclinations-Liniers de
Estrada-prefaced and published it in 1953. Like numerous women in the
Americas before her, Sanchez produced a requested text written by invitation,
suggestion, or direction from male relatives, friends, or ecclesiastical figures.





3 0 - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


Like most of these women, Sinchez took advantage of this occasion to write a
text which articulates and presents her own voice and her own contribution to
history.
   Approaching Recuerdos, we must first reckon with the category of"mem-
ory" which the title evokes.Autobiographical writing enables a discussion of
the personal as recuperated in memory. In Sanchez's Recuerdos, the personal is
absent. Sinchez does not use the first person and she does not position herself
as a participant in the social conventions described. She further distances
herself from the events described by omitting the nature of her relationship
with the key people in her life, such as her parents and her first husband.This
distancing of the events described from the narrator who depicts them is
characteristic of travel writing, where the weight of the narrator's participa-
tion is her/his role as witness.
   Travel writers generally establish spatial contrasts between "here" and "there."
Sinchez uses time to construct in colonial Buenos Aires a "there," a place other.
I have claimed in my introduction that travel writers need to position them-
selves in respect to collective identities. In Recuerdos, Sinchez's strategy of dis-
cussing her childhood in a place that she now recognizes as other requires an
articulation of self that shuns her own past and creates her character as an
Edenic figure. Although it may be claimed that the past always has the quality
of otherness, in Recuerdos, the past is a prelapsarian order (and women in this
prelapsarian society are proto-Eves). Social construction is presented by Sin-
chez as key to understanding and creating a landscape. Colonial Buenos Aires
is a foreign place for the narrator, who stresses its anomaly, its anachronism as a
community caught in the Middle Ages. Mariquita Sanchez is reluctant to asso-
ciate herself with this community and therefore distances herself textually by
presenting her parents and her first husband as strangers and foreigners.
   What marks the anachronic quality of colonial Buenos Aires is its treatment
of women.Women are confined to the domestic space and to religious norms
which derive from the Hispanic past. Sanchez's creation of herself as a "new
woman" takes place as she re-creates colonial women as completely foreign and
different from her. Let us look, for example, at the way in which she depicts her
parents, Cecilio Sinchez and Magdalena Trillo. Describing a visit the bishop
paid to her parents, for example, she writes:

   para ir a San Isidro, a la casa de una familia, con quien [el Obispo] tenia
   mucha amistad. Era Don Cecilio Sanchez deVelasco y su senora Dona
   MagdalenaTrillo, pero, nombrada siempre delArco, nombre de su primer
   marido. Esta senora era una notabilidad en aquella 6poca; ocupada sin
   cesar, en el cultivo divino, en las funciones de iglesia; tenia las mis originales
   ideas. (So)





Mariquita Sinchez's Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres Virreynal - 31z


   [in order to go to San Isidro, to the home of a family with whom the
   bishop was good friends. It was Mr. Cecilio Sanchez deVelasco and his
   wife Mrs. Magdalena Trillo, but always called "del Arco," the name of
   her first husband. This woman was notable in that era; constantly occu-
   pied with church functions and the veneration of the divine; she had the
   most original ideas.]

This quotation is included within the chapter on religious life, specifically in a
vignette entitled "Incidente del Obispo" [Incident with the Bishop]. What
Sinchez is describing is the bishop's visit to her family's weekend house in San
Isidro.Yet the description is distanced from Sanchez's life in the inclusion of the
full names of her parents with no reference to their relationship to her. Sinchez
devotes most of the vignette to the description of her mother and her care as
hostess to prepare her house for the arrival of the bishop.The very presentation
of Magdalena Trillo as a woman completely involved in issues of religion and
worship distances her from the filial relationship with the author. Sinchez
omits the parent-daughter relationship and therefore challenges the text's ob-
vious function as family heirloom. The emphasis on her mother's role is in
keeping with the text's concerns about women's roles also but further prepares
the ground for the development of a relationship between self and other along
issues of time and not issues of blood. The narrator in Recuerdos is a modern
woman, a layperson, independent, with a sense of allegiance and inclusion
within English and French societies.The "other" against which the narrator in
Recuerdos constructs her idea of self is a religious woman who, like Magdalena
Trillo, is tied to medieval Hispanic conventions.
   Alberdi claimed that Unitarians were a hundred years ahead of their time,
Federals a hundred years behind.As a firm believer in women's education and
women's rights, but restricted by her position as a woman to certain domestic
roles, Sinchez was on a different time line from her male Unitarian friends and
correspondents.They envisioned a modern Argentina of the future, inhabited
by modern lay male subjects and included within a capitalist system of eco-
nomic exploitation. Sinchez's plan for the future also had a place for equality
for some women. It is, I believe, the men and women of the future who shared
her understanding of gender roles, who Sanchez envisioned as the intended
readers of her text. Sinchez is therefore creating the past for an audience of the
future. In this sense, she is, like the travel writer, a translator and intermediary.

The English Are Coming
   La juventud de Buenos Aires llevaba
   consigo esta idea fecunda de la fraternidad
   de intereses con la Francia y la Inglaterra;





32  - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


   llevaba el amor a la civilizaci6n, a las
   instituciones y a las letras que la Europa
   nos habia legado y que Rosas destruia en
   nombre de la Am6rica, sustituyendo otro
   vestido al vestido europeo, otras leyes,
   a las leyes europeas, otro gobierno, al
   gobierno europeo.
   Facundo 357

   [The youth of Buenos Aires carried with it this fertile idea of a fraternity
   of interests between France and England; it maintained a love for civili-
   zation, for the institutions and the literature bequeathed by Europe and
   that Rosas was destroying in the name of America, substituting other
   clothing for the European style, other laws for the European ones, an-
   other government for the European one.]

Although Sinchez's text is entitled Recuerdos, the narration assumes a certain
distance more characteristic of anthropological or journalistic studies.The au-
tobiographical pact is there: we are to assume that there is an identity between
narrator and author and that the narrator's authority derives from her position
as witness. In this sense, the text can be read as a travelogue in which distance
is not established by a spatial displacement but rather by a temporal one. Like
many travel writers, Sinchez selects different areas of interest and develops
them. As with most women travel writers, these areas of interest are well
grounded within discourses of the private and personal: insides of houses,
schools, churches. The stock arrival scene of travel writers, the moment in
which the immanence of time in the periphery becomes interrupted and in-
cluded within the historical time of the metropolis, is marked by the arrival of
the English soldiers who invaded Buenos Aires twice in the first decade of the
nineteenth century.
   In the description of the invasions, Sinchez clearly marks the difference
between the male "plumas aventajadas" who will write the historical account
and her contribution which is confined to the interiors of houses where the
English soldiers are received socially and the beautiful spectacle they offer when
they march along the streets of Buenos Aires in gallant military attire. The
invasion, which Sanchez's husband Martin Thompson was in charge of crush-
ing, is described as a social visit.The inhabitants of Buenos Aires are awakened
from their peripheral and allochronic existence by the incursion of the British
who while on a military mission also perform"civilization." In Sanchez's text,
civilization is described in terms of physical appearance-that is, whiteness
and also dress. Fashion becomes a marker of civilization.





Mariquita Sinchez's Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres Virreynal - 33


   Mary Louise Pratt has explained that travelogues include a stock arrival
scene which is a trope in the "language of conquest" ("Scratches" 35-3 7) .These
scenes stress European intervention as encounter and exchange rather than
invasion and conquest. Sinchez reverses this process and turns an invasion into
little more than a social visit. The chapter which describes the first English
invasion of 18o5 starts with the admonition:

   Te he dado una ligera idea del estado de Buenos Aires a la llegada de
   Beresford y, aunque plumas aventajadas, han escrito sobre esto, voy a darte
   mi opini6n (63).

   [I have given you a small idea of the state offBuenos Aires upon the arrival
   of Beresford and, although superior pens have written of this, I will give
   you my opinion.]

This chapter begins by ostensibly evoking Santiago de Estrada, the man for
whom the text was written. Sinchez refers to his interlocutor very seldom in
her text, and most of the references happen within this chapter. The fact that
the previous five chapters are presented as setting the scene for this develop-
ment is also suggestive. The previous chapters are narrated within the allo-
chronic time of the periphery: life is repetitious and nothing much happens.
The arrival of the English marks the entrance of Buenos Aires into modern
historical times, and the English, as written by Sinchez, are here to perform
modernity and free enterprise. It is not surprising, therefore, that Sinchez re-
minds us that the invasion interrupted the performance of Moratin's El si de las
ninas (a play about the marriageability of a group of young women) that the
viceroy was attending at the theater.Again marriage, domesticity, and nation are
irrevocably connected.
   The first vignette in this chapter finishes with the British flag in the fort of
Buenos Aires, the second vignette in the chapter, "Las milicias portenas y las
inglesas," provides an extended description of the physical characteristics and
attire of the English and porteno soldiers. Let us compare descriptions:

   Permite una disgresi6n, te voy a pintar estas dos fuerzas militares, una
   delante de otra. Las milicias de Buenos Aires: es preciso confesar que
   nuestra gente del campo no es linda, es fuerte y robusta pero, negra. Las
   cabezas como un redondel, sucios; unos con chaqueta, otros sin ella; unos
   sombreritos chiquitos encima de un panuelo atado en la cabeza. Cada
   uno de un color, unos amarillos, otros punz6; todos rotos, en caballos
   sucios, mal cuidados; todo lo mis miserable y mis feo. Las armas sucias,
   imposible dar ahora una idea de estas tropas.Al verlas aquel dia tremendo,
   dije a una persona de mi intimidad; sino se asustan los ingleses de ver esto,





3 4 - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


no hay esperanza. Te voy a contar lo que entraba por la plaza: el regi-
miento 71 de Escoc6s, mandado por el general Pack;las mis lindas tropas
que se podian ver, el uniforme mis po6tico, botines de cintas punz6
cruzadas, una parte de la pierna desnuda, una pollerita corta, unas gorras
de una tersia de alto, toda formada de plumas negras y una cinta escocesa
que formaba el cintillo; un chal escoc6s como banda, sobre una casaquita
corta punz6. Este lindo uniforme, sobre la mis bella juventud,sobre caras
de nieve,la limpieza de estas tropas admirables, qu6 contraste tan grande!
El regimiento del Fijo, conservaba aan en Buenos Aires toda la vieja
costumbre de: coleta larga, casaca azul; todo esto ya era muy usado. El
regimiento de Dragones era mis a la moda. Pero todo, un gran contraste,
sobretodo en la frescura de los uniformes y en la limpieza de las armas.
Todo el mundo estaba aturdido mirando a los lindos enemigos y llorando
por ver que eran judios y que perdiera el Rey de Espana, esta joya de su
corona; 6sta era la frase. Nadie lloraba por si, sino por el Rey y la Religi6n.
(65-66)

[If you will allow for a digression, I will describe these two military forces,
one after the other.The military of Buenos Aires: I must confess that the
people of our countryside are not attractive, they are strong and robust,
but black. Their heads are like a circle, they are dirty; some have jackets,
others do not; some wear tiny little hats on top of a handkerchief tied
around their heads. Each of them is of a different color, some are yellow,
others bright red; all of them are broken, on dirty horses, badly cared for;
everything is completely miserable and ugly. The dirty weapons, it is
impossible now to give an idea of these troops.When I saw them on that
amazing day, I said to a close friend: if the English are not scared when
they see this, there's no hope. I will tell you what entered the square: the
regiment 71 in kilts, sent by General Pack; the most beautiful troops that
you could imagine, with the most poetic uniforms, boots with bright red
ribbons in the form of a cross, a part of their legs naked, short skirts, tall
caps, everything made from black feathers and a Scottish ribbon that
formed a hatband; a Scottish shawl as a sash, over a short little bright red
frock coat. This attractive uniform clothed the most beautiful youth, of
white faces, the cleanliness of these admirable troops, what a huge con-
trast! Even in Buenos Aires, Fijo's regiment preserved the old custom of
long pigtails and blue frock coats; all of this was already very much out of
date. Dragones' regiment was more in line with the fashions. But all of
them were a huge contrast, especially in the freshness of the uniforms and
in the cleanliness of the weapons. Everybody was stunned to see the





Mariquita Sinchez's Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres Virreynal - 35


   attractive enemy and crying to see that they were Jews and that they
   would lose the King of Spain, this jewel of a crown; this was the phrase.
   Nobody cried for themselves, but rather for the King and the Religion.]

In Sanchez's description, modernity, femininity, beauty, and grace are con-
nected to the English. The gauchos are irremediably relegated to the past by
their anachronistic physical appearance and by their attire.The English, in con-
trast, perform the future of the nation by the mere appearance of their bodies
and by the clothes they wear. Discussion of soldiers' appearances will reappear
in the narratives of other travel books I discuss in this book such as Lina Beck-
Bernard's Le rio parana and Eduarda Mansilla's Recuerdos de viaje. These writers'
obsession with dress and style is associated with the dichotomy between civi-
lization and barbarism, which is developed here. Like a fashion commentary for
a women's magazine, Sanchez's discussion of dress is detailed and enthusiastic.
Her admiration of the British troops and the "civilized" Europe they stand for
is unrestrained. Her only reservation in watching the "lindos enemigos" is that
they are Jews, infidels trying to snatch a jewel-albeit an unsophisticated one
from the king of Spain and the Catholic religion.9 The description of the
"gauchos" to whom she herself has referred as "la clase mis injuriada" [the most
abused class] in a previous chapter of her Recuerdos (32) is charged with racism.
The insistence on their darkness and dirt approaches an animalization that is
confirmed when she jokingly refers to their frightening nature.'0
   After describing the troops' attire in detail, Sinchez describes women's attire
in equal detail. While the British troops' dress is adequate, the dress of "las
elegantes de aquel tiempo" [the elegant ones of that time] is described as inad-
equate, too revealing and "insolente" [insolent].Those in charge ofjudging the
adequacy of women's dress are none other than the British soldiers:

   Que se juzgue lo que pensarian los ingleses en una naci6n que no se
   dicen medias y, para colmo, los recibian en los cuartos, con camas muy
   adornadas con colchas bordadas y sibanas con encajes, ri6ndose a car-
   cajadas y tomando por sordos y tontos a todos ellos, porque no sabian
   hablar espafol. Dios mio! cuando pienso en esto todavia me da vergienza.
   La oficialidad que vino en esa expedici6n, era muy fina, asi empezaron a
   visitar en las casas y a conocer la fuerza de la costumbre o la moda y reirse,
   unos y otros, del contraste. (69)

   [Imagine what the British would think in a nation where no one speaks
   with reserve and, to make matters worse, they were received in their
   bedrooms, with very ornate beds with embroidered bedspreads and
   laced sheets, laughing out loud and taking them for deaf and stupid





36  - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


   because they didn't know how to speak Spanish. My God! When I think
   of all of this it makes me embarrassed. The official who came on that
   expedition was very fine, so they began to visit the houses to get to know
   the strength of the custom or the style and to laugh, with one another,
   about the contrast.]

This friendly description of invasion as social visit and as an occasion for social
interaction sets the tone for the ending: Sinchez never refers to the second
British invasion, although she does mention that "[v]ino la segunda lecci6n y
fue mayor el adelanto.Ya este pueblo conoci6 lo que podia hacer y pens6 en si
mismo" (70). [the second lesson came along and the progress was greater. Now
these people knew what they had to do and thought about themselves.] Inde-
pendence from Spain is therefore implied but never mentioned. Even the rela-
tionship between invader and invaded is represented within the context of life
inside the houses, inside the bedrooms.
   As was mentioned before, Sinchez's description of the portenas positions
them in a prelapsarian state, innocent temptresses with

   [1]os brazos desnudos, en todo tiempo, y descote, una mantilla de blonda
   y un aire, que se llamaba gracioso, de cabeza levantada, que ahora se diria
   insolente y todas eran muy inocentes. (69)

   [nude arms the whole time and low cut dresses, a blond headdress and an
   air that they called charming with elevated heads, that would now be
   called insolent and all of them were very innocent.]

This description to some extent follows the paradigmatic descriptions of
women by male travelers who represent native women as unaware of their
seductive powers, too naked and too forward. Nonetheless, Sinchez, the proto-
feminist, echoes European nineteenth-century feminist concerns that women's
authority was undermined through overt sexualization of dress. According to
early feminist thinkers, women had to learn to become less visible physically
and to sublimate their sexuality in order to shed their subservient roles. Sinchez's
model of new womanhood is constructed on her own persona: a European in
America, a white woman who aspires to participation in the political life of
Argentina but who also holds on to the racist ideologies of her European
ancestors to justify her own privileged space in the New World. Sanchez's
privileging of Europeanness is clear in her admiration of the British soldiers:

   Asi, al ver a los ingleses tan bien uniformados y hacer sus maniobras como
   era regular, los admiraban y habia una gran concurrencia todos los dias, al
   punto que empezaron a conocer muchas fisonomias de los ingleses. (67)





Mariquita Sanchez's Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres Virreynal - 37


   [So, upon seeing the English so well dressed and doing their maneuvers
   as usual, they were admired and there was a great turnout every day, to the
   point that they began to recognize many physiognomies of the English.]


Writing of Self and Beyond
Sylvia Molloy has pointed out that autobiographical writers in Argentina dur-
ing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries stress their own position
within the history of the country. These writers create a link between the
nation and their families, a link that for most writers of the nineteenth century
in Argentina was strong and binding. In Recuerdos, Sinchez executes the oppo-
site gesture: she opens a gap between herself and her family and creates the
persona of a modern woman that links past and future irrespective of the family
connections between the past and the future of the homeland. As I will show
in the next few chapters, this gesture is shared by other women travel writers:
in traveling, these women envision themselves as pioneers, independent from
family connections. In writing about these trips, they create a new model of
womanhood: independent and self-reliant.This model of travel writing, I will
show, will be consistent in depictions of female travelers well into the twentieth
century.
   In her letters to her children, Sinchez critiques the Unitarians' plans to
exterminate the indigenous population and substitute it with European immi-
grants.This plan, which she opposes, will actually be carried out by her friends
once they accede to power after the battles of Caseros and Pav6n. While
Sinchez critiques this policy, she offers no alternative to the model of a white
society championed byAlberdi and Sarmiento except as a utopian reality of life
in the frontier that she mentions in her letter to her daughter, quoted at the
beginning of this chapter. The countryside that Sinchez longs for is a literary
creation, the pastoral illusion found in Romantic literature and not the messy
reality of living in a country in-the-making. In this context, it is not surprising
that Sinchez imagines drinking coffee and broth and not mate (a traditional
Argentinean drink), even if she does envision the possibility of living on a
"rancho."
   The frontier in Sanchez's Recuerdos is temporal.The time of colonial Buenos
Aires is irrecoverable.The distance between the past-colonial Buenos Aires
  and the future-the modern white nation-is lodged in her text by a
narrator who has visited the past and can look into the future. And both past
and future are possible only within urban spaces. The countryside is con-
demned to the allochronic time of the periphery and can therefore be nar-
rated only as a disappearing reality. Sanchez's trust in the future of the mod-





38 - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880

ern nation is underscored by her belief that the landscape could be controlled
and dominated. In this context, a "rancho" could become a home, the pampas
could become an enclosed garden, and the city of Buenos Aires could be-
come a bustling, elegant metropolis-a place where a well-dressed British
soldier could just blend in.


















2


Queen of the Interior: Lina Beck-Bernard's

Le Rio Parana





Long after returning to Europe, Lina Beck-Bernard used her recollections of life
in the Argentinean littoral province of Santa Fe to write a love story located in the
open space of the pampas. Her novel, L'estancia de Santa Rosa, narrates the unfor-
tunate love story between Mercedes, the daughter of the "estanciero," and Jose,
the son of an Indian servant.1 The love between Mercedes and Jose is never
consummated:Jos6 is killed during an Indian incursion and Mercedes becomes a
nun.This love story, like many other women-authored texts, offers an alternative
to the narrative of rape as the only possible relationship between white women
and Indian men on the frontier.2 In conceiving of different narrative roles for
Indian men, these women writers are also offering their women protagonists
alternative subject positions in their texts.When a white woman falls in love with
an Indian man, she undermines the patriarchal norms that use white women (and
their virtue) as units of exchange and legitimation for white families. The very
possibility of "mestizaje" challenges the patriarchal order and the model of the
emerging Argentinean nation that imagines itself as white. Using an Indian man
as a protagonist challenges his usual position as an antifigure within nineteenth-
century French literature.3
   Lina Beck-Bernard was born in Bitschwiller, a small town in Alsace, in 1824,
to a bourgeois Protestant family. Her great-grandfather, Conrad Pfeffel, had been
a major figure in Alsatian literature of the eighteenth century. During her child-
hood, Lina had the occasion to meet her great-grandfather's intellectual friends
who had gone into exile in Alsace, such as Madame de Sta81 and Camille Jordan.4
When Lina was sixteen, her family moved to Switzerland where she studied penal





4 0 - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


law. She married Swiss businessman Charles Beck-Bernard in 1852, the year
Rosas was defeated in the battle of Caseros by Justo Jose de Urquiza.
   The defeat of Rosas opened the door for the long-desired Unitarian plan to
settle northern European immigrants.The first attempts at agricultural coloniza-
tion in Argentina took place in 1823, but it was only in the late 185os after the
defeat of Rosas that successful colonization projects took place. During the period
of 1852-70, however, disputes between Buenos Aires and the rest of the country,
and the 1865-70 war against Paraguay, slowed European immigration to the colo-
nies, and it was only in the 187os that the movement gained momentum.
   Charles Beck-Bernard was an early player in agricultural colonization. Soon
after the battle of Caseros, he established a company in Basel to organize Swiss
immigration to the littoral province of Santa Fe. He first traveled to Santa Fe in
1856 and moved his whole family there in 1857.The Beck-Bernards lived in the
capital city of Santa Fe during the period 1857-62. Charles was busy organizing
"Colonia San Carlos" (named in imperial fashion after himself) and helping es-
tablish Swiss families in the rural areas of the province. He was also writing on the
economic prospects of the country and publishing articles and books on the
region in French and German. Lina, on the other hand, used the opportunity to
compose a charming travel book in which the plans of her husband and his vision
for the future ofArgentina are absent.This travel book, Le rio parana published in
Paris in 1864, addresses issues of gender by focusing on the role of women in the
new republic.
   Le rio parana: Cinq annees de sijour dans la ripublique argentine narrates the long
ocean voyage to Argentina and provides a summary of Beck-Bernard's five years
in Santa Fe. The book was translated by Jose Luis Busaniche and published in
Buenos Aires in 1935 as Cinco anos en la confederacion argentina 1857-1862.
Busaniche's title reflects two changes from the original: he uses the term "con-
federaci6n argentina" [Argentine confederation], which is more historically ac-
curate. In 1854, Buenos Aires severed all links with the provinces and established
its independence, while the provinces formed the Argentine Confederation with
its capital in Concepci6n del Uruguay under the presidency of Justo Jose de
Urquiza.With the defeat of Urquiza by Buenos Aires governor Bartolom6 Mitre
in the battle of Pav6n in 1861, the Argentine Republic finally became a political
entity and the constitution which had been drafted in 1853 after the battle of
Caseros was ratified. Busaniche also includes the exact dates of Lina Beck-
Bernard's stay in Argentina in the title.Those dates are not provided in the title of
the French edition nor anywhere else in the text.The narrative starts in medias res,
with the family in Southampton waiting to board a ship. Beck-Bernard provides
the exact date (January 9), but the year is given only as "185....." The dates given
in Busaniche's translation acquire great significance if read in the context of





Lina Beck-Bernard's Rio Parana - 41


Argentinean history: Beck-Bernard's travelogue documents the critical moment
at which the landscape of the Argentinean littoral was codified as the progressive
mecca of navigable rivers and desirable immigration. The province of Santa Fe
was the center of immigration and agricultural colonization during the period
1870-95. Its population grew 345.7 percent during this twenty-five-year period,
and by 1895, 41.9 percent of the inhabitants of the province were foreign-born
and an additional 25 percent were children of foreign-born inhabitants (Stolen
38-39).
   Le rio parana discusses immigration and colonization from the perspective of
gender. The most lively descriptions are devoted to the lush landscape of the
region, and to female figures that Beck-Bernard either meets or hears about
during her stay. Race is also discussed in connection to gender. The displace-
ment of gauchos and Indians, which was required for the establishment of the
agricultural colonies, is presented, as I will show below, in connection with the
instability of gender roles. Like other women travel writers, Beck-Bernard high-
lights the continuities between the situation of women in Europe and that of
white women in Argentina.There is also an underlying critique of the position
of less privileged women-Indians and mestizas-and of subaltern males
gauchos and Indians-who are feminized. The connection between Charles
Beck-Bernard's colonizing project and the ongoing uprooting and elimination
of Indians and gauchos is more evident if we remember that some of the lands
awarded to the colonies were still owned by Indians and that the colonists were
in charge of establishing frontier posts to keep gauchos and Indians out and to
mark the "civilized" areas.5 After his eight-year stay in Argentina finished un-
successfully, Charles Beck-Bernard returned to Europe where he held a politi-
cal post as a representative of the Argentine government in matters of immigra-
tion until his death.Whereas Charles Beck-Bernard shows himself in his own
writing to be a very active and willing participant in the creation of modern
Argentina, his wife depicts herself as an innocent observer, a visitor who reports
on Argentina as she saw it but who had no influence whatsoever in what it was
to become. In her book, Beck-Bernard narrates what she "sees," describing the
present with no reference to what the future might hold for the country if her
husband's enterprises succeed, and she never mentions the way in which she is
indirectly related to these enterprises. Lina Beck-Bernard dissociates herself
and her writing from her husband's project.
   It is understandable that for Beck-Bernard as a Romantic writer, direct ties to
the project of modernization her husband represented were, to say the least,
uncomfortable. She therefore ignores this connection, and the conditions of pro-
duction of the text are never made overt.We never hear how Beck-Bernard got
to Argentina or how long she was there. Even though the beginning of the book





42  - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


suggests that this is a narrative in medias res, the missing elements are never pro-
vided.The book itself shifts back and forth between being a collection ofpersonal
impressions on life and travel in Argentina and an analysis that aspires to ethno-
graphic validity. It takes more than seventy pages to get to Argentina since the
author gives detailed descriptions of the trip and of the places visited on the way
(Galicia in Spain, Lisbon in Portugal, Rio de Janeiro and Bahia in Brazil). Even
Buenos Aires, which is not the final destination of the traveling partyis described
in great detail. Once the travelers arrive in Santa Fe, the chronological narration
is replaced by typified descriptions of scenery and people with the titles of chap-
ters defining a particular topic (for example, "le 25 mai,""la fete de nuestra senora
du Guadeloupe").
   In the first chapter we find out that the narrator is traveling with her husband,
her children, and a "femme de chambre" described as "courageuse" and "utile."
The husband and children do not get adjectives. In fact, they are scarcely included
in the narrative at all: the husband is camouflaged in the "nous" Beck-Bernard
constantly uses, while the children are mentioned in passing in a very few in-
stances in which reference to them is needed to make a certain point.We do not
know how many children there are.We do not know their ages, genders, names.
We never find out that two ofBeck-Bernard's children died inArgentina nor how
this affected their mother. Reading this book, it is difficult not to imagine that its
sole purpose was to give Beck-Bernard free rein to express herself outside of the
constraints of her role and position within her family and society.
   Throughout the book, she exercises her observational ability in descriptions,
narratives, and anthropological, ethnographic, and historic discourses. She is well
versed in Argentinean history, and she offers extensive descriptions of Rosas, his
government, and the character of his daughter Manuelita. Beck-Bernard starts off
as a very participatory narrator: her voice is personal and even introspective, her
descriptions are flowery and rich. There is something intriguing about the fact
that she seemingly acquires a voice from traveling, from her very displacement.
What is lacking is a self-reflective element that tells us precisely how this voice
came into being and how this first person plural point of view came to be con-
stituted. By the end of the book, Beck-Bernard's voice becomes more feeble, she
quotes extensively, and her own perspective is lost. Her departure from the coun-
try is not narrated, her personal narrative is cut short, and the book finishes with
a description of Indians of the Argentinean littoral which includes full pages of
verbatim quotations from the Franciscan monk Constance Ferrero y Cavour and,
later, a biography of the monk himself.The book finishes at this point, and Beck-
Bernard's voice never reappears to bid farewell to her readers.
   The ease with which Le rio parana flows, the quality of the narrative, raises the
issue of how long Beck-Bernard had hoped for a chance to write. Beyond any





Lina Beck-Bernard's Rio Parana - 43


writing on Argentina and its scenery, the book functions as a space where Beck-
Bernard can write (about) herself. What seems crucial is the writing: beyond
anything that Beck-Bernard is writing about, she is exercising her pen. The nu-
merous descriptions that precede her stay in Argentina are exactly that: Beck-
Bernard exercising her pen and her subjectivity in a genre that does not compro-
mise her as a woman or as a mother.And in her exercise, she also includes her own
sometimes untraditional and progressive political views.
   Women writing in colonial situations rarely have agency. If they do, this
agency is often derived from a man's: that of a husband, a father, a brother. Beck-
Bernard makes no use of whatever agency she might have drawn from her hus-
band, although it may easily be argued that her very act of writing is derived from
her husband's and her great-grandfather's influence. She erases the position of
power she held in Argentinean society as Beck's wife. She puts this relevant po-
sition aside. Her portrayal of herself shows her as an outsider who can "blend in,"
an unusual position for an educated French woman writer in the provincial Santa
Fe of the mid-nineteenth century.
   Scholarship on women writing about empire has usually concentrated on the
dichotomy "collaboration versus resistance" and has tried to decide whether a
particular woman writer at a particular time was resisting or collaborating in the
colonial enterprise. Beck-Bernard's book seems to preclude this kind of analysis:
she removes herself from the site of conflict, erases her relationship to positions of
power, and creates an alter ego that is not related in any way to male endeavors
such as the creation of a colony-or to the creation of a nation. Her alter ego is
a woman without a past and with no reason to be where she is. In her text, she is
free and alone but still respectable, guarded as she is by the figure of a husband and
children included in the "nous."

Queens of the Pampas

Women are the focus of Le rio parana, and Lina Beck-Bernard's discussions of
gender are always informed by her understanding of race. Most of her characters
are female, and her depictions of the stock figures of nineteenth-century travel
writing on Argentina-gauchos and Indians-are presented in connection with
women (that is, mestizas and Indian women as mothers) or to gender (that is,
gauchos and Indians as feminized). In this context, it is not surprising that her
discussion of the figure who most captured the attention of Europeans-the
gaucho-is preceded by the presentation of a woman disguised as a gaucho:

   Je dois a la fille du general Stanislas Lopez, dona Mercedes Lopez de
   C***, quelques details assez interessants sur Manuelita, qui 6tait unes de
   ses amies d'enfance. Elles sortaient souvent a cheval ensemble, Manuelita





44  - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


   habillee en gaucho, pour obeir aux bizarres caprices de son pere. Ce serait
   peut-etre ici le moment de dire ce qu'est le gaucho et ce qu'il 6tait sous
   Rosas. Le gaucho represente dans la confederation argentine l'616ment
   retrograde. (92)

   [I owe the daughter of General Estanislao L6pez, dona Mercedes L6pez de
   C***, some very interesting details about Manuelita, who had been one of
   her childhood friends. They often rode together, Manuelita dressed as a
   gaucho to obey her father's bizarre whims.This would probably be the place
   to explain what the gaucho is and what he was for Rosas. The gaucho
   represents the retrograde element within the Argentinean Confederation.]

In most travel narratives of the period, the gaucho is introduced as a source of
danger-a menacing dot on the horizon. In Le rio parana, being a gaucho is
presented as a performance, a masquerade, not unlike the figure of the stock
gaucho of elementary-school plays I discussed in the introduction. The paradox
that Beck-Bernard writes into her presentation of Manuelita performing as a
gaucho-"obeir aux bizarres caprices de son pere" [dressed as agaucho to obey her
father's bizarre whims]-is that while Manuelita's performance of barbarian mas-
culinity was used byArgentinean Unitarian male writers to mark the fierceness of
regime which could not protect white womanhood, Beck-Bernard's also marks
the unfairness of the discourse of the Unitarians toward nonwhites. In this way,
Beck-Bernard's text comes close to deconstructing one of the basic premises of
the discourse of Romanticism within which the text is written. Following Cora
Kaplan, we must remember that modern feminism and cultural theory "emerged
as separate but linked responses to the transforming events of the French Revo-
lution" (150). According to Kaplan, "[t]he autonomy of inner life, the dynamic
psyche whose moral triumph was to be the foundation of republican govern-
ment, was considered absolutely essential as an element of progressive political
thought" (15 1).This emphasis on inner life which welcomed white middle-class
women into writing also excluded from subjectivity others in terms of race and
class.The connections between the multiple exclusions are in the background of
Beck-Bernard's text. The privileged space that white creole women held as the
vessels of the future white citizens and as creators of a European space in exile is
presented in the context of their difference from the Indians whose precarious
situation is metaphorized in their feminization.The Indians are the inhabitants of
the desert, whereas white women are the "queens of the interior":

   A peu d'exceptions pres, les femmes sont les reines de leur interieur, et
   excercent cette royaut6 d'une faeon peu constitutionnelle, ce qui faisait dire
   a un Genois marie a une creole: "On peut penser de ce pays ce que





Lina Beck-Bernard's Rio Parana - 45


   Machiavel 6crivait d'une ville republicaine de l'Italie:-'C'est le paradis des
   femmes, le purgatoire des hommes, l'enfer des betes."' (Le rio parana 132)

   [With few exceptions women are queens of their interior, and do not
   exercise this royal power in a very constitutional way. This led a Genoese
   man married to a creole woman to say, "One's opinion of this country
   could be what Machiavelli wrote about a Republican city in Italy: 'It's a
   paradise for women, a Purgatory for men, a hell for beasts."']

What Beck-Bernard is describing is a division of labor and responsibilities that
grants women a space of power, of royalty inside the home.Women therefore have
a space over which they have power within the family. In Beck-Bernard's case, this
space is a humble building in a corner of Santa Fe, but the phrase "queens of their
interior" might also extend to another "interiorit6"-the Romantic idea of feel-
ings and "vie interieur." "Interieur" takes two other meanings within the context
ofBeck-Bernard's text: the "interior" of the country as opposed to the coastal city
of Buenos Aires, and the space of Romantic subjectivity.The notion of women as
queens of their interior follows a mid-nineteenth-century ideology which looked
upon the bourgeois woman as "the angel of the hearth," the absolute ruler of the
bourgeois home and the possessor of a sensibility that made her adequate for this
role. The word "interieur" in the Argentina of the mid-18os reverberated with
images of the strife between Buenos Aires and the "interior," which violated the
sacredness of feminine spaces and brought the violence of the battlefield into the
domains of bourgeois women.
   This reference to women's paradise is, however, deconstructed by Beck-Ber-
nard herself in her chapter on the celebration of the anniversary of the May
Revolution. Beck-Bernard describes the events of the day from the ringing of
bells early in the morning to the disorganized presentation of arms by the national
guard, cockfighting, and horse races.At night there is a ball at the Cabildo. Beck-
Bernard arrives promptly at ten, the first person in the party, and observes as the
room fills up not only with invited guests but also with gate-crashers, children,
even dogs. The narrator sits next to Mercedes de L, the mother of one of the
beautiful young debutantes. While Mercedes de L talks about the party, Beck-
Bernard catches sight of what will become an aside in the narration yet is key to
our understanding of the text:

   Dona Mercedes me parlait de la fete lorsque, tout a coup, derriere son
   fauteuil et le mien,j'entends le vagissement d'un tres-petite enfant;je me
   retourne vivement et je vois une Indienne qui avait son nourrisson en-
   velopp6 dans son chile et couch6 sur son 6paule, selon la coutume des
   femmes du desert. Cette Indienne avait la teint bronze, la figure triste, la





46  - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


   bouche entr'ouverte avec une sorte de dedain, les dents d'une blancheur
   6clatante, la regard m61ancolique, les cheveux incultes tombant tout droits
   comme des crins; une couverture entortillee autour d'elle en guise de jupe,
   la tete de son petit enfant paraissant au-dessus de son 6paule, elle se tenait
   droite et fiere derriere le fauteuil de dona Mercedes, qui drapee dans une
   magnifique robe de brocart, resplendissait sous ses dentelles de perles et de
   brillants. C'6tait le luxe de la civilisation a c6t6 de la barbarie, comme Santa-
   F6 a c6t6 du Chaco. Ces deux femmes personnifiaient, d'une maniere
   saisissante, deux races que trois cents annees de luttes ont laissees ennemies
   l'une vis-a-vis de l'autre, et qui resteront irreconciliables comme les peuples
   depossedes et les peuples envahissants le seront touj ours. (Le rio parana 138)

   [Dona Mercedes was talking to me about the party, when suddenly, from
   behind her armchair and mine, I heard the cry of a very small child; turning
   around, I saw an Indian woman who had her infant wrapped up in a blan-
   ket behind her back, as is the way of the women of the desert. This Indian
   woman had tanned skin, a sad figure, the mouth half open with disdain,
   the teeth of a dazzling whiteness, a melancholic gaze, unkempt hair falling
   straight like a horse's, a blanket around her instead of a skirt, the face of her
   small child coming out from behind her shoulders. She held herself straight
   and strong behind the chair where dona Mercedes, dressed in a magnifi-
   cent dress shone in her lace embroidered with pearls. It was the luxury of
   civilization next to barbarism, like Santa Fe next to the Chaco. In a startling
   way, these two women personified two races that three hundred years of
   struggle have made into one another's enemies, and that will remain ir-
   reconcilable, as dispossessed peoples and invading peoples will always be.]

Mercedes de L and the Indian woman are observers here but they are also ob-
served by Beck-Bernard (who, after all, as a European writer, is there for the
show).These women make their way into Beck-Bernard's text as metaphors for
the most charged categories in Argentinean history: civilization and barbarism.
The Indian woman stands for the dispossessed (women and also gauchos and
Indians) who have no interior to reign over. Mercedes de L, on the other hand, has
two kingdoms: her own house and the open space of the streets and the plazas
where, as a symbol of the republic and its heroes, she can parade her royalty.The
women of Mercedes de L's social class-and probably Mercedes de L herself
were creating other territories to rule over: charities, schools, hospitals for women
and children. The Indian woman, on the other hand, was being displaced and
excluded from all forms of interiority. She appears in the text, however, described
in detail in her role as mother, and as such in a comparable female role to that of
Mercedes de L and Beck-Bernard herself. Mercedes de L has produced a daugh-





Lina Beck-Bernard's Rio Parana - 47


ter for spectacle (she is one of the main attractions of the party); the Indian child
(who has not been invited to the party) interrupts Mercedes de L's discussion of
the party, reaffirms his/her presence, and captures the attention of the European
onlooker.The Indian child interrupts, however momentarily, the narrative of the
nation and its incipient rites.
   Later on in the text, Beck-Bernard comes across "real Indians," Indians who
had not yet been incorporated into "civilization" as the woman sitting next to
Mercedes de L had. In a semi-destroyed house, Beck-Bernard sees a group of
Indians, but she cannot make out their gender. After several changes of opinion,
Beck-Bernard decides that in the group there are several men and one woman.
Deprived of an interior to rule over, this Indian woman is also deprived of her
femininity, and her gender is presented as ambiguous and unstable:

   Dans ce groupe il y a, en effet, unefemme; mais nous ne la distinguons des
   hommes qu'a son jupon, fait d'une piece d'6toffe entortillee autour d'elle;
   meme costume, meme physionomie, meme taille, meme m61ancolie superbe,
   dans les gestes, les regards, l'attitude, comme tous les peuples destines a
   mourir, et qui sentent instinctivement qu'ils assistent a l'agonie de leur race.
   (183)

   [In this group there is actually a woman, but we distinguish her from the
   men only by her skirt made from a piece of cloth wound around her
   same clothing, same physiognomy, same size, same superb melancholy, in
   their gestures, their looks, their bearing, like all peoples who are destined to
   die out, and who instinctively feel that they are witnessing the death throes
   of their race.]

In Le rio parana, gauchos and native people are always connected to or represented
by women. Beck-Bernard presents this uneasy and unstable situation of gender
definition as chronologically preceding-and maybe leading to-disappearance.
In the text, the gauchos are men and manly (even if they are introduced in
connection with Manuelita Rosas); the "criollos" have taken on some of the
characteristics of the gaucho and polished them with a European exterior. It is
only the Indians who appear in a gender limbo included within the Romantic
paradigm only as "noble savages." If we compare Lina Beck-Bernard's writings to
her husband's, the contradictions become more apparent. Her husband's book La
republiquecArgentine extols the promise Argentina holds for immigrants and inves-
tors. Lina places Argentina in an isolated space within the context of the imperi-
alist expansion of Europe. Considering the centrality of her family's role in the
attempt to create a modern Argentina, Beck-Bernard's creation of a narrative
space for the indigenous population is analogous to her creation of a narrative





48  - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


space for herself. The space she reigns over is her text; the space she assigns the
dispossessed Indians to reign over is a small portion of her text, a discursive
reservation.

Manuelita

The narrator of Le rio parana is a character in an unstable and ambiguous position.
If Beck-Bernard as writer needed a role model for Beck-Bernard-the-narrator's
ambiguous and unstable position, she found one in the country she was visiting.
Manuelita functions as an axis around which Beck-Bernard structures her narra-
tion of Argentinean history and also her anthropological construction of the
country. Manuelita is presented as a member of "civilization" living in-and
reigning over-the stronghold of barbarism, and as such she is a European insider
in the history ofBuenos Aires and of the country. Beck-Bernard uses her as a tour
guide of sorts, the European character through whose eyes we as readers try to
make sense of recent Argentinean history.This is our introduction into the coun-
try and the unifying theme behind the Beck-Bernards'visit to Buenos Aires: once
the Beck-Bernards get to Santa Fe, Beck-Bernard is on her own, and she shifts
from a narrative style to a descriptive one. In Santa Fe, the space for her husband's
colonizing schemes, Beck-Bernard produces static vignettes of a kind of life that
was drastically altered once the northern European colonists arrived and the
specific character and culture of the region was changed forever.
   The portrait of Beck-Bernard in the Spanish version of her text bears a strik-
ing resemblance to the best-known portraits of Manuelita. For most Argen-
tineans, Manuelita is the Manuelita portrayed by Pridiliano Pueyrred6n: a young
dark-haired woman dressed in red standing next to a desk, her hand resting on a
piece of paper (a letter? a book?). Lina Beck-Bernard's portrait shows a similar
dark-haired dark-eyed woman, her head similarly slanted to the left, her eyes
looking straight ahead. In Beck-Bernard's case, the red federal attire is replaced by
a white Romantic dress associated more with the melancholia she writes about
than the resoluteness with which she writes and through which she most cer-
tainly braved the hardships of life in exile including the deaths of two of her
children. Manuelita's portrait was made in the house she reigned over after the
death of her mother (the ambiance in her portrait also reminds me of one of the
most famous paintings of the time, Boudoir Federal). If the space of nineteenth-
century middle-class women is the home, what better way to introduce a woman
than in the context of the house she inhabits or once inhabited? Beck-Bernard
first mentions Manuelita as an integral part of her own visit to Palermo. Beck-
Bernard describes Palermo as the ghastly home of the dictator which is now in a
state of decay since no one dares get too close to the site of so much recent





Lina Beck-Bernard's Rio Parana - 49


suffering, but the house is "le souvenir d'une femme, de la bonne et gracieuse
Manuelita, la fille de Rosas, [qui] adoucit, comme une ombre charmante, les
lgendes sinistres de Palermo" (83) [the memory of a woman, of the good and
kindly Manuelita, the daughter of Rosas, who like a charming shadow, mitigates
the sinister legends of Palermo]. Manuelita is presented as an innocent instrument
of her father; she is the angel who made tyranny and dictatorship more endurable.
Manuelita's moral survival in spite of her father's wrongdoings resonates with
Josefina Ludmer's "tricks of the weak," which I discuss in the Introduction. Beck-
Bernard's Manuelita shares with Beck-Bernard loyalty to a man who is erected as
the authority but whose authority is minimized not by open rebellion but by
small insubordinations that do not completely wear away at male authority but
somehow erode it. Beck-Bernard shows Manuelita using her privileged space to
affect the outcome of events (we see her intervening in favor of prisoners, per-
suading her father to grant a widow the right to give Christian burial to her
husband). In her book, Beck-Bernard seems to be doing something similar to
what she portrays Manuelita as doing: creating a space to reign over (in Beck-
Bernard's case, her book). In this, like her Manuelita, she is not a passive observer
but an agent, an underminer of patriarchal authority.
   This subtle undermining is also present in Beck-Bernard's description of the
gaucho. Beck-Bernard's first statement about the gaucho echoes those of the
architects of national consolidation: "Le gaucho represente dans la confederation
argentine l'616ment retrograde" (92) [In the Argentinean Confederation, the gau-
cho represents the reactionary element]. But her development of the description
moves away from this kind of representation:

   Sa physionomie sauvage, m61ancolique, est bronzee par le soleil et le vent
   des immenses pampas oi il dompte ses chevaux et se laisse emporter par
   eux rapide comme la foudre, volant sur la pointe des herbes, devorant
   l'espace, ne faisant qu'un avec l'animal fougueux sur lequel il saute d'un
   bond, une vraie incarnation moderne du centaure de la fable grecque. (93)

   [His savage, melancholy facial features are tanned by the sun and the wind
   of the wide pampas where he breaks his horses and lets them carry him
   away fast as lightning, flying on the tips of the grasses, devouring the spaces,
   being one with the spirited animal onto which he leaps with a bound, a
   true modern incarnation of the centaur of Greek mythology.]

This romantic description of the gaucho deviates from the stock description of
the noble savage. For one thing, the gaucho is likened to a Greek centaur; his
space is classical Greece-birthplace of Western of culture-instead of the stock
barbarian sites such as Palestine. His sexuality, which is stressed in the image of the





5 0 - Part i. Frontier Identities, 1837-1880


centaur, is toned down later in the description where he is defined as a"caballero"
in the absolutely unambiguous sentence "il est caballero."
   To appreciate the oxymoronic quality of this last sentence, I would like to
contextualize my reading of the attitudes Beck-Bernard takes toward both Indi-
ans and gauchos. First of all, we must understand that for both European and
creole writers of the time, the figure of the gaucho represents a composite of
indigenous and white characteristics. The gaucho, universally defined as male, is
the amalgamation of the qualities that created him as a type. In the paragraph
quoted above, Beck-Bernard starts off with a list of the Indian-like characteristics
of the gaucho-his savagery and his melancholy-and ends up with his most
positive (white) characteristic-his resemblance to an element in a Greek (cul-
tured, civilized) fable. In so doing, Beck-Bernard creates a glorious ancestry for
the gaucho, but in displacing him to such a distant past she also exiles him from
the modern Argentina her husband and his associates were creating.
   In Le rio parana, it is possible to masquerade as someone else. Manuelita Rosas
disguises herself as a gaucho but keeps her earrings as gender markers; Lina Beck-
Bernard blends in in Santa Fe and can watch others without being watched. In
the performance of nation, as in performances of gender, dress is paramount. A
few months before the Beck-Bernards left Argentina, Urquiza was defeated by
Mitre in the battle of Pav6n.The unified nation was now ready to dramatize the
dream of whiteness and homogeneity which the agricultural colonies of Santa Fe
promised. In Le rioparana, this performance takes place in the context of a military
parade. The soldiers from the provinces, Lina Beck-Bernard complains, "ont en-
core un aspect bizarre" (259) [still have a bizarre appearance].Again, as in Mari-
quita Sanchez's description of British invasions, white Argentineans are charmed
by European soldiers who know how to wear their uniforms.The European male
soldier is presented as the model of desirability:

   Mais les soldats des provinces ont encore un aspect bizarre, peu fait pour
   plaire aux Europeens. En voici un exemple: Un jeune sous-officier des
   chasseurs deVicennes en semestre chez ses parent habitant la confederation
   argentine fut present6 au general ***, gouverneur de l'une des provinces.
   Le jeune sous-officier portait son uniforme avec la parfaite et gracieuse
   tenue qui caracterise nos soldats francais. Le vieux general en fut charm6.
   "Restez avec moi, dit-il au jeune homme,je vous offre le grade de lieuten-
   ant-colonel dans mon 6tat-major, avec 150 piastres de paye par mois." Le
   chasseur de Vincennes repondit sans hesiter et avec une franchise toute
   militaire: "Merci, mon general, j'apprecie votre offre; mais vous me per-
   mettrez de la refuser.J'aime mieux etre sergent dans mon pays que lieuten-
   ant-colonel de le v6tre." (259)





Lina Beck-Bernard's Rio Parana  - 51


   [But the soldiers from the provinces still have a bizarre appearance that is
   unpleasing to Europeans. Here is an example of this: a young noncommis-
   sioned officer from the Vincennes regiment was on leave and staying with
   his parents who lived in the Argentinean Confederation; he was introduced
   to General ***, governor of one of the confederation's provinces. The
   young officer wore his uniform with the perfect and gracious posture
   which is characteristic of our French soldiers.The old general was charmed
   by it. "Stay with me," he said to the young man, "I offer you the rank of
   lieutenant-colonel in my staff, with 150 piastres per month in wages." The
   Vincennes infantryman answered without hesitating and with a thor-
   oughly military straightforwardness, "Thanks you, General, I appreciate
   your offer, but permit me to refuse it. I prefer to be a sergeant in my own
   country than a lieutenant colonel in yours."]

The promise of a white Argentina which Charles Beck-Bernard championed and
his wife, Lina, supported with mild enthusiasm is metaphorized in the inclusion
(yet unfulfilled) of the desirable young Frenchman in the army-and the citizen-
ship  of the nation.A promise mildly realized by the beginning of the twentieth
century with a huge cost to all of those who could not successfully perform
Europeanness.











2

Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900




















3


Eduarda Mansilla de Garcia's

Recuerdos de Viaje: "Recordar es Vivir"1





   ... tenemos que mendigar al extranjero para tener mis poblaci6n, y sin
   embargo, por otro lado, exterminamos a los de nuestra propia tierra.... Si
   el territorio que han ocupado ... siempre lo hemos considerado, en
   nuestras cuestiones diplomiticas, como parte integrante del territorio de la
   Naci6n, todos los alli nacidos ... son ciudadanos argentinos por ese hecho.
   Pero si se dice que el indio es extranjero, quiere decir que no ha nacido en
   territorio argentino, luego ese territorio no debe pertenecernos.

   [ ... we have to beg foreign nations in order to increase our population,
   but on the other hand, we exterminate those of our own land.... If the
   land that they have occupied ... has always been considered by us, in
   matters of diplomacy, as an integral part of the national territory, then all
   those who were born there ... are Argentinean citizens for that very reason.
   But if it is said that the Indian is a foreigner, it means that he was not born
   on Argentinean territory, and thus that land should not belong to us.]

   Quoted by Barba, et al. 235-3 6

In one of the congressional debates that followed Argentina's expansion into
Patagonia, commonly known as the Campaign to the Desert, the future of the
inhabitants of the region had to be decided.The fact that one of the possibilities
which was seriously considered was declaring them foreigners says much about
the instability of the concept of nation and nationality in Argentina toward the
end of the nineteenth century. The same elite that was developing ways to





56  - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900


interpellate the white immigrants into allegiance to the nation was devising
ways to disenfranchise the indigenous population. And superimposed on the
white (male) citizenry and the indigenous "subhuman" population, the elites
were articulating a discourse that likened the nation to the domestic order of
landowning families: new immigrants could live, work, and prosper with the
nation; only the selected families would rule.With the expansion to the south
and the complete occupation of what Domingo Faustino Sarmiento had en-
visaged as the national territory, the dilemma of how to define and circum-
scribe the "nationals" became more problematic and more urgent.The Indians
had been massacred and displaced, and the elites were to take their place as the
owners of the land in both the literal and the metaphoric sense: through pos-
session of the land, they had gained access to the creation of the land/nation.2
   According to David Vinas, the accession of Julio Argentina Roca to the
presidency marks the transformation of the Romantic nation imagined by
Sarmiento and Juan Bautista Alberdi into a liberal state. This state inherits the
models of colonization and land distribution that were so dear to Sarmiento
and Alberdi. The 18 8os is therefore the "classical moment of the Argentinean
liberal 6lite" (Indios, Ejdrcitos 21) who will impose a paradigm of written legality
which will organize work and land ownership. Indians will be excluded from
this legality and so will gauchos inasmuch as they do not accept this new
paradigm.
   The debates surrounding the future of the Indians displaced from Patagonia
and the creation of a modern nation with a modern capital city in Buenos Aires
inform my discussion of Eduarda Mansilla's Recuerdos de viaje. Recuerdos was
published twenty years after Mansilla's trip to the United States, but its subject
matter is appropriate for Argentina of the 188os. On the one hand, it delves into
matters of race and nationality and specifically addresses the displacement of
the U.S. native populations, while on the other hand it celebrates the advan-
tages of life in a modern lay society such as the one the Argentinean positivists
were striving to create.

When You Are Rosas's Niece ...
In 185 5, three years after Juan Manuel de Rosas was defeated in Caseros, his
seventeen-year-old niece Eduarda Mansilla, who had once served as his trans-
lator, was the protagonist of a controversial love story described by the indefati-
gable Montevideo papers as an autochthonous version of Romeo and Juliet.
Eduarda Mansilla-daughter of military hero General Lucio Mansilla and
Rosas's sister Agustina-married Manuel Garcia, the son of a staunch Rosas
opponent and a diplomat for Justo Jos6 de Urquiza's government. This mar-
riage realizes what Doris Sommer considers the necessary literary trope that





Eduarda Mansilla de Garcia's Recuerdos de Viaje - 57


throws "eros" and "polis" together (30-51). If we follow Sommer's argument,
"national" novels in Latin America use love stories as metaphors of the need for
national unification that would bring the principal elements of society to-
gether, like a family, united in love for the purposes of procreation.While the
definition of nation was being actively and heatedly discussed in Argentina, this
historical marriage brought together two families on opposing sides of the
political sphere of the country and in their children the evidence of fruitful
alliances.'
   The trip to the United States narrated by Mansilla in her Recuerdos de viaje
took place five years after her marriage to Garcia. He and Mansilla had spent
those five years in Paris, where Garcia had a position in the Argentine embassy
and where she was an active socialite. Mansilla, Garcia, and their family traveled
to the United States for the first time in 186o on a diplomatic mission, and this
is the trip which Mansilla narrates in her Recuerdos de viaje. With Recuerdos,
Eduarda Mansilla de Garcia inaugurates travel writing forArgentinean women.
By the time her book was written and published, travel writing as a genre had
a longstanding tradition in the country as a genre produced by males for whom
the trip to Europe (and to a lesser extent to the United States) had an almost
ritualistic meaning.4 The trip to Europe had started off as a political tradition,
first as the necessary exile from Rosas, then as the initiatory gesture of the elite
men preparing for government abroad. In Eduarda Mansilla's case, the travel-
ogue took on a different meaning: she was never in exile, and she would never
govern. Her book, therefore, addresses areas only suggested in male travel-
ogues: home, children, servants. Her book also bears witness to the fact that the
pacification of the country allowed bourgeois women to enjoy the advantages
of genteel life instead of forcing them into exile. The phrase en touriste, which
both Eduarda and her brother LucioV. Mansilla use repeatedly in their writ-
ings, is symptomatic of the new spirit of this period. Mansilla's language in
Recuerdos is saturated with English words that remind the reader that above all
this is a travel guide. These words-"confort" [sic], "home," "laundry," "waiter"
-always appear in italics and are seldom translated into Spanish. This lan-
guage of tourism and leisure is adequate for the image the protagonist of
Recuerdos creates of herself: a modern woman, at ease in ships, buses, and hotels.
Mansilla's Recuerdos more than any other of her works anticipates Maria Rosa
Oliver's andVictoria Ocampo's writings on leisure travel abroad.5 Travel and
tourism became another subject for women of the upper class to explore in
novels, memoirs, short stories, and journalistic essays. By the beginning of the
twentieth century, most women writers of the upper class devoted large parts
of their works to vacations, vacation spots, travels abroad, and the reiterated
retirement to the "estancia."6





58  - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900


   Recuerdos de viaje narrates Mansilla's stay in the United States during the Civil
War while her husband was commissioned to study the justice system in the
Argentine embassy in Washington, D.C. In both his diplomatic missions to the
United States, Garcia worked under the supervision of Sarmiento, whose Viajes
also includes a narrative of his trip to the United States. Recuerdos starts with
Mansilla on her way to NewYork with her husband and children and finishes
with her leaving NewYork to return to Europe for a new diplomatic assign-
ment. Her stay in the United States lasts four years, but Mansilla never mentions
specific dates, and even though she lived in Washington for a few years she does
not delve into the mundane details of daily life in the city. Mansilla describes
NewYork,Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Niagara Falls and parts of south-
east Canada, Staten Island, and Boston, and she mentions other cities such as
Baltimore in passing. In her description of Washington, she does include vi-
gnettes of Washington nightlife: the social life among diplomats and U.S.
politicians. Recuerdos de viaje is written as a guide for Argentineans traveling to
the United States. There are practical references to what kind of lodging and
restaurants to choose and which sights to visit.Throughout the book, Mansilla
also includes her own reflections on modernization and on race and gender
relations. Two readers are directly mentioned in the book: Barbosa, a physi-
cian who in Mansilla's words "me ha impulsado a escribir mis Recuerdos de
viaje" [has propelled me to write my Travel Memories], and Santiago Arcos.
Arcos, an author of books on the indigenous populations of South America, is
also LucioV. Mansilla's interlocutor in Una excursion a los indios ranqueles. Arcos
is described by both Mansillas as an enlightened man of the future, a compen-
dium of the good elements of liberalism. For Eduarda Mansilla, he is also a
father figure who puts aesthetic values in the context of philosophical and
ethical ones.The wider readership that Mansilla expected for her travelogue is
the Argentinean elite whom Mansilla never directly addresses but whom she
includes in her adjective "nuestro/a," which she uses throughout her text. In
Recuerdos more than in any other of her works, it is possible to infer what being
Argentinean meant for Mansilla.The identity in flux which I mentioned at the
beginning of this section is articulated throughout Mansilla's works. She is
probably the first Argentinean woman writer for whom a definition of identity
as an Argentinean rather than as a "unitaria,""federal," or the by-then anachro-
nistic "americana" is essential. In seeing herself as an Argentinean, she could
renounce the conflictive past which for her was also the history of her own
family.7 The adjective "argentino/a" is never used; the possessive adjective
"nuestro" is used in its place, and Argentina is never mentioned except as "la
patria ausente" (193) [the absent native land] or ironically as "una Republica de
nada" (93) [a republic of nothing].





Eduarda Mansilla de Garcia's Recuerdos de Viaje - 59


   The preoccupation with "lo nuestro" appears in most of Mansilla's works as
well as in those of her male cohorts. It is explicitly articulated in Mansilla's
introduction to a collection of children's stories she published in Buenos Aires
the same year she published Recuerdos:

   La acogida benevola que obtuvo Chinbr6, publicado en folletin, acentu6
   en mi la idea que desde Europa me atormentaba tiempo ha, cuando mis
   hijitos que adoran 5Andersen, devoraban ividos las obras de la Condesa de
   Segur, tan popular en Francia. Casi con envidia veia el entusiasmo con que
   esas inteligencias, esos corazones que eran mios, asimilaban sentimientos 6
   ideas que yo no les sugeria;y mis de una vez trat6 de cautivar 5 mi turno con
   mis narraciones, al grupo infantil. (Cuentos vii)

   [The kind reception that Chinbr6 received, published as a newspaper serial,
   impressed upon me the idea that had been tormenting me since Europe,
   when my children, who love Andersen, avidly devoured the works of the
   Countess de Segur, so popular in France.Almost with envy, I would see the
   enthusiasm with which those sharp minds, my very own dears, assimilated
   feelings and ideas that were not my own; and more than once I had tried to
   captivate the children with my own narrations.]

Mansilla's children's stories in the collection include mostly cosmopolitan
themes with a few incursions to American themes such as references to the
May Revolution and to American plants and animals. To infer what Mansilla
considers factors that define "nuestro" from the disparate elements of the sto-
ries would be very hard indeed. In her Recuerdos, the elements that circumscribe
"lo nuestro" appear in a somewhat clearer way: "lo nuestro," which is what
Mansilla as travel writer and her readers share, includes two languages (Spanish
and French), a religion (Catholicism), and a way of life which mirrors the life
of the upper class in France.
   In her "Preliminares" (Preliminaries) to Recuerdos, Mansilla makes her alle-
giances clear when, after an extended discussion on the differences between
British and French ships, she says:

   Y aqui, para no ser ingrata ni olvidadiza con una naci6n que tanto quiero,
   dire, que personalmente, yo prefiero hasta naufragar con los Franceses. (12)

   [And here, so as not to be ungrateful to nor forgetful with a nation that I
   love so much, I will say, that personally, I would even prefer to be ship-
   wrecked with the French.]

France, the French, and Paris are the standards against which everything is
measured. France and French as a language are not presented as foreign for the





6o  - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900


narrator and her readers. "Anglo-Saxon" is presented in opposition to "lo
nuestro," whereas French is highlighted as the most desirable element of "lo
nuestro." French is learned without effort, as a mother tongue; English, on the
other hand, has to be learned, requires effort, and never comes naturally to the
narrator. For Mansilla, Argentina is closer to France than to the United States,
but the United States and Argentina share the characteristic of being "Ameri-
can."8 The American elements in the culture are introduced in the context of
their newness or youth in comparison to the centuries-old culture of the
European capitals (she mentions Madrid, London,Vienna, and, of course, Paris).
"Americanness" is also depicted as an exotic element, a spectacle:

   El cosmopolitismo h5lase mis acentuado en Nueva York; pero la raza
   sajona descuella alli sobre las demis 6 imprime a la metr6poli norte amer-
   icana, todo el caricter de una ciudad inglesa. Si se exceptuan los "tobac-
   conish," con sus colosales cigarros de madera chocolate 6 sus indias de lo
   mismo, adornadas con el clisico tocado y la cintura de plumas rojas y azules
   que tienen un sello puramente americano. (23)

   [Cosmopolitanism is found more pronounced in NewYork; but the Saxon
   race stands out among the rest and imprints all the features of an English
   city on the North American metropolis. If one is to leave out the "tobac-
   conish," with their colossal chocolate-brown wooden cigars or their simi-
   larly constructed Indian women, decorated with the classic headdress and
   the red and blue feathered waistbands that have a purely American hall-
   mark.]

The reference to Indians, as in the above passage, and the reference to feathers,
in particular, appear repeatedly throughout the book. Mansilla shows herself
empathetic with the plight of the U.S. Indians:

   Dolorosa es la historia, que llamar6 privada, de los Estados Unidos, en
   contacto con esas tribus salvajes, que poblaban los territorios de Nevada,
   Colorado, etc. Asi que elYankee tuvo una existencia politica asegurada, no
   se content6 ya con comprar, como en otro tiempo tierras a los indigenas,
   decidi6 destruir la raza por todos los medios a su alcance. Muerte, traici6n
   y rapina, han sido las armas con las cuales los han combatido; promesas y
   enganos, h6 ahi su politica con los hijos del desierto. (53-54)

   [Painful is the story, which I shall call private, of the United States' contact
   with those savage tribes that populated the territories of Nevada, Colorado,
   etc. In this way the Yankee had an assured political existence. He did not
   content himself with simply buying the land from the indigenous people,





Eduarda Mansilla de Garcia's Recuerdos de Viaje - 61


   as he had in other times. He decided to destroy the race through any means
   at his disposal. Death, treason, and robbery have been the weapons with
   which they have fought them. Promises and deceit, such is the politics
   against the children of the desert.]

Mansilla's denunciation of the Indian genocide is situated in the context of the
white legend of the colonization of the Americas. For her, the root of the
mistreatment of the Indians by the U.S. government has to be looked for in the
racial background of the inhabitants of the United States, since, for her, this
cruelty shows "una similitud notable, que encuentro entre el Saj6n de Europa
y el trasplantado al Nuevo Mundo" (53) [a notable similarity that I find be-
tween the European Saxon and the New World transplant]. She even quotes
the London Times to further support this theory. Her impassioned defense of the
Indians whom she calls "children of the desert," a phrase commonly used in
connection with Argentinean Indians, ends in solidarity and admiration for the
"duenos de la tierra" (55) [owners of the land]. I believe her condemnation of
genocide is focused on the U.S. situation, but the United States functions as a
reflection ofArgentinean political and social concerns.We must remember that
18 8o marks the accession to the Argentine presidency ofJulio Argentino Roca,
the general in charge of the annihilation of the Argentine native populations of
Patagonia, and Mansilla's use of the term "children of the desert" had un-
equivocal connotations for Argentinean readers of the time.
   Although sympathetic to the plight of the Native Americans, Mansilla is
completely myopic to the suffering of blacks. She admits to having supported
the South in the American Civil War, and she defines the South as "simpitico"
and elegant and bemoans the fact that the genteel life of the South had neces-
sarily to end with the abolition of slavery. Support of slavery is justified in the
context of elegance and good manners:

   En el comienzo de la guerra, la alta sociedad filadelfiana, era casi toda sudista;
   y aquellos que no tenian en realidad opini6n decidida, no perdian ocasi6n,
   sin embargo, de decir a los extranjeros: Oh! Solo en el Sud existe la verdadera
   elegancia. Parecia este dicho ser como un exponente de buen gusto, de
   refinamiento, y quizi lo era: es decir que la moda consistia entonces, para los
   elegantes, en ser sudistas, 6 si se quiere, que los sudistas, habiendo hasta
   entonces, empunado el cetro de la elegancia, no lo habian cedido ann, a esas
   nuevas capas sociales, que surgieron mis tarde con su ruina. (108)

   [At the beginning of the war, Philadelphia's high society was almost com-
   pletely pro-South; and those who did not really have a fixed opinion did
   not lose any opportunity to tell foreigners: Oh! Only in the South can you find





6z  - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900


   true elegance. This saying seemed to be like an expression of good taste, of
   refinement, and perhaps it was. That is to say that for the elegant, fashion
   then consisted of being Southern. Or, if you wish, that the Southerners,
   having wielded until then the scepter of elegance, had not yet given it up
   to those new social strata that later arose from the South's deterioration.]

Throughout the book, Mansilla trivializes slavery, using adjectives such as "sim-
patico" [charming], "elegante" [elegant], "refinado" [refined], and "monopo-
lizador de la cultura" [monopolizer of culture] to refer to the order of the
South. Slavery is presented in the context of genteel life for women of the
middle classes, and even though Mansilla praises republicanism as an egalitarian
system, she is nostalgic for the advantages older monarchic societies offer the
affluent:

   El oficio de sirviente, es mis complicado de lo que en las Americas se cree,
   y tanto nosotros como losYankees estamos servidos por aficionados. (123)

   [The job of servant is more complex than what is believed in the Americas.
   We, as much as theYankees, are being served by amateurs.]

In her use of"nosotros," the first person plural, Mansilla includes members of
her own social class who in Argentina also stand for the old order. In her short
fiction set in Argentina, Mansilla contrasts the faithful service of blacks and
mestizos with the unreliability of the new immigrant Italian and Spanish ser-
vants. For Mansilla, manual labor is undignified for women of her social class
whom she includes among the "nosotros." Thus her dramatization of the
downfall of slavery shows the debacle of upper-class women:

   Cay6 vencido, aniquilado ese Sud tan simpatico a pesar de sus errores; y sus
   mujeres mis hermosas, mis educadas, mis opulentas, tuvieron que vivir del
   trabajo de sus manos. Algunas damas de la mejor sociedad, de Nueva
   Orleans, se vieron reducidas a ser hasta cocineras. ;Expiaci6n horrenda!
   ;Lecci6n cruel, que lleg6 a enterner a esos mismos esclavos, libertados por
   las llamas y el hierro del vencedor! (196)

   [Conquered and annihilated, that kind South fell, despite its errors. Its most
   beautiful, educated, and opulent women had to live off the labor of their
   own hands. Some ladies of the best society, from New Orleans, even saw
   themselves reduced to cooks. Horrendous atonement! A cruel lesson that
   came to move those same slaves, freed by the flames and iron of the victor.]

In this passage, the next to final paragraph of Recuerdos, Mansilla performs a
move that brings together her preoccupations with race and gender. Social





Eduarda Mansilla de Garcia's Recuerdos de Viaje - 63


reform is depicted as threatening the social position of middle-class women.We
must remember that between her trip to the United States in the 186os and the
writing of this travelogue in the 187os, the Paris Commune and the installation
of the Third Republic had taken place in France.9 Mansilla's insistence on the
advantages of monarchy has to be read in this historical context. Mansilla is
evidently a believer in a strict social hierarchy that supersedes national and
religious identities. Her discussions of Catholicism in the United States, there-
fore, are not very substantial and are immersed in the context of another discus-
sion of servants:

   Quizi, con ese espiritu practico, eminentemente utilitario de los Amer-
   icanos, la dama protestante se hacia este raciocinio, en extremo correcto:
   Siendo cat6lica, mi sirvienta no tendri inconveniente en servirme el Do-
   mingo, y de esa suerte podr6 utilizarla como los demis dias de la semana.
   (132-33)

   [Perhaps with that practical, eminently utilitarian mind of Americans, the
   Protestant lady would, quite rightly, reason thus: Being a Catholic, my ser-
   vant will not mind serving me on Sundays, and with this good fortune I
   will be able to use her like the other days of the week.]

Unlike later travel writers such as Delfina Bunge for whom religion is an
important issue (and who would most probably be horrified by the above
passage), Mansilla does not believe that Catholicism deserves major attention.
When she describes Protestant churches, she is critical more on aesthetic than
on moral terms. She admires the religious tolerance (even including tolerance
ofJudaism) that is de rigueur among the generation of 188o but which will be
fiercely criticized by the Argentine Catholic nationalists at the beginning of the
twentieth century.
   Mansilla's concerns about race, slavery, and servitude are present in most of
her works. Livery as a mark of social class and indenture is often given preemi-
nence in her European stories where the servants are absolutely identified with
the masters and faithful to them.'0 In Recuerdos, Mansilla includes a telling an-
ecdote:

   No puedo prescindir de recordar aqui la respuesta que me dio algunos anos
   despues, unVirginiano, cochero, a quien exigia se pusiera la librea con los
   colores de la Republica Argentina:"Senora," me dijo,"yo s6 bien que eso no
   deshonra a nadie; pero soy tan joven ... y quien sabe si llego algin dia a ser
   Presidente ... pueden reprochirmelo." "Tiene Ud., raz6n,John," le contest6;
   y tome un negro. (125)





64  - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900


   [I cannot go without remembering here the answer given to me a few years
   later by a Virginian driver, when I requested that his livery be decorated
   with the colors of the Argentine republic: "Ma'am," he told me, "I know
   well that this does not dishonor anyone; but I am so young . . . and who
   knows if one day I manage to be president ... they could turn it against me."
   "You are right,John," I answered him; and I hired a black man.]

Mansilla's presentation of herself here is similar to her description of Parisian
ladies in her European short stories.Throughout Recuerdos, Mansilla complains
about the quality of service and servants in the United States, where what she
calls the "democratic spirit" interferes by instilling ideas of equality in subal-
terns. In the above passage, we are privy to her perceptions of blacks as outside
this realm of equality. Her inclusion of this anecdote in her travelogue attests to
Mansilla's complete unawareness of her own racism.
   Mansilla's belief in a hierarchical social system is further manifested in her
discussion of white North American women's place in society:"

   La mujer en la Uni6n Americana, es soberana absoluta; el hombre vive,
   trabaja y se eleva por ella y para ella. Es ahi que debe buscarse y estudiarse
   la influencia femenina y no en suenos de emancipaci6n politica. aQu6
   ganarian las Americanas con emanciparse? Mis bien perderian, y bien lo
   saben. (114)

   [The woman of the American Union is an absolute sovereign; the man
   lives, works and is exalted by her and for her. It is there that one must find
   and study the feminine influence and not in dreams of political emancipa-
   tion. What would American women gain by emancipation? They would
   lose, and they know it.]

This image of the sovereignty of women is very telling and is shared by other
travel writers such as Lina Beck-Bernard. Paradoxically enough, Beck-Bernard
uses it to describe Argentinean women for a French-reading public, and
Mansilla uses it to describe North American women to her Argentine readers.
However, Beck-Bernard describes Argentine women's power inside the home,
whereas Mansilla extends women's power to the public space: "[1]as mujeres
influyen en la cosa piblica por medios que llamar6 psicol6gicos e indirectos"
(114) [women have influence in the public sphere by means that I shall call
psychological and indirect]. Mansilla endorses indirect participation by women
in public life but condemns emancipation. However, she uses the word "eman-
cipaci6n" in a positive context a few paragraphs later:

   Reporters femeninos, son los que describen con amor el color de los trajes





Eduarda Mansilla de Garcia's Recuerdos de Viaje - 65


   de las damas, su corte, sus bellezas, sus misterios, sus defectos; y a fe que lo
   hacen concienzuda y cientificamente. Los Yankees desdenan, y con raz6n
   ese reportismo que tiene por tema encajes y sedas; hallan sin duda la tarea
   poco varonil. Es una listima que en los demis paises no suceda otro tanto.
   En ello ademis,las mujeres tienen un medio honrado intelectual para ganar
   su vida: y se emancipan asi de la cruel servidumbre de la aguja, servidumbre
   terrible desde la invenci6n de las miquinas de coser. (115)

   [Women reporters are those who describe with love the color of ladies'
   suits, their tailoring, their beauty, their mystery, their defects; and you can be
   assured they do it conscientiously and scientifically. Rightly so, theYankees
   disdain that type of reporting that concerns itself with lace and silk; without
   a doubt, they consider the task not manly enough. It is a shame that in other
   countries this does not occur more frequently.There, women have an hon-
   ored intellectual milieu in which to earn a living: and they emancipate
   themselves from the cruel servitude of the needle; a terrible servitude from
   the invention of the sewing machine.]

For Mansilla, emancipation for middle-class women translates into intellectual
work circumscribed by "feminine concerns," especially journalism. "Ser-
vidumbre" is a negative word in the passage above, yet throughout most of her
book it has a positive connotation for those who are served, who use servants
to make their lives easier and more pleasant.Any emancipation which includes
political reform, be it for women or for blacks, is suspect for Mansilla. Birth
control and abortion are presented in her travelogue as aberrations, and it is not
surprising that Mansilla prudishly refuses to even deal with those subjects and
refers her readers to a book by an obstetrician in case they are interested in the
subject:

   Como a mi me repugna por demis, tratar esta cuesti6n, de una importancia
   vital, empero, para todas las sociedades, recomiendo al lector, que guste de
   profundizarla, las obras del Dr. T. Gaillard Thomas, c61ebre Profesor de
   Nueva York, especialista de obstetricia, sumamente interiorizado en las
   costumbres de la sociedadYankee.Yo prefiero pasearme tranquilamente por
   la Quinta Avenida, esa esplendida calle de mansiones de mirmol blanco,
   que parece pertenecer a ciudades de las Mil y una noche. (138)

   [Since I abhor dealing with that question of vital importance for all socie-
   ties, I recommend, for the reader who is interested in examining the matter
   further, the works of Dr.T. GaillardThomas, celebrated NewYork professor
   of obstetrics, who is extremely well versed in the customs of Yankee soci-
   ety. I, on the other hand, prefer to stroll quietly down Fifth Avenue, that





66 - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900

   splendid street of white marbled mansions that appears to belong to the
   cities ofThousand and One Nights.]

Maybe this last statement most aptly expresses Mansilla's ideology in Recuerdos.
Her escape from the problems that she herself considers "de una importancia
vital" [of vital importance] to a fantasy land of luxury defined by the whiteness
and the coldness of marble is symptomatic of her attitude as a travel writer.
Mansilla's travelogue is seductive because of its readability, its casual and light
tone, its light-heartedness. Underneath its superficial charm, there is, how-
ever, a complex structure that draws its input from the most reactionary dis-
courses available at the time, which naturalize power, discrimination, racism,
and xenophobia. That this combination of charm and acute intolerance of
difference is present in many, if not most, travel books still being produced today
must serve as a cautionary note for all of us.





Lady


4


Interlude in the Frontier:

Lady Florence Dixie's Across Patagonia




Throughout the nineteenth century, Argentinean writers drew on European
travelers to create their own versions of what Argentina was and what it should
become.The British gaze, rewritten in Spanish by creole writers, worked as an
unreliable but relied-upon mirror ofArgentine reality and as a crucial element
in the creation of a national project for the literate elites. By the time of the
Campaign to the Desert in 1879-8o,Argentina had been "put on the maps," as
it were, by numerous accounts in European and American magazines, travel
journals, and travel books.The existence of a government which looked favor-
ably on foreign investment was a further incentive for all sorts of traveling
entrepreneurs: miners, businessmen, investors, cattle-ranchers. The availability
of land and economic possibilities whereby a male European of average intel-
ligence could become rich overnight were sufficient encouragement for visi-
tors and offered ample opportunity for later reports-to the institution that
had paid for the trip, to the employer, to family, to "posterity." Men retold the
outcome of their visit: becoming rich, exploring economic possibilities. The
question most travel writers sought to answer was:"Could an average European
become rich here?" The answer most of them gave was "yes."
   Not many travelogues by women on Argentina were published in this pe-
riod. One of the reasons might be that most travel literature on Argentina
published during the period had a more practical goal; travel books which
would open up South America to capitalist exploits were traditionally written
by men. Most travelogues by European women during the period were con-
cerned with the "Orient" (North Africa for Frenchwomen, India for their





68  - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900


British counterparts) or with Africa. Florence Dixie, the author I discuss in this
chapter, gained notoriety in literary circles in Britain with her travelogues on
South Africa and her impassioned defense of the Zulus. Before she ventured
into South Africa, she had traveled to Patagonia, a region which figured promi-
nently in British travel writing thanks mainly to the works of Charles Darwin
andThomas Graham. Unlike those authors, Dixie was not an explorer, a scien-
tist, or a businesswoman. She was a tourist, looking for leisure and a good time.

Dinnertime in Patagonia

   But whatever country one is in, whatever scenes one may be among-in
   one's own cosy snuggery in England, or in the bleak steppes of Patagonia
   there is a peculiar sameness in the feeling that comes over one towards the
   hours of evening, and which inevitably calls up the thought, It must be get-
   ting near dinner-time.
   Across Patagonia

"Una lady viaj6 a la Patagonia .. ." Thus began an article published in La
Bandera Liberal in Argentina in 1881, two years after the end of the Campaign
to the Desert and a year after Lady Florence Dixie's trip to Patagonia.Twenty-
three at the time, Dixie was a British aristocrat who traveled to Patagonia to
escape the boredom of her life in London. The trip is a leisure one during
which her political sensibilities are aroused by the native population only
inasmuch as they compare favorably toVictorian habits.The quotation above is
significant: what Dixie points out is a sameness in Patagonia and England
which refers back to herself. In her writing, everything refers back to Dixie
as protagonist, as seeing eye, as experiencer.
   Born in 1857, raised partly in England and partly in France, Dixie married
in 1875 when she was already a published poet. Her Across Patagonia, published
in NewYork in 1881, provides an interesting ground of comparison for hege-
monic discourses in travel narratives at the time.With its title page illustration
of a dog Dixie took back to Britain with her and with the book's humble
dedication to the Prince of Wales (without the by-then characteristic allusion
to the economic prospects of the region), Dixie's narrative of her "wanderings
over unexplored and untrodden ground" is, from the outset, anomalous.
   I want to echo Inderpal Grewal's statement: "I take it as a given that various
imperial, racist, and gendered narratives were art of the lives of all women who
lived in England, and that these affected participation in Victorian imperial
culture" (9). I therefore want to argue that Dixie's participation in the genre of
travel writing in general and in the writing of Patagonia in particular is of
course marked by these imperial, racist, and gendered narratives while it resists





Lady Florence Dixie's Across Patagonia - 69


others. By reading Dixie's text, I intend to highlight the existence of discourses
other than the hegemonic male discourse of conquest, plunder, and extinction.
I want to suggest that during the nineteenth century, there were other possibili-
ties to hegemonic discourses. Dixie's writing on Patagonia challenges the tra-
dition of writing on the region started by Darwin. Male travel writers refer to
each other, quote each other, and share each other's basic assumptions on the
region. By neglecting to quote any of these figures, Dixie disclaims their au-
thority and challenges their hegemonic position. My reading of Across Patagonia
investigates the ways in which Dixie both appropriates and challenges the
conventions of this tradition.The actual physical location of her writing is the
frontier, not defined in her text as a place of danger but rather as a paradisiacal
locale where gender relations are fruitful and harmonic.
   Imaginary spaces in the colonial era often correspond to erotic male fanta-
sies penetration, rape, availability of native women. The imperial scheme is
metaphorized as an act of penetration and subjugation; whole populations are
feminized, their bodies read and written on.The vocabulary used by men in the
central tradition of travel writing is difficult for women to appropriate. In this
discourse, women are metaphors and objects, not speaking subjects. Travel
writers on Patagonia had always feminized the region, stressing its vacuity, its
infertility.Within the tradition of male travel writing on Patagonia, the region
was represented as an empty and barren woman ready to be penetrated and
fertilized, a conflation of all women, both virginal and treacherous at once. It is
in a tone, borrowed from this central tradition of travel narrative, that Dixie sets
out after explaining that her voyage was instigated by a disgust with "the artifi-
ciality of modern experience" combined with the advantage of Patagonia be-
ing a region where she can be

   safe from the persecutions of fevers, friends, savage tribes, obnoxious ani-
   mals, telegrams, letters, and every other nuisance you are elsewhere liable to
   be exposed to. To these attractions was added the thought, always alluring
   to an active mind, that there too I should be able to penetrate into vast wilds,
   virgin as yet to the foot of man. Scenes of infinite beauty and grandeur
   might be lying hidden in the silent solitude of the mountains which bound
   the barren plains of the Pampas, into whose mysterious recesses no one as
   yet had ever ventured. And I was the first to behold them?-an egotistical
   pleasure, it is true; but the idea had a great charm for me, as it had for many
   others. (3)

If the Western gaze has been theorized as male, few discourses provide more
examples of the determinacy of the male gaze than travel narratives. In these
narratives, the gaze is not only male but white and European too.According to





70 - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 188o-1900


Figure 3. Julius Beerbohm,"An Indian Camp." In Julius Beerbohm, Wanderings in Patagonia.


Raymond Williams, any description of landscape or scenery is constructed by
the axis of the viewing eye and what is viewed. Travel narratives in the late
nineteenth century erase the viewing eye from the description.The description
employs elements that are supposed to make it objective and therefore gener-
alizable and usable for scientific and/or mercantilistic purposes. Dixie's narra-
tives subvert these conventions of the objective male gaze by localizing the gaze
before the description of what is gazed at and by making the two most privi-
leged objects of the gaze-natives and women-subjects.
   The illustrations in Dixie's book are excellent examples of this "subjectivity
of the gaze."The illustrator,Julius Beerbohm, is introduced by Dixie as a mem-
ber of her group. His book, Wanderings in Patagonia, had just come out when
they started their excursion.The second edition of Wanderings in Patagonia was
published in 188I in London while Dixie's Across Patagonia was being published
in NewYork. The difference between the illustrations Beerbohm publishes in
his own book and those in Dixie's book is paradigmatic of larger differences at
other narrative levels. The most interesting contrast is that between the two
depictions of an "Indian camp." Beerbohm's Indian camp (figure 3) is the stock
portrayal of the time. The Indians seem to be unaware of the looking eye
describing them (none of them is actually facing the viewer of the picture), and





Lady Florence Dixie's Across Patagonia - 71


Figure 4. Julius Beerbohm, "Indian Camp." In Florence Dixie, Across Patagonia.


they are all overengaged in activities.1 The excess of simultaneous activities on
the part of the Indians seems to be hinting at the picture's function as a summa
of Indian life, even at the expense of credibility or verisimilitude. In the illus-
tration in Dixie's book (figure 4), on the contrary, the main and only event is
the arrival of the foreigner.2 This arrival marks the disruption of daily activities.
The eye-lines of the Indian are concentrated on Dixie and the members of her
travel party. The main focus of the picture, however, is the woman on the right
who is holding a baby and is looking straight at us (readers, voyeurs, onlookers).
Eyes are privileged parts in the spatial delineation of the imperial subject. Eye-
sight grants credibility and authority. The traveler retains the privilege of the
gaze and of intelligent sight and reserves for the Indian eyes that are either
empty or laden with passion (as opposed to the intelligence of the Europeans'
eyes). In graphic depictions-photographs and sketches-the Indians' eyes are
always blurred or looking elsewhere.
   Why is this Indian woman looking at us? She is not only defying the rule
that the native does not look back, but she is also looking back with interest and
curiosity-attributes of the European male. What this woman in Beerbohm's
sketch in Dixie's book gives us is a portrait of"human curiosity" that recipro-
cates the "human curiosity" Dixie and her team possess.There are other inter-





72  - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900


esting elements in the picture: the woman is placed in the typical mother-child
dyad position codified inWestern art. Furthermore, there are two small children
looking at her, while she looks out of the picture at us, somehow protecting and
representing the whole family in the looking and the being looked at. The
representation of the Indian woman as mother in the timeless madonna-like
dyad is quite exceptional in the iconography of the period, and it breaks the
dichotomy between "good" and "bad" women. In this picture, the native
woman-generally associated with lust and passion-is placed in the most
privileged space Western discourse has reserved for women. In Beerbohm's
sketch in his own book, on the other hand, the European is absent and the
picture attempts to depict the "other" as an "exoticized" sight.The artificiality
of the scene/seen comes clear when the viewer tries to codify the multiplicity
of activities going on at the same time. The fact that someone had to put
together the picture ex post facto-and that this is a montage prepared for the
British onlooker-is evident.3'There is an overwhelming simultaneity of occu-
pations more appropriate to industrial London than to Patagonia, especially
since, except for a few examples (the man using the "boleadoras" on the near
right, the young man next to him running aimlessly, the man at the back
inexplicably galloping behind the horses), what Beerbohm represents are vari-
ous forms of indolence, which he attributes to the Indians. Interpersonal rela-
tions in the picture happen only in pairs, and the Indians who in the narrative
description are collectivized and defined in terms of community traits suffer
here from a strange reifying syndrome.The lack of connection and lack of unity
of the Indian community remind us of the words commonly used to describe
Indian languages: "grunt," "guttural," "disgruntled." What is portrayed here is
definitely a microcosm of inarticulate beings who are not communicating with
each other.The readers of the day would possibly relate the lack of purpose in
the Indians' activities and their loitering as both symptom and cause of their
imminent disappearance.James Clifford describes this technique of"'pastoral'
encodation" as "a relentless placement of others in a present becoming past.
. . Primitive,' nonliterate, underdeveloped, tribal societies are constantly
yielding to progress, 'losing' their traditions" (Writing 114--15).
   A remarkable characteristic of Dixie's writing and one that sets her apart
from others is that whenever she writes herself as viewer, she herself is also
looked at, viewed, defined. Her first encounter with a "real Patagonian Indian"
is marked by mutual gazes and by Indians and Europeans being all on horse-
back, and thus at the same physical level:

   We reined in our horses when he got close to us, to have a good look at
   him, and he doing the same, for a few minutes we stared at him to our





Lady Florence Dixie's Across Patagonia - 73


   hearts' content, receiving in return as minute and careful a scrutiny from
   him. Whatever he may have thought of us, we thought him a singularly
   unprepossessing object, and, for the sake of his race, we hoped an unfavor-
   able specimen of it. (63)

This description is characteristic of Dixie's writing in several ways, the most
outstanding of which is the combination of a reactionary discourse of other-
ness that privileges a racial purity ("real Patagonian Indian," insistence on
pure-breed Indians) and draws deprecatory descriptions, together with a trans-
gressive acknowledgment of mutual difference and of reciprocity, where the
European also becomes the "object of the gaze." Likewise in the picture there
is an awful lot of "looking" going on, the most notable examples being the
woman on the right looking out of the picture and the exchange of looks
between the Indian (I have difficulty deciding whether the drawing means to
depict a man or a woman) and Dixie. Of course, something has to be made of
the difference between Dixie looking down from the horse and the Indian
character having to look up, but the mutual look itself is significant mainly
because it is usually conspicuously absent from the genre, and because it in-
cludes the narrator/viewer as much as the narrated/viewed.4 The chapter in
Dixie's book that describes the visit to the Indian camp, both verbally and by
means of the sketch I have already mentioned, is striking in its departure from
the conventions of travel writing.The first "real Patagonian Indian" rides away,
and the Europeans are again observed-this time by several mounted Indians
on the top of a ridge-before they can look back. It is only after these two
encounters that Dixie gets to the trope of the arrival scene: the Indians watch-
ing in "lazy curiosity," the Europeans responding in "leisurely observation"; the
distribution of sugar among the Indian children; the exchange of sugar for
meat; the Indians' examination of Dixie's boots and bracelets; the mutual in-
spection. Dixie also interpolates physical descriptions of the Indians and com-
parisons between what she expected them to be like and what she thought of
them on meeting them.
   Interestingly enough, Dixie does not acknowledge any sources for her way
of reading and of looking at the Patagonian Indians.This absence is especially
remarkable since an acknowledgment of being well versed in previous narra-
tions of the region and an ongoing dialogue with previous travelers was a well-
established characteristic of the genre. Dixie only quotes Beerbohm. Beer-
bohm, on the other hand, refers to the canonized narrators of Patagonia such
as Musters and Darwin. In spite of this absence of source citations, Dixie shows
from the outset that she is acquainted with the mythical representations of the
region, and her text can be quite insightfully read against and next to Beer-





74  - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900


bohm's. Beerbohm's Wanderings in Patagonia is the only book Dixie mentions.
While Beerbohm was a co-traveler in her expedition, his outlook differs greatly
from Dixie's. Beerbohm is an engineer on a surveying excursion; Dixie, on the
other hand, is an aristocrat "palled for the moment with civilization and its
surroundings," who goes on this trip to escape the "shallow artificiality of
modern existence" (2). Dixie's book is fascinating in its interweaving of hege-
monic and non-hegemonic discourses. For example, her attitude toward the
English servant class is absolutely deprecatory, as one would expect from an
aristocratic woman:

   We only took one servant with us, knowing that English servants inevitably
   prove a nuisance and hindrance in expeditions of the kind, when a great
   deal of "roughing it" has to be gone through, as they have an unpleasant
   knack of falling ill at inopportune moments. (3-4)

Yet, at the same time, Dixie does not indulge in the idealization or the infan-
tilization of the Indians that characterizes the work of most other writers of her
time. She devotes more narrative space to the women than to the men. Fur-
thermore, her description of Indian women is radically different from-and far
more sympathetic than-any other written at the time.
   The way Dixie interweaves narrative with general information on the Indi-
ans is unique. Her generalizations are always subordinated to the narrative, and
her use of the "ethnographic present" (in Johannes Fabian's terms) is devoted to
areas which were usually absent from men's travel narratives (marriage, rela-
tionships between spouses, child care). Undoubtedly Dixie obtained much of
the background information from Beerbohm, but in reworking this informa-
tion, her interpretation differs strongly from his.Although her writing unveils
the relationship between seeing eye, description, and interpretation, Dixie
chooses not to mention her sources of information that challenge the prevalent
views.Another way of looking at this chapter is to consider it an example of a
woman writing in the margins: instead of encroaching in "male" topics and
writing about means of production and economic organization of the Indians
(with a helpful hint to readers that these Indians could be used as sources of
information or cheap labor), she dwells on information that is "feminine" (it
deals with home and family, it has no "practical application"). In her portrayal
of the Tehuelche Indians, she includes characteristics which male writers had
denied Patagonian Indian women (industriousness, beauty, capacity to nurture,
conjugal happiness), and by so doing she implicitly compares conditions for
women in Britain with conditions among more "primitive" groups.5

   But it is only men who are cursed or blessed with this indolent spirit. The
   women are indefatigably industrious. All the work ofTehuelche existence





Lady Florence Dixie's Across Patagonia - 75


   is done by them except hunting. When not employed in ordinary house-
   hold work they busy themselves in making guanaco capas, weaving gay-
   coloured garters and fillets for the hair, working silver ornaments, and so
   forth. Not one of their least arduous tasks is that of collecting firewood,
   which, always a scarce article, becomes doubly hard to find, except by going
   distances, when they camp long in one place. But though treated thus
   unfairly as regards the division of labour, the women can by no means
   complain of want of devotion to them on the part of the men. Marriages
   are matters of great solemnity with them, and the tie is strictly kept. Hus-
   band and wife show great affection for one another, and both agree in
   extravagant love of their offspring, which they pet and spoil to their heart's
   content. (68-69)

The initial "buts" in each paragraph create a contrast between Dixie's state-
ments and statements made previously by other writers on the region.6 They
also make a comment on "life in general." And the underlying comparison
between Victorian life at home and "primitive" life is striking. My paraphrase
of the text, if I assume that this contrast is paramount, would be: women work
twice as hard because not only do they work in production for the community
(or for the system) but also in "household work"; Indian women at least have
the compensation of good marriages ("the tie is strictly kept" as opposed to
British philandering) and of being able to "pet and spoil their children" (as
opposed to the long hours of labor in Britain for working-class children and
the "seen-but-not-heard" upbringing of bourgeois and aristocratic children).
The elements that appear in my reading of this passage were all prevalent
elements of debate in London at the time, especially among feminist and re-
formist groups.7 Paid women's labor in London and in the industrial towns in
the north was especially concentrated in activities akin to those performed by
the Tehuelche women (weaving and sewing). Male infidelity in all social
classes was the silenced issue behind heated debates on prostitution control
and legislation on venereal diseases. Dixie's comment on child rearing is the
only part of the description in which she is more ambiguous as to moral
value, and thus she uses negative words such as "extravagant" and "spoil," even
if counterbalanced by positive nouns such as "love" and "heart."The effect of
this "extravagant" upbringing is not illustrated by spoiled children, though.
On the contrary, Dixie observes that Tehuelche children are amazingly well
behaved, and she devotes her most pastoral passage-which I will discuss
below-to three Tehuelche children.
   What comes immediately after the passage quoted above illustrates the ten-
sions within a discourse that while attempting to escape hegemonic constraints
returns to them again and again. From the plural "men" and "women," Dixie





76  - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900


returns to "the Tehuelche" and then to the generalized pronoun "he," placing
the pronoun in a location whose referent is definitely not only male. In this
context, Dixie echoes widely described prejudices concerning the Indians:

   The most prominent characteristic of the Tehuelche is his easy-going good
   humour, for whereas most aboriginal races incline to silence and saturnine
   gravity, he is all smiles and chatter.The other good qualities of the race are
   fast disappearing under the influence of "aquadiente" [sic], to the use of
   which they are getting more and more addicted, and soon, it is to be feared,
   they will become nothing more than a pack of impoverished, dirty, thieving
   ragamuffins. (121)

Dixie's resistance to prevalent discourses is, of course, problematic since it does
not focus on any attempt at social reform or on the creation of alternatives but
on a very escapist type of resistance: the creation of Utopian spaces. Like Wil-
liam Henry Hudson, another writer on Patagonia, Dixie draws a Utopian
Patagonia that is basically a comment on prevalent problems in Britain, such as
the criminal effects of alcohol described in the above passage and a space for
self-discovery and self-reflection. The problems with this utilization of the
"other" are innumerable: using the space of the "other" for self-reflection or for
metaphorical purposes seems to be the underlying link between all colonialist
discourses. But while other contemporary texts on Patagonia such as Hudson's
Idle Days in Patagonia (1893) see "progress" as inevitable, Dixie erases it com-
pletely from her descriptions and devotes her descriptive abilities to stressing
the "normality" of Indian life-and natural life-when undisturbed by Euro-
pean intervention. This type of descriptive skill is at its best in her pastoral
portrayal of a threesome of youngsters in a tent:

   At one of the tents we saw two remarkably clean and pretty girls, who were
   engaged on some kind of sewing work; and beside them-probably mak-
   ing love to one (or both)-stood an equally good-looking youth, who
   struck me by the peculiar neatness of his dress, and his general "tire a quatre
   6pingles" appearance. His hair was brushed and combed, and carefully
   parted,-a bright red silk handkerchief keeping its glossy locks in due subjec-
   tion. His handsome guanaco capa was new, and brilliantly painted on the
   outside, and being half opened, displayed a clean white chiripi, fastened at
   the waist by a silver belt of curious workmanship. A pair of neatly fitting horse-
   hide boots encased his feet, reaching up to the knees, where they were
   secured by a pair of gay-coloured garters, possibly the gift of one of the fair
   maidens at his side. (71-72)





Lady Florence Dixie's Across Patagonia - 77


What is going on in this description? Why is Dixie so intent on drawing a
picture of spiritual bliss which, except for the few Indian elements that appear
almost as superimpositions on the text, seems to be extracted from a Thomas
Hardy novel? Again, what strikes me most in this description is Dixie's ability
to see the "other" as familiar. But in choosing a pastoral tone, she is situating her
characters in an irrecoverable past tense. Like Hardy, she is fatalistically narrat-
ing a present becoming past. Hardy's complaint that "if the true artist ever
weeps it probably is then, when he discovers the price he has to pay for the
privilege of writing in the English language" holds true for Dixie. The con-
straints of the imperial language and of the literary tropes of writing on the
"other" are, for her, insurmountable. But unlike Hardy, Dixie is not aware of
these constraints. Her book finishes on a light note:

   Taking it all in all, it was a very happy time, and a time on whose like I
   would gladly look again. (251)

This light ending is highly problematic considering the extent of the massacre
which was going on at the time. Dixie's visit to Patagonia happened during
General Julio Argentino Roca's Campaign to the Desert, and it was openly
discussed and celebrated in the Argentine press and in the European geographi-
caljournals where many travel writers first published their works.Through her
omission of all references to military campaigns, Dixie creates an elaborate
discursive space for the Indians to live in but does not assign them any actual
real geographical or historical place in which to continue living. Her romanti-
cized depictions of Indian life do nothing else than grant her a space from
which to narrate her own self.


















5


Traveling/Teaching/Writing: Jennie Howard's

In Distant Climes and Other Years




By the late nineteenth century, unchaperoned women travelers to Argentina
had been warned of the possibility of being abducted and forced into prostitu-
tion. Massive campaigns were orchestrated outside Argentina to put an end to
white slavery. Unsuccessful as these campaigns were, they brought to the atten-
tion of European and U.S. citizens the imminent danger that the country posed
for unsuspecting young women. Donna Guy has analyzed how campaigns
against white slavery were tainted by racism on the part of Europeans who
shuddered at the thought of European white women having sex with men of
other races. Legalized prostitution in Argentina and campaigns against it both
inside and outside Argentina brought to light contradictions intrinsic in both
the constructions of nationalism in Argentina and in the constructions of the
different European nationalisms in the contact zones:Argentine nationalism as
always threatened by foreign interference; European nationalisms in danger of
being contaminated by nonwhite ethnicities.1
   One of Guy's most emphatic claims in her analysis of prostitution is that
foreign prostitutes were very few in comparison to Argentine-born ones and
that the anxiety about importation of prostitutes was related to other issues
such as the xenophobia that resulted from massive immigration. The debate
about female prostitution spilled over into a more general debate on female
labor and on foreign female laborers.The authorities on female issues were the
members of the Society of Beneficence, a charity institution organized by
Bernardino Rivadavia in 1823 and which since national reunification had be-
come increasingly powerful and influential. In a country which was modern-





Jennie Howard's In Distant Climes and Other Years - 79


izing itself at notable speed, these women represented the amalgam of values
associated with the colonial Hispanic past.They objected to female labor and
mistrusted foreigners. Their strongholds-the education of girls and women
and the health care of women and children-allowed them to exercise an
inordinate amount of power over the lives of both native and foreign-born
Argentineans. Interestingly enough, their position of power was only margin-
ally affected by the prostitutes, but it was dramatically changed by other un-
chaperoned women travelers-North American normal school teachers.
   The connection between teaching and prostitution as professions reserved
for women is made by Redding S. Sugg in his preface to Motherteacher: The
Feminization of American Education:

   The first profession opened to women consisted of the sale of sexual love
   and was called prostitution; the second, an initiative of nineteenth-century
   Americans, was a traffic of maternal love and was called pedagogy. (7)

This quotation opens up noteworthy issues in the discussion of the importation
of teachers that Domingo Faustino Sarmiento set up to educate the country
and the definition of the profiles of teachers, in particular, and female workers
in general. Sugg shows how the formation of normal schools in the United
States required a definite change in direction in what education meant and
how it was carried out on a day-to-day basis: when most teachers were male,
physical punishment was an integral part of education; however, when nor-
malism introduced female teachers into the education of teenage boys, there
was a shift to a pedagogy which shunned physical punishment and stressed
the affective, in what Sugg calls "a traffic of maternal love." This model, which
was transplanted to Argentina by Sarmiento, shaped the educational system
like a family: the paterfamilias-administrator was a man, the teacher in charge
of the daily contact with the children was a woman, and the patriarch-fathers
who presided over the whole arrangement were the "fathers of education":
Horace Mann in the United States, Sarmiento in Argentina. Sarmiento de-
scribes with loaded metaphors his plan to educate the country using North
American teachers:

   Esti pues el terreno preparado para sembrar la semilla, la buena semilla que
   traen las maestras. Desde alli 61 extenders sus ramas por toda la Repnblica y
   San Juan seri por segunda vez, el Precursor de la nueva doctrina. En mi
   viaje he sentido, palpado, que la educaci6n seri en el inimo del pueblo y
   que la tierra, el espiritu, serin igualmente cultivados.
   Sarmiento (letter to Mary Mann dated February 15, 1870)





8o  - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900


   [The land is therefore ready to sow the seed, the good seed that the teachers
   bring. From there, branches will spread all over the Republic and San Juan
   will be for the second time, the Precursor of the new doctrine. In my trip,
   I have felt that education will belong in the spirit of the people and that the
   land and the spirit will be equally cultivated.]

This quotation presents a development of Sarmiento's perception of the land in
Facundo where he establishes a relationship between the landscape and the
people and notes how the absence of a traveler/social analyst interferes with the
possibility of prescribing a "correct drug" for the problem of the nation, a
"drug" which would address the misgivings and limitations of the country in
the context of what the nation needs according to its geography. In his letter to
Mary Mann, Sarmiento acknowledges the advantages granted to him by the
end of his exile. He now can travel the land, question it, examine its signs, and
uncover the "right drug" to cure the ills of the nation: education. Absolutely
reliant on his sight, Sarmiento reads the signs and reports on a land ready for
planting. The farmers-U.S. teachers-are very much like the farmers he
wanted for the actual-and not the metaphorical-land: white and Anglo-
Saxon.2 What is unusual in this farming metaphor is that the planting is done
by women-"las maestras." Sarmiento did hire men as well as women, but he
makes his point dramatically clear when he chooses the feminine noun here:
his educational project was to be carried out by women partially masculinized
by their professional undertakings and devoid of the Catholicism prevalent
among the Argentinean upper-class women from the Society of Beneficence,
who still had a firm grip on education. The fact that Sarmiento envisioned
this project as resulting in a fruitful harvest of millions of female teachers must
have seemed radical to the Society ladies who saw their otherwise undisputed
control over the minds of young women slip through their fingers.
   In purging Argentinean education of its religiosity, Sarmiento expected to
attract the Anglo-Saxon immigrants he envisioned as instrumental in the con-
struction of a modern Argentina. The trip Sarmiento refers to in the third
quotation took him to C6rdoba, Santa Fe, and Entre Rios, and Sarmiento
devoted a large part of the letter to Mary Mann describing the German and
Swiss colonies where Sarmiento claimed people were happy and rich. This
mini-manifesto for universal and lay education is expressed in evangelical
terms: "el terreno preparado para sembrar la semilla" [the land is ready for
sowing],"la buena semilla" [the good seed],"el Precursor de la nueva doctrina"
[the Precursor of the new doctrine].The whole spirit of the paragraph evokes
religious images, and Sarmiento sets himself in the place of a modern prophet:
a prophet of secularism.





Jennie Howard's In Distant Climes and Other Years - 81


The Teachers

Jennie Howard was one of these farmers. Jennie Howard never went back
"home" to the United States and like many of her colleagues and most of the
foreign prostitutes made her home in Argentina. Of the three women I talk
about in this part of my study, Howard is the only one who prioritizes her
profession, who travels for professional reasons, and who is totally plebeian in
the way she addresses her job and her writing. Her position in both her own
society and in Argentinean society depends absolutely on her own capabilities
as a teacher-something she has trained for and which has become her whole
life. Her own account is not personal in intent but meant to account for a
whole group of men and principally women who, like her, carried out Sar-
miento's educational project. All in all, sixty-five North American teachers
founded or reorganized eighteen normal schools in Argentina between the
years 1869 and 1898.About a third of them stayed in the country for good and
continued teaching either in public or in private schools.
   In 1842, while exiled in Chile, Sarmiento had founded a normal school only
two years after Horace Mann's foundation of the first normal school in the
United States. In La educacion popular published in 1849, he advocated universal
lay education. During the early 185os, in an extended trip to the United States,
Sarmiento visited schools, gathered books and materials, and interviewed edu-
cators and teachers. Having already decided that Argentina's schools would
emulate their American counterparts, Sarmiento still had to choose a specific
model and get the human-power to put it into practice. For the model he chose
Chicago; for teachers, he chose women. Women were preferred because, as
Mann had pointed out to him, they could be hired for a fraction of a man's
salary. Sarmiento did not stop there; he described desirable teachers in these
terms:

   The girls must be normal-trained, with considerable teaching experience.
   They must have irreproachable morals and manners.They must come from
   good families.They must be young and good-looking if possible. (Luiggi,
   Sixty-Five Valiants 17-18)

It is clear how much Sarmiento's project shared elements of the educational
project of the elite women, even when it definitely came up against it. The
emphasis on the appearance and morals of the "girls"' was shared by the elites,
but the difference was that whereas for the elite women this composure came
from Catholicism, for Sarmiento it was an integral part of the education of
teachers rooted in a Puritan work ethic and in the Puritan New England
ideology of passionlessness to which I will refer later on.





8 2 - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900


   After several false starts and numerous complications attended to by Sar-
miento himself, the teachers finally started arriving and occupying posts at
normal schools all over the country. Some men were brought to head schools
for boys, but the bulk of the teachers were young women from the East Coast
and the Midwest of the United States.Jennie Howard was a Bostonian, one of
the two Bostonians who according to Alice Luigi had annoyed their Midwest-
ern compatriots with their belief in the academic superiority of their city of
origin. Educated at Framingham Normal School,Jennie Howard led a life until
her arrival in Argentina that was not very different from that of many of the
other teachers. Orphaned after her father had lost his fortune, she needed to
look for a means to pay for her brother's Ivy League education as well as to
support herself and her older sister.
   By the time Howard arrived in Buenos Aires, she was already thirty-eight
and an experienced teacher.Together with another Bostonian-Edith Howe
-she organized the Girls' Normal School of Corrientes. From there she
went on to the Girls' School of C6rdoba and to the coeducational ("mixta")
school of San Nicolis.When she retired, she was a methodology teacher, and
the minister of education, Juan Ram6n Fernindez, granted her a special re-
tirement.

Howard's "Distant Climes"

The title Howard chose for her book In Distant Climes and Other Years has
definite connections with the title of a book by a compatriot of hers and
Argentina's ultimate expatriate writer:William Henry Hudson's FarAway and
LongAgo. The deictic position from which Hudson and Howard write is how-
ever very different: Hudson writes in England as an adult about the place where
he spent his childhood; Howard distances herself from Argentina ("in distant
climes"), which is the place from where she is writing this book (a memoir? A
travelogue?). By the time she writes it, Howard has spent more than half of her
life in Argentina and yet she chooses a foreigner's perspective for her writing.
The place where she has chosen to spend her life is still foreign. In spite of
remarkable progress, it is still a land populated by unreliable inhabitants who
speak a "jibberish [sic]" language.
   Howard's book starts off using one of the conventions of travel writing by
historicizing her arrival in Argentina in the context of what her U.S. compatri-
ots knew about the country at that time:

   In the United States forty-six years ago, a geographical knowledge of the
   Argentine Republic even among teachers, was confined mostly to the an-
   cient name of Patagonia, seen on the maps of South America in the geog-





Jennie Howard's In Distant Climes and Other Years - 83


   raphies of that time with the strange name of Buenos Aires, pronounced by
   them "Bonus Airs" stretching across the center of it, and to pictures in the
   same books of long lines of bullock carts crossing interminable plains. But
   so far away seemed these distant, mythical lands, and so little information
   was aroused as to where these bullock carts were going or from whence
   they came. (23)

This mythical and romanticized description of the country has nothing in
common with what will be Howard's own descriptions. Howard does not
romanticize the region and rarely finds any beauty in it. On the contrary, her
description points to the end of the order of the open pampas traveled by
bullock carts.What she sees in the country is backwardness and barbarism, and
her greatest achievement is her own participation in putting an end to this
barbarism through the civilizing efforts of education. Unlike Dixie and Beck-
Bernard, Howard does not devote any time to describing Indians or gauchos.
Completely identified with Sarmiento's project, Howard sees education as the
tool which will push Argentina into modernity and which will rescue it from
its position among the "mythical" and "distant" (that is, uncivilized, barbaric)
places. In this process of modernization, the indigenous populations had no
place, and Howard does not even devote a deprecatory remark to them. She
does, however, engage in long descriptions of insects who stand in the way of
civilization, going even as far as eating volumes of Dickens's novels.
   It is not surprising in the context of Howard's identification with capitalism
and modernization that she will use Charles Dickens as her literary mentor. On
the way to Buenos Aires, she writes, the teachers stopped in "delightful London
with its historical associations known to them only through books," (25) where
they visited "some of the haunts of Dickens" (25). Howard reads, celebrates, and
shares in Dickens's admiration-but none of his scorn-for modernity, and in
her writing she imitates his style. Nowhere is this clearer than in chapter 14,
where she triumphantly describes the change Argentina had gone through in
the previous thirty years. Howard uses fast-paced prose to praise the new Ar-
gentina (especially the new Buenos Aires), full of department stores, connected
by fast and modern means of transportation, and generally buzzing with activ-
ity. She celebrates the fact that this change has also brought about a change in
manners, especially in the way women can lead their lives. In spite of this
change which she terms a "Rip van Winkle" awakening, she does not compare
Buenos Aires to London but to "gay Paris."There is an intrinsic contradiction
in Howard's discourse: by refusing to equate Buenos Aires to London, she is
steadfastly holding on to the belief that the London she has read in Dickens
coexists with the London of culture, with precapitalist London. Buenos Aires





8 4 - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900


falls short because the new order has no previous glorious order to coexist
with:

   The men in general dedicate themselves wholly to business and to the
   pleasures of life, and are materialists, neglecting the higher questions of soul
   and spirit; and lofty ideas have little attraction for them. Argentina has
   given birth to a poet now and then or a writer of spiritual thought, but
   they do not seem to have succeeded in impressing their standards upon
   the masses. In many literary and artistic societies, the spirit of materialism
   reigns as it also does in great educational institutions. (119)

Passionlessness and the Teacher
Howard's greatest feat might well be that she is able to write a whole book
about herself from her point of view using the pronoun "I" only once.3
Whereas Beck-Bernard's prose effaces the existence of a husband and, at a lesser
level, of children, Howard's prose effaces the very voice that engendered it.
Howard's experience is therefore normalized and generalized. To avoid using
the first person, she cumbersomely uses all the different passive and impersonal
forms available as well as of the third person plural in nouns such as "the
teachers" and "the American teachers." In the chapter "American Teachers
Make Dreams, Realities," she narrates her own experience on the way to Parani
(her first appointment):

   Once fairly settled, they set about absorbing as much of the Spanish lan-
   guage as possible in four months. The days were dedicated to hard study,
   visiting the Normal School frequently to accustom the ear to the sound of
   Spanish, and having two teachers, one for grammar and one for conversa-
   tion. (40)

Her style becomes cumbersome at times because of her insistence on keeping
it impersonal and general (talking of herself, for example, she says "one of the
American teachers had the great honor and pleasure of being received in the
home of the General Mitre .. ." [97]). In effacing others, she effaces herself. No
one has a name in her narrative except the great male "heroes"-Sarmiento,
Mann, Mitre. The teachers recover their names only in the last chapter where
they are listed and grouped into different categories.
   It might be argued that this self-effacement is part of the normal school
education. Teachers-both the North American teachers and their Argentine
disciples-were supposed to elaborate a complex duality between their public
and their private lives.Jennie Howard's narrative transfers the pedagogic ethos
to her own writing, and presumably to her own life too. Even the physical





Jennie Howard's In Distant Climes and Other Years - 8 5


discomfort she feels has to be erased. Howard's presentation of herself is com-
pletely devoid of sentiment. She is the professional woman, the traveler with a
mission. The impersonality of the teacher as professional is what is going to
protect her from the dangers of contamination by the outside world.4
   Underlying Howard's discourse is the ideology of passionlessness. Nancy E
Cott has shown how this ideology, which was prevalent in New England from
the end of the eighteenth century until the mid-nineteenth century, was wide-
spread among middle-class women, allowing them to have professional en-
deavors beyond the family and to define the size and structure of the family.
According to Cott:

   The ideology of passionlessness, conceived as self-preservation and social
   advancement for women, created its own contradictions: on the one hand,
   by exaggerating sexual propriety so far as to immobilize women and, on
   the other, by allowing claims of women's moral influence to obfuscate the
   need for other sources of power.The assertion of moral integrity within
   passionlessness had allowed women to retrieve their identity from sexual
   vulnerability and dependence. (236)

Cott's article stresses the instrumental role that Protestantism played in the
formation of this ideology by portraying women as more spiritual than men on
the condition that they renounce their sexuality. This new perspective on
women made possible the reformation of education carried out in the middle
of the eighteenth century in the United States and the importation of U.S.
teachers into Argentina later on. In Argentina, these women whom Sarmiento
described as possessing "irreproachable morals" found opposition especially
among the traditional Catholic groups for whom all sources of morality had to
come from the Catholic church. The teachers had, in turn, to educate their
female students in this ideology of passionlessness as an essential element to the
successful outcome of an education that would possibly uproot them from
their parents' home and grant them financial independence.

The Family
The text establishes a family relationship between Sarmiento, the teachers, and
the students. Sarmiento was "the father of Argentine education," an image
which by the 1930s when this book was published was fairly widespread. But
let us look at other ways in which Howard describes him:

   Perhaps those who may read these chronicles, while passing by this statue
   thinking of the splendid heroic figure for which it stands, may give a
   thought to the band of self-sacrificing American women who answered his





8 6 - Part 2. Shifting Frontiers, 1880-1900


   call and followed his lead into his own far land, and ably seconded and made
   practical his enthusiasm. (42)

If the word "women" was replaced by "woman," it would unequivocally stand
for "his wife."The statue Howard is referring to is Sarmiento's in Boston (her
hometown). The reference to the teachers as multiple wives who follow
Sarmiento and put his plans into practice is noteworthy; after all, Howard
herself claims that the first teacher who went to Argentina and returned to the
United States to recruit more teachers had an encouraging "robust glow."This
familial structure and its underlying ideology of passionlessness will survive
well into the twentieth century, transmitted from generation to generation of
men and especially women in normal schools.
   Jennie Howard's written account of her experiences was not published until
1931, but in her experiences she is a precursor to the women writers I discuss
in Part 3. Howard is a professional, a single woman traveling by herself with a
personal plan that went beyond marriage and children. Her role as a govern-
ment-appointed employee put her in a privileged position in the country in
which she arrives without previous knowledge of its idiosyncrasies or lan-
guage.5 The type of female subjectivity which she deploys in her writing was
one of the cornerstones of women's education at the beginning of the twenti-
eth century.The liberal elite's commitment to women's education would even-
tually warrant the inclusion of millions of immigrant women into lettered
culture.










3

Shiftin  Identities, 1900-1930



















6


Traveler/Governess/Expatriate:

Emma de la Barra's Stella




   En la escritora gentil hay una "brava" ciudadana.
   [In the gentile woman writer there is a "spirited" citizen.]
   Edmundo D'Amicis, prologue to Stella

In 1905, Stella, a novel published by Emma de la Barra under the pseudonym
C6sar Duayen, became the first Argentinean best-seller. The main character in
the novel is Alejandra Fussell, the daughter of an Argentinean woman of the
elite and a Norwegian scientist. After her father's death, Alejandra (or Alex, as
she is mostly referred to in the novel) travels to Argentina with her younger
invalid sister Stella, whom she has raised since her mother's death. Following
her father's wishes, the sisters move in with their dead mother's brother and his
family. Intelligent and educated, Alex becomes her cousins' governess and
arouses emotions of admiration and jealousy. Courted by several successful
men,Alex falls in love with her aunt's brother, Maximo Quir6s, a rich heir who
spends his life traveling. The lovers finally get together but only after Maximo
has undertaken civic responsibilities in the construction of the nation.
   Stella engages actively with issues of gender and citizenship. Even though
the book is narrated from a third person omniscient point of view, the reader
is encouraged to sympathize with Alex and to participate in her profound
critique of upper-class life in Buenos Aires.A main focus of the critique is the
ignorance which riddles the women of the elite. De la Barra distinguishes
between education ("educaci6n") and upbringing ("instrucci6n"), and unlike





9o    Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


all the other women in the novel,Alex has both: her European scientist father's
knowledge and her Argentine mother's moral and religious principles. As a
cultural "mestiza," Alex is both an insider and a visitor in Argentinean culture,
and as a woman who is both educated and "instruida" she is a catalyst for
change. The men who fall in love with her realize that they have to become
better men (and better citizens) to deserve her.
   De la Barra seems to indicate that to synthesize the European and the au-
tochthonous as Alex does is very difficult.As a matter of fact, traveling in itself
does not help achieve this combination since it only results in".. . esa instruc-
ci6n superficial de los que han viajado mucho" (96) [ ....that superficial edu-
cation of those who have traveled a lot].Alex's mother,Ana Maria, is portrayed
as never having profited from the knowledge that her husband (and Europe)
had to offer. Her ignorance is tempered by her piety, andAlex takes from her the
latter but discards the former. Alex's identity is a composite of the identities of
her father and her mother, her trip to Argentina representing the realization of
both her parents' wishes: her father's written wish that the daughters go back to
their mother's family; the mother's mandate to return, which she uttered before
her death.
   Alex also brings her mother's exile full circle: her mother, the text explains,
always yearned for a return, but it is going to be the daughters who return to
Buenos Aires: Stella to die, Alex to live. Alex's first trip to Argentina is com-
pleted with her sister's death. Her second trip, back from Norway (where she
has been working as a teacher) to the "estancia," to recover her sister's body for
burial in Europe, is left unfinished because she joins Maximo, now a serious
citizen. How the love affair develops is left unsaid. The novel ends when Alex
goes into the sanatorium for poor children that Maximo built in honor of Stella
and which would open only if Alex agrees to run it.
   Travel as trope figures prominently in the novel: both Maximo and Alex are
experienced travelers who also write. Alex is collecting her father's unpub-
lished work which she will publish as a scientific treatise. Until he meets Alex,
Maximo is the dissolute traveler to which references abound in Argentine
literature of the time. Alex, on the other hand, travels with her father to study
and to learn. Her writing, although it comes from the heart, is not emotional
but scientific and didactic; its main function is to honor her father and record
his voice:

   Mi trabajo es material nnicamente; interpreto lo que tan s6lo El podia
   concebir.... Enhebro sus perlas de Oriente en el miserable hilo de que yo
   dispongo. (226)





Emma de la Barra's Stella - 91


   [My job is only material; I interpret what only He could imagine.... I
   thread his pearls of the Orient on the miserable thread that I own.]

Alex's fascination with patriarchal authority permeates the novel and takes
other manifestations:Argentina is represented as lacking the moral authority of
a father figure, and Maximo is a worthy suitor for Alex only after he has applied
his money to help others and his privilege and education to become

   eljefe y guia de la numerosa y selecta agrupaci6n que ayudaba con desin-
   teres y patriotismo a su pais, en la evoluci6n que 61 muchos anos antes
   profetizara. (388)

   [the chief and guide of the numerous and select group that helped their
   country with disinterest and patriotism, in the evolution that he had
   prophesied many years earlier.]

The preoccupations with authority, education, and national identity which
organize the narrative in Stella are indicative of the spirit of the time, and the
crisis that Alex observes reflects a larger crisis in the nation, a crisis Maximo
explains in these terms:

   Avanzamos por agregaci6n y adopci6n, lo que nos va quitando todo lo
   nuestro. La n6mina de los concurrentes a cualquier fiesta le dice a usted
   c6mo nos eliminamos. Los nietos de las grandes familias, que no han sabido
   mantener el rango de sus ascendientes, se substituyen por los inmigrantes,
   energicos y luchadores pero sin alma nacional, con el patriotismo estrecho
   vinculado a la prosperidad material nnicamente. De ahi la indiferencia que
   permite todos los abusos y las tiranias solapadas, y la relajaci6n moral. (234)

   [We are advancing through addition and adoption, which are taking away
   all that is our own. The list of guests at any party shows you how we are
   eliminating ourselves.The grandchildren of the great families that have not
   known how to maintain the rank of their ancestors are being replaced by
   immigrants, who fight and are energetic, but do not have a national soul.
   Their thin patriotism is connected only to material prosperity. From there
   comes the indifference that allows for all of the abuses and evasive tyrannies,
   as well as moral relaxation.]

De la Barra makes a rather naive and ambivalent suggestion of what men
should do, but she is very assertive in her recommendations for improving their
lot. Basically, women should be more like Alex. They should be educated and
"instruidas," have access to the liberal professions, and disdain luxury and idle-





92    Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


ness.They should have freedom within the public sphere and be queens inside
the home. Like Alex, women should be a compound of the technological
advances of Europe and the spiritual virtues of pre-immigration Argentina.2
   As a couple, Maximo and Alex represent the possibility of an auspicious
future for the country. Alex, who stands for the best of bourgeois northern
Europe (science, technology, hard work) and the best ofArgentinean feminin-
ity (religiosity, charity), marries Maximo, who by the end of the novel has
added the characteristics of good citizen to the material qualities he has always
had, mainly "old money" and land. In Alex, her mother's European journey
closes, since Alex returns to "una casa como en la que naci6 mama" [a house
like the one in which Mother was born], the endogamous quality of Argen-
tina's landowners as evident as ever in a marriage that binds again the same two
families that Alex's aunt and uncle had joined.
   In dealing so strongly with the problematics of the time and offering possible
solutions, Stella emerges out of the spirit of the period; and as a publishing
boom it undoubtedly provided a starting point for other texts. In a study of
weekly periodical fiction in the period of 1917-27 (a genre that shares many
conventions with a realist novel such as Stella), Beatriz Sarlo has pointed out:

   la ficci6n y tambien la poesia no s6lo se construyen con materiales ideo-
   l6gico-experienciales que, de algin modo, forman parte de un patrimonio
   comun transformado esteticamente, sino que los textos mismos funcionan
   como formadores activos de fantasias sociales. Identificaciones morales y
   psicol6gicas se suscitan en el proceso de lectura y es posible pensar que
   tengan una permanencia mis duradera que la del momento del consumo y
   el placer. Huellas de la literatura en sus lectores y tambien marcas de los
   lectores en la literatura. (Imperio 23)

   [fiction as well as poetry are not only constructed with ideologic-exper-
   iential materials that in some way form part of a common aesthetically
   transformed patrimony, but also the texts themselves function as active
   shapers of social fantasies. Moral and psychological identifications are sus-
   tained in the reading process and it is possible to think that they have a more
   lasting presence than that of the moment of consumption and pleasure.
   Traces of literature in its readers and also marks of the readers in the litera-
   ture.]

Stella's main contribution to Argentine literature is the inclusion of a strong-
willed independent woman as a protagonist. Alex's responsibility as the in-
scriber of her father's words and as the record keeper of her adoptive family's





                                              Emma de la Barra's Stella - 93

finances inaugurates an era when women of all social classes will be present in
the public sphere. De la Barra's novel also engages with the heated debates on
the feasibility of modernization in the country. De la Barra's text includes a
model of modernization which would not only import European models but
also adapt them to the local context. Maximo and Alex stand for the new
modern man and woman who could carry out this plan: a moral landowning
politician and an educated and modern angel of the house, able to live on her
own but virtuous enough to use all her science and knowledge in the home.


















7


Globe-Trotting Single Women




   For the Spanish American writer, globe-trotting,
   at the turn of the century, is the mark of modernity.
   Sylvia Molloy, At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Latin America

The year is 1910.Argentina sets out to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of
the May Revolution and a hundred years of independent life.This celebration,
which will be known in Argentina as the centennial, served the country as an
occasion to evaluate the past, the present, and the future. It was also an excuse
to tally the republic's achievements vis-a-vis its European counterparts.A long
list of events was organized to celebrate the anniversary and to praise the young
republic and its achievements.The general spirit of the centennial was interna-
tionalist, its main objective to show how Argentina could interact in a status of
equality with the European nations and with the United States.'
   The centennial was not only a showcase of the achievements of the oligar-
chic republic but also an occasion in which problems surfaced. Because of the
positivistic ideology of the generation of 188o, Argentina had progressed and
expanded: it had extended the railways, established a favorable balance of trade,
and set up a modern educational system. Argentina had also circumscribed its
territories with massive campaigns to displace the indigenous populations and
was proceeding to change the characteristics of its population by welcoming
hundreds of thousands of European immigrants.2 The cracks within the system
(which was sustained by fraudulently elected governments until 1916) were
emerging in the form of labor unrest, strikes, and political instability. A group
of intellectuals interpreted the unrest as a crisis of identity and speculated on





Globe-Trotting Single Women - 95


ways to overcome it. Grouped around the journal Ideas, these intellectuals sought
to replace the positivistic, lay, and cosmopolitan ideology hegemonic at the time
with a new one which would steer Argentina back to the wealth of the Hispanic
past.Two of the most active members of the group, Manuel Gilvez and Ricardo
Rojas, meditated on the ways in which a nationalist education could make
Argentineans out of immigrant children and how a typically Argentinean culture
could serve as a unifying language for communication within a nation.
   Rojas (1882-1957) designed a program to carry out what he called "la
restauraci6n nacionalista" [the nationalist restoration]. For him, the spiritual
problem of the nation brought on by modernization and immigration could be
solved in the context of liberal democratic values which the public education
system had to impose. According to him, public schools were to be the initia-
tors of the "restoration," which would produce a new historical synthesis in
which immigrants and their children would be included.The role of the intel-
lectuals was to create a national history and a national literature that would
provide the materials by which immigrants would be interpellated into the
national identity. Immigrants in this master plan had to give up their idiosyn-
crasies and their culture to integrate themselves into the nation. An Argen-
tinean history and literature had to be "founded" to provide the canonical
contents of the school curriculum.3 During the 1910s, Rojas held the first chair
in Argentine literature at the University of Buenos Aires and wrote the nine-
volume Historia de la literatura argentina. In his Restauracion nacionalista (1909), he
also hinted at the creation of a national history, and he designed syllabi for the
teaching of "modern humanities" (history, geography, literature, "castellano,"4
"moral civica") in the different levels of education. For Rojas, who still upheld
Sarmiento's categories of civilization and barbarism, sustained change had to be
spiritual and independent from modes of production. The restoration could
take place in conjunction with the economic system imposed by the liberal
government:

   Pero esta restauraci6n del propio pasado hist6rico debe hacerse para definir
   nuestra personalidad y vislumbrar su destino. Restaurar el "espiritu trad-
   icional," no significa, desde luego, restaurar sus "formas" econ6micas o
   politicas o sociales, abolidas por el proceso implacable y l6gico de la
   civilizaci6n. (235)

   [But this restoration of one's own historic past should be done to define our
   personality and glimpse its destiny.The restoration of the "traditional spirit"
   does not mean, however, the restoration of its political or social economic
   "forms" abolished by the relentless and logical process of civilization.]





9 6 - Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


Rojas, who did not oppose immigration, believed public education was the
most important actor in unifying the nation and in creating a new synthesis in
a culturally creolized cosmopolitan population. Unlike Rojas, Manuel Galvez
(1882-1962) inverted Sarmiento's categories of civilization and barbarism and
located barbarism in the cities and civilization in the provinces which were the
stronghold of the Hispanic past. Galvez develops this idea in his El diario de
Gabriel Quiroga (191o), which uses the centennial as its background. In El diario,
a young writer modeled by Galvez after himself reflects on the crisis which
immigration had brought to the country. Buenos Aires and the wealthy prov-
inces of the littoral-which, according to Quiroga/Gilvez, are ugly, libertine,
and lacking a physiognomy of their own-are corrupting the country. The
provinces of the interior represent everything which is positive: spirituality,
religion, the mistrust of foreigners:

   Pero las provincias interiores, libres ann del desborde inmigratorio, ignoran
   las llagas que nutre con sus vicios la cosmopolita Buenos Aires, y precisa-
   mente de las provincias proceden los contados espiritus democriticos que
   mitigan, con sus prestigios, el descredito moral de la hora presente. (109)5

   [But the interior provinces, still free from the onslaught of immigration, are
   ignorant to the wounds that cosmopolitan Buenos Aires nourishes with its
   vices, and precisely out of these provinces emerge the few democratic
   spirits that, through their good name, mitigate the moral disrepute of the
   present time.]

The forty years of barbarism are reinterpreted by Quiroga/Gilvez as the rebel-
lion "del espiritu americano contra el espiritu europeo"6 [of the American
spirit against the European spirit]. In the midst of the celebrations (the book
finishes on May 25, 1910), Quiroga takes a step back to call attention to the
despicable state of affairs and to offer a possibility ofrevindication in Hispanism,
Catholicism, and spiritualism.
   In both Rojas's and Gilvez's work, women function as important metaphors
for the moral crisis of the nation and its possible solutions. Rojas believed that
a new American cultural identity which would be the synthesis of European
and indigenous traditions had to be created. The process by which this new
culture came to be was depicted by Rojas in heavily gendered metaphors.
Women were instruments for the nation, the space where American men could
inscribe their own history.7
   Gilvez devoted several of his works to exploring issues concerning women.
His thesis La trata de blancas (1905) dealt with prostitution, a subject he would
later fictionalize in Nacha Regules (1918).8 He treated normalism and the role of





Globe-Trotting Single Women - 97


women in education in La maestra normal (1914).The protagonist of La maestra
normal, which takes place in La Rioja, is Raselda, an unsophisticated local
teacher who is seduced by a male colleague from the littoral. Raselda becomes
pregnant, has an illegal abortion, is removed from her job in the capital city, and
is relegated to a rural school. Who is to blame for Raselda's misery? Far from
leaving the answer to this question in the hands of the reader, Galvez makes
Raselda herself spell it out:

   Aquella tarde que se confesara habia comprendido que la religi6n era la
   6nica defensa contra el pecado. Ahora pensaba que si ella hubiera sido
   verdadera creyentese habria salvado. Pero en la escuela nunca le hablaron de
   Dios, y algunos profesores hasta le ensenaron a despreciar la religi6n. (227)

   [The afternoon that she confessed she understood religion to be the only
   defense against sin. Now she thought that if she had been a true believer she
   would have been saved. But in school they had never spoken of God, and
   some teachers had even taught her to scorn religion.]

La maestra normal dramatizes several controversial issues of the period such as lay
education, the education of women, and the moral decay of the country. It is
indicative of Gilvez's ideology that he chose women such as Nacha Regules
and Raselda to depict the problems ofArgentina. For Galvez, the instability in
the roles of women was an example (and maybe a cause) of the instability of the
country.The prostitute and the "fallen" normal school teacher represented for
him the emergent elements in a society which had disdained ideals and values.
Gilvez's concern with spatial control of women was shared by the women
writers I treat in this chapter. Galvez worried that certain social spaces could
contribute to the degeneration of women. Emma de la Barra, Cecilia Grierson,
andAda Maria Elflein, on the other hand, believe in the defining role of women
as creators of adequate spaces for the development of independent women. It
is not surprising that the battlefield between both ideologies is fought on the
bodies of women and in four distinct spaces: the bourgeois home, the brothel,
the normal school, and the controlled yet still not modernized landscape of
the western provinces of Cuyo.
   The debates on values, nationalism, and education in which Rojas and
Galvez participated inform my discussion of travel literature and women trav-
elers in this part of the book. Since what constituted the national had to be
defined vis-a-vis the "other" (which took on different meanings according to
who was speaking), travel writing as the genre of the encounter with the
"other" continued to be a popular venue for the writings of elite men. The
period 1900-1930 also saw a flourishing, which peaked at the time of the





98  - Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


centennial, of travel writing on Argentina by foreigners. After the Russian
Revolution, left-wing Argentinean writers added their travelogues on the So-
viet Union to the corpus.
   During this same period, writing by women flourished. Partly a conse-
quence of the general economic prosperity which also accounted for a prolif-
eration of cultural manifestations by men, literature by women also owed its
authors and its readers to the educational reforms of the late nineteenth cen-
tury, especially normalism. The normal school system instituted by Sarmiento
was responsible for the education and professionalization of hundreds of lower-
middle-class women. By 1910, about 70 percent of the teachers were women.
Many of the writers of the period, including Alfonsina Storni, were normal
school teachers.9 Most of the women who participated in the feminist move-
ments at the beginning of the century had also graduated from the normal
schools."
   The entrance of women into the workforce in large numbers and the mod-
ernization of the country also allowed for a larger mobility of women. Chap-
eroning as a practice was dying out except in the very wealthy traditional
families." Middle-class women of immigrant origin enjoyed an unprecedented
freedom of movement as well as new educational and professional perspectives.
Gina Lombroso Ferrero, an Italian who traveled to Argentina in 1907, wrote in
her travelogue:

   I have known in Buenos Aires some forty female doctors who practice
   medicine, surgery, dentistry, anthropology and obstetrics. I visited a class at
   the Academy of Medicine which was directed by a woman. I also visited a
   school of massage and of nursing founded and directed by a woman; and
   on more than one occasion listened to speeches given publicly by ac-
   claimed and renowned women. (37)

In this context, women also started to travel more and to write about travel.
Cecilia Grierson and Julieta Lanteri, both normal school teachers and medical
doctors, traveled to Europe to research issues of women's education and women's
health, respectively.The first text I analyze in this chapter, Grierson's Educacion
tecnica de la mujer, is a result of her European experience. Like Jennie Howard,
Grierson traveled on a contract and wrote her book on request, inaugurating
professional travel writing for women inArgentina.Ada Maria Elflein, a teacher
and professional writer and journalist, also wrote travel literature by request.
Her trip to the west ofArgentina was sponsored by the Buenos Aires newspaper
La Prensa, where her text was published.These authors strive to give satisfactory
answers to questions already posed by Emma de la Barra in Stella: how can
Argentina as a nation construct a discourse that includes and excludes groups





Globe-Trotting Single Women - 99


of people who are or are not welcome in the nation? what kind of education
can be used to make this discourse prevalent in the population? what role do
women have within this discourse and within the educational plan that will
serve to propagate it?

To Europe and Back: Cecilia Grierson's Professional Trip
John and William Parish Robertson, who visited the River Plate in the 182os
and wrote one of the most often quoted travel books on the region, obtained
from Bernardino Rivadavia a piece of land to start the first Scottish colony in
Argentina. One of the first families in the colony was that of Cecilia Grierson's
grandparents,William and Katherine Grierson. Cecilia Grierson's father, named
John Parish Robertson after the traveler, was born in the colony in 1827. Edu-
cated in Buenos Aires and Britain,John Parish Robertson Grierson married the
daughter of Irish immigrants and settled down on an estancia in Entre Rios,
where their daughter Cecilia was born.
   Cecilia Grierson's trajectory is paradigmatic of what the normal school
system could do for women. After her father's death, Cecilia worked as a
governess, then as a rural teacher in Entre Rios. She was admitted to the normal
school of Buenos Aires at the age of fifteen, graduated at seventeen, and sup-
ported herself and her family with her teacher's salary while she attended
medical school. The first Argentinean female medical doctor and an active
feminist, Grierson founded schools for the blind and for the deaf and several
professional schools for women. She also taught at the University of Buenos
Aires, organized the Argentine Association of University Women, partici-
pated in the International Federation of University Women, and presided over
the International Women's Conference which met in Buenos Aires in 1910.
   In 1899, Grierson was planning a trip to Europe as a representative of vari-
ous women's organizations in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, when the Argentine
minister of education commissioned her to do research on the technical and
professional education of women. Her book Educacion tecnica de la mujer (1902)
was the report on this trip, which she prepared for the Argentinean ministry of
education. She was the second woman who was commissioned by an Argen-
tinean government to embark on such a mission and the first one to write a
book reporting on a trip.'2 Her trip took her to professional schools for women
in Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland,Austria-Hungary, France, England,
and Sweden.The names of the countries function as the titles for the different
chapters of her book.The introduction lists Grierson's occupations during the
two years between the time she traveled to Europe and the time she made the
report available. The body of the text consists of a chapter devoted to each
country she visited; a two-page chapter titled "Otros paises," in which she





100  - Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


refers briefly to Denmark, Poland, Russia, and Italy; and a chapter devoted to
the United States, which Grierson did not visit. The last chapter of the book,
"Republica Argentina," is the longest. In it Grierson describes a feasible plan for
the technical education of women in Argentina. An appendix includes syllabi
from different schools.
   The similarity between this report and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's
Educacion popular is overwhelming. Educacion popular, first published in Santiago
in 1849, was a report Sarmiento put together for the Chilean government.The
book had been reprinted in Argentina in 1895 as part of Sarmiento's complete
works. Like Sarmiento, Grierson includes programs from schools she visited
abroad as models for what Argentine education could become. Unlike Sar-
miento, who also used experiences from these trips to write his travelogue,
Grierson restricts her writings on her experiences abroad to this technical
book which was used as a textbook for the training of teachers. Grierson also
published several other textbooks for the training of nurses and massage thera-
pists, reports on different aspects of education and health care, and histories of
nursing, of the Scottish colony where her father was born, and of the munici-
pality of Buenos Aires. In this study, I will refer both to her Educacion tecnica and
to an autobiographical speech she wrote on the occasion of retiring from
teaching in 1916.13 As I will show, this speech illuminates the way in which the
personal and the public interact in Grierson's Educacion tecnica.
   Cecilia Grierson is the first professional Argentinean female travel writer.As
such, her writing shares many characteristics with Jennie Howard's. Although
Howard's experience preceded Grierson's by a couple of decades, Grierson's
book appeared first. However, the subject position from which Grierson speaks
is that of a professional woman, a mode of subjectivity which was inaugurated
in the country by North American normal school teachers such as Howard.
As a matter of fact, Grierson pays tribute to the NorthAmerican teachers in her
text, calling them "inteligentes, emprendedoras e independientes" (167) [in-
telligent, enterprising, and independent].These three adjectives describe the
model of femininity that Grierson advocates, and she uses them to describe the
end product of her educating mission.They also represent the best attributes
a professional traveler like Grierson could have.
   In the remainder of this section I will discuss how Grierson writes a travel
book in which the very characteristics of the narrative of travel are displaced in
favor of a coherent argument to advance a model of education.The trip appears
in the background; the particulars of it are never specifically alluded to in a
gesture which expresses Grierson's goal: to do away with artifice and the
minute details of her daily personal life in favor of the construction of a global-
izing project which she sums up in this way:





Globe-Trotting Single Women - 101


   Desearia ver implantado el amor a la verdad y combatir nuestra nefasta
   tendencia al lujo, la mentira y falsas apariencias. ... (207)

   [I would like to see love of truth implanted [in our students] and I would
   like to combat our harmful tendency towards luxury, lies and false appearances.


The aim is therefore not only to construct an educational model but also to
modify an identity which here appears only alluded to as what is "ours." The
austerity her book champions is reflected in her very direct and straightforward
writing. Her ideal woman, based on the model of femininity of the northern
European bourgeoisie, is constructed in opposition to that of upper-class
Argentinean women. Her identity as a traveler is written in opposition to that
of leisure travelers. Elements from travel writing do appear in her text, and
Grierson sets herself up as the model for the professional traveler. Unlike leisure
travelers who recommend hotels and restaurants, Grierson gives practical in-
structions on how to make the most of a research trip:

   Por eso, mucho tiempo he perdido y mucho trabajo me ha costado encontrar
   en cada ciudad las instituciones del hogar y eso conociendo el idioma de
   cada pais, sin lo cual no puede darse un paso adelante. (13)

   [Therefore I have lost much time and it has been difficult to find domestic
   schools in each city and this is all knowing the language of each country
   without which one could not make any progress.]

It is characteristic of Grierson's writing that she represents herself as able and
shows the problem solved rather than the process of solving it. She gives
advice (learn a foreign language) in an indirect way, explaining how she set
herself up for success. In keeping with the spirit of enterprise, she never
discusses how she was actually able to overcome the difficulties. Her refer-
ence to languages is equally indirect. Even in her speech, she never accounts
for how she learned languages other than her native English ("Fui al examen
con una base un poco erritica: tres idiomas, siendo el castellano el que menos
sabia" [129] [I went to the exam with a somewhat erratic background: three
languages, with Spanish being the one I knew least]).Throughout the text,
she insists on the need forArgentine teachers to know several languages to be
able to travel to Europe to improve their training. Language learning is seen
as a means to achieve modernity and is never questioned on nationalistic
principles.
   It is tempting to speculate on why Grierson did not omit the few references
to her trip altogether.The text would have certainly not lost cohesiveness if it





10 2 - Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


had been organized as the result of research and not the result of a research trip.
The allusions to the trip, however, position Grierson very differently in rela-
tionship to her subject. Being there, as we know, is the key to authority in travel
writing, and Grierson uses her short references to travel to claim this interpre-
tive authority: "Como he estado algin tiempo en Amsterdam . . ." (69) [As I
have spent some time in Amsterdam]; ." . .uno necesita ser presentado o sino
escribir a la direcci6n .. ." (123) [one needs to be introduced or if not write
down the address];"Frau Anna Hierta-Retzius a quien conoci en el Congreso
de Mujeres en Londres ..." (155) [Frau Anna Hierta-Retzius whom I met at the
Women's Conference in London].These phrases stress Grierson's authority and
also implicate her in the project of providing a model for the enterprising,
modern Argentine woman. Unlike Jennie Howard who never uses the first
person, Grierson uses "I" throughout her text, never once shifting to the im-
personal "we." Likewise she never shies away from listing her accomplishments
and praising her achievements as a pioneer.
   Throughout her text, Grierson chooses European models to copy. Her own
identity is modeled on that of the European feminists she admires and in
opposition to the upper-class Argentine women she was feuding with at the
time for control of the National Council ofWomen and whom she bitterly
attacks in her writing.At the time of the writing of Educacion tecnica, Grierson
and other professional women were fighting upper-class women for control of
the National Council ofWomen, which included both feminist organizations
and traditional charity organizations such as the Society of Beneficence. At
stake were the adherence ofArgentina to international suffragist struggles, the
commitment to civil rights, and the vote for women at home. The disagree-
ments between the two groups finally brought about a schism, and each group
hosted a women's conference in celebration of the centennial in 1910. Grierson
was the president of the conference sponsored by the Argentine Association of
University Women, an internationalist meeting of mainly professional women
who advocated legal reforms for suffrage, better working conditions for women,
and more equality in the family. Elflein attended the conference presided over
by Grierson, but she also participated in the official women's conference: the
"Congreso Patri6tico de Senoras de la Republica Argentina."This conference,
organized by upper-class women, most of them active in the Society of Bene-
ficence, was a nationalistic meeting to sing the praises of upper-class patrician
women and the ties to the Hispanic past. At the National Congress, women
were urged to stay in the house, respect the status quo, and repudiate the
campaigns for the vote and civil rights.
   The Society of Beneficence counted among its members many writers all
the way back to one of its founding members-Mariquita Sanchez.The early





Globe-Trotting Single Women - 103


twentieth century in Argentina saw a flourishing of personal writing by upper-
class women, autobiographical writing which was ultimately meant to be read
by others and which dealt with personal matters, leisure, art and literature,
social functions, and marriage. Grierson's personal writing is strategically posi-
tioned against the writings of these women. Instead of dwelling on immobility
and readings, her texts are full of action, the streets, hospitals, and schools: the
background for her excursions. There are no references to feelings or bodily
sensations; the personal in Grierson's writing is completely sublimated into the
professional. It is symptomatic that Grierson's personal narrative is always con-
cerned with movement, new endeavors, new activities. In her speech, she pre-
sents herself as a worker, "trabajadora," a term which positions her in opposi-
tion to the indolent upper-class women.
   For Grierson, inclusion in the Argentine nation is a matter of being civilized.
National identity is never questioned in her text because it is assumed as a
geographical given, elliptically referred to as "lo nuestro,""nuestro,""nosotros";
Argentina is defined as a country in the process of becoming Europeanized
(that is, civilized). Grierson's adherence to a narrative ofEuropeanness includes
a belief in a certain order of nations where the most privileged ones are the
"paises civilizados" [civilized countries]. Part and parcel of this progress was
imperialism and the possession of colonies. Grierson's text reflects the work-
ings of a hegemonic ideology which has bearings on relationships of class, race,
and gender. Although Grierson is progressive on issues of gender, she is ulti-
mately biased in terms of relationships of class and race.This is seen very clearly
when we compare two quotations from her text:

   Mme. van Treyler y Mlle. Haighton tomaron a su cargo los trabajos indus-
   triales de las mujeres de las colonias y especialmente de las indigenas de las
   Indias Occidentales. (78)

   [Mme. van Treyler and Mlle. Haighton took charge of the industrial work
   of the women of the colonies and especially the indigenous women of the
   West Indies.]

   Esta ensenanza ha influido muchisimo en Inglaterra y sus colonias y hay
   muchisimas mujeres que han hecho su fortuna con el cultivo de fiores y
   huerta, agricultura, la cria del gusano de seda en Australia;la del avestruz en
   Nueva Zelandia; cabanas en el Canadi. (154)

   [This teaching has had a large influence in England and its colonies and
   there are very many women who have made their fortune through the
   cultivation of flowers and orchards, agriculture, the breeding of the silk
   worms in Australia; that of the ostrich in New Zealand; cabins in Canada.]





104  - Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


The racially based hierarchy between women established in the different quo-
tations above runs throughout her text. In the first quotation, Indian women
are presented as needing guidance to do their jobs, as working under tutelage
in industrial jobs. Transplanted white women in the second quotation, on the
other hand, use their knowledge to become entrepreneurs. The womanhood
which Grierson sees as desirable is epitomized by bourgeois European women.
Grierson's fierce critique of the Argentine upper class mocks the upper class's
belief in their moral superiority and their value as guides for the working class:

   Toca a nuestro "high-life" dar el ejemplo que siempre debe venir de lo alto
   y tener en cuenta nuestras filantr6picas damas que por la limosna s6lo se
   ayuda a medias; mientras la caridad es completa, ensenando a los pobres a
   bastarse a si mismos, dindoles habitos que los eleven moral e individual-
   mente. (190)

   [We rely on our "high-life" to serve as the paragon that should always come
   from above, that our philanthropic ladies need to keep in mind when they
   only partially aid with their hand-outs. Real charity is complete. It teaches
   the poor to be self-sufficient, giving them habits that elevate them morally
   and individually.]

The irony in the above piece is, of course, directed at the ladies of the Society
of Beneficence. The verb "elevate" illustrates Grierson's uncritical use of the
class metaphors prevalent among the high-class women. The critique of the
high-class philanthropic society ladies does not include a critique of their class
status but rather of how they define this class status. In contrast, Grierson
includes numerous examples of European aristocratic women attending techni-
cal schools and working. Housework is defined as a natural activity for women
of all classes, and the Protestant ethic of the dignity of work pervades Grierson's
work. In the context of the presentation of herself as a professional, she uses the
word worker-"trabajadora"-which establishes an intimacy between her and
working-class women and distances her from Argentinean upper-class women
who are always described as indolent. Grierson's self-definition is an out-and-
out criticism of the way upper-class women define themselves. Grierson
opposes the upper-class women's inactivity to the professional women's move-
ment, and the upper-class women's blood relationships with heroes of indepen-
dence to the professionals' own personal accomplishments. In this, she is a
direct heir ofJennie Howard, an inheritance she prides herself on in both her
Educacion and her autobiographical speech:

   Me hubiera llenado de satisfacci6n el haber llevado a la meta la primitiva
   escuela de Buenos Aires ("Escuela de Enfermeras y Masajistas"), donde se





Globe-Trotting Single Women - 105


   preparaban hombres y mujeres, que creo que se han empleado en todas las
   reparticiones y hogares de nuestro pais y que llamo "mi obra"; pero los
   obsticulos que encuentra toda "pioner" [sic] en su camino han sido insu-
   perables; dos veces que fui a Europa, al volver, encontr6 la escuela deshecha,
   y hoy continua en tal estado. Nuestra mania por la reorganizaci6n es fatal
   para las instituciones; pero la semilla esti sembrada y otros recogeran mis
   tarde los frutos, reconociendo que la base en que se fund6 la instituci6n es
   la 6nica verdadera, pues se amolda a nuestras costumbres, a pesar de haber
   sido copiada de los mej ores institutos extranjeros, y sobre la cual espero se
   afirmen todas las instituciones que surgen, como es actualmente la escuela
   de la asociaci6n que lleva mi nombre. (133)

   [It would have filled me with satisfaction to have reached my goal with the
   primitive school of Buenos Aires ("School of Nurses and Masseurs"), that
   prepared both men and women, that I think have been employed in all of
   the government departments and homes of our country and that I call "my
   work." But the obstacles that every "pioneer" encounters in his way have
   been insurmountable. The two times that I went to Europe, I found the
   school undone upon my return, and today it continues in that state. Our
   mania for its reorganization is fatal for the institutions, but the seed has been
   sown and others will later reap its fruit, recognizing that the basis on which
   the institution was founded as its only true foundation, for it has been
   adapted to our customs despite having been copied from the best foreign
   institutes, and I hope that all of the institutions that emerge affirm the
   quality of the school of the association that bears my name.]

These two paragraphs illuminate the relationships that Grierson establishes
between identities. On the one hand, her use of the word "pioneer" to refer to
herself is symptomatic of the way she always talks about herselfnever ashamed
of tooting own horn if she is discussing her work. Furthermore, she uses the
word in English, a word that in Argentina at the turn of the century resonated
with references to the U.S. westward campaigns. The description of her work
is done in the image coined by Sarmiento: the sown seed. In her case, as in
Sarmiento's, the seed is foreign, but Grierson claims that it is in accord with
what is "ours." The image throws light on Grierson's model of identity. The
foreign schools she imitated function as models to which the very elusive
Argentinity that Grierson refers to adapts well. Her model for femininity is the
northern European bourgeoisie, and in her indefatigable activities as teacher,
founder of schools, traveler, and textbook writer, Grierson seeks to produce
Argentine women who would replicate the European model.
   This lack of preoccupation with the idiosyncratic distinguishes Cecilia





io6  - Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


Grierson's work from that of the next writer I treat, Ada Maria Elflein. In
Elflein's work, there is a deep involvement in the debate on nationality and
nationalism which became crucial during the centenary. Both Grierson and
Elflein participated in the celebrations. Grierson, as was already mentioned,
presided over the feminist congress;Elflein attended both but read a paper only
at the National Congress. Nothing shows the difference between Ada Elflein
and Cecilia Grierson more clearly than the very subject Elflein addressed: the
importance of wearing a rosette during patriotic functions.When at the turn of
the century Grierson traveled to Europe to find models of womanhood and of
women's education to imitate, she could not have anticipated that ten years
later her opponents in the National Council ofWomen, rooted as they were in
the past and in the traditional, would actually be at the forefront of political
debates. Nothing could be further from her imagination, we might guess, than
the fact that professional women of immigrant origin educated in European
models, like Ada Maria Elflein, would participate in the project of defining a
national agenda. Elflein's travel writing needs to be read in the context of the
new definitions of nation and of national identity that surfaced during the
centennial and which became hegemonic during the 1930s. In her work, we
witness a shift to the interior, to the provinces, to the creole. For the first time,
an Argentinean woman travel writer will speak actively of nationality and will
give content to a definition ofArgentinity.Yet, within this writing preoccupied
with the nation, there is also in embryo a new model of femininity which
allows for more sexual and physical freedom for women.

Into the Land/Nation: Ada Maria Elflein Travels to the Heartland
When Ada Maria Elflein was born in Buenos Aires in 18 8o, Cecilia Grierson
was already twenty-one, the director of a normal school, and a high school
biology teacher who was considering becoming a medical doctor. Far from
being anecdotal, their age difference helps account for the different outlook
each author had on nationalism. Elflein is the first author treated in this study
for whom the definition ofArgentinity is important. Born right after the Cam-
paign to the Desert, in a country which had already circumscribed its territo-
ries, Elflein came of age at a time when railways were uniting the country for
the first time and free lay education for all was becoming a reality.Together with
these achievements came the interrogation of what these measures of progress
were doing for the country and how the numerous immigrants could be made
part of the nation.
   The first normal schools established by Sarmiento, like the one where
Grierson studied, had almost no typically "Argentinean" elements.The Escuela
de Parani, the model for all the Argentinean normal schools, offered only two





Globe-Trotting Single Women -107


courses on Argentinean history out of a total of one hundred and twenty re-
quired courses. As late as 1877, 85.4 percent of students attending normal
schools in the littoral did not study Argentine history and 77.1 percent did not
study geography.This started to change in the 188os when the introduction of
a capitalist mode of production in Argentina and the massive arrival of immi-
grants required the creation of an imagined community in which both the
newcomers and most conservative inhabitants of the provinces would be in-
cluded. The new Argentine nation, with the state as its political entity and
education as its interpellating force, created a narrative of Argentinity which
challenged other identities such as regional identities, ethnicity, and national
origin. To this end, the 1420 law of free, obligatory, and lay education was
passed in 1883.The school programs were changed: in the national schools
the number of hours devoted to Argentine andAmerican history was increased:
in 1874 there were four weekly hours ofArgentine and American history and
eight hours of general history; in 1888 seven and a half and six and a half,
respectively, and the relationship between hours devoted to Argentine and
American history and general history had reversed with twelve hours for the
former, six for the latter (Tedesco 97). Furthermore, the study of foreign lan-
guages had decreased from 24 percent to 14 percent in the period 1874-88
(Tedesco 70)."4
   Ada Maria Elflein's literary project was foregrounded by the changes in the
educational system and the preoccupation with Argentinean (rather than
cosmopolitan, modern, European) education. The daughter of German im-
migrants and a professional writer of children's stories and of nonfictional
"criollista" writings on the Argentine landscape and its inhabitants, Elflein had
training as a teacher but gave up teaching early in life when through a recom-
mendation of General Bartolom6 Mitre, she got a full-time job as a reporter for
La Prensa. Most of her writings were first published in La Prensa in the form of
travel accounts, short stories, or "tradiciones." Elflein was a professional writer
who wrote profusely and regularly. Her writing was fully devoted to finding a
definition of nationality that would serve her-a daughter of immigrants-and
in this sense, her definition of nationality is very different from that of most of
the members of the National Council ofWomen. Unlike them, Elflein has no
historical ties to the land. In her writing she struggles to create these ties, to
write them, and hence her insistence on stressing the Argentinean element of
landscapes and characters. Elflein is also the first Argentinean female traveler
who can be included in the list of adventurers.15 She visited Uruguay, Chile,
and the Andes, and she descended into mines, traveled on horseback, ventured
into the jungle in Misiones, and climbed the Cerro Pelado. If her originality as
a traveler is shown in her explorations, it is also clear in her choice of destina-





io8  - Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


tions which in itself bears testimony to an increasing engagement with the
definition of the nation.
   The work I will analyze here is made up of a series of weekly travel articles
that Elflein wrote for La Prensa during the months ofApril and May of 1918.
At the time of her death in 1919, she had planned to compile the articles into
a book under the title Por campos serranos.'6 The series had the objective of

   divulgar los conocimientos sobre diversas regiones de nuestro pais in-
   teresantes por su belleza, por sus recuerdos hist6ricos, riquezas naturales o
   por cualquier otro atractivo. (April 8)

   [spreading knowledge about diverse regions of our country that are inter-
   esting because of their beauty, their historical memories, their natural riches
   or for whatever other attractive element.]

Other objectives mentioned include luring tourists into regions which were
not easily reachable by railway and encouraging women to travel unchaper-
oned. In this quotation, which will be further analyzed later on, Elflein's femi-
nism and independence are associated with the modern nation and are posited
in opposition to the Hispanic past:

   Aparte de los prop6sitos ya expresados me guiaba en este viaje-como en
   los anteriores-el interes de animar a nuestras mujeres a deponer sus temores
   y lanzarse a viajar, no dire solas, pero de dos, o tres, o cuatro, independientes
   y movedizas, olvidadas de prejuicios y falsos escripulos, valientes, briosas y
   alegres. jCuintas senoras y ninas pasan el verano tristemente en sus casas por
   no tener un padre, un hermano o un esposo para acompanarlas! Pienso que
   si se reuniesen, formaran grupos pequenos o grandes comitivas, prescin-
   dieran de las tradiciones moriscas y salieran a gozar de las bellezas de
   nuestra tierra, pronto adquiririan la convicci6n de que en todo momento
   las rodeaba y protegia la exquisita cultura argentina. (April 8)

   [Apart from the already expressed objectives I was guided-as I have been
   previously-by an interest in encouraging our women to lay down their
   fears and embark on trips, I will not say alone, but in groups of two or three
   or four, independent and mobile, forgetful of their prejudices and false
   scruples, brave, enthusiastic and happy. How many ladies spend their sum-
   mers sadly at home without a father, a brother, or a husband to accompany
   them! I think that if they got together, they would form small groups or
   large processions, they would do away with the Moorish traditions and
   would go out and enjoy the beauty of our land. Soon they would acquire
   the conviction of being surrounded and protected at every moment by
   exquisite Argentinean culture.]





Globe-Trotting Single Women - 109


The underlying definition of national identity which appears in the paragraph
above is a conflation of the vision of nation espoused by the participants of the
two women's congresses Elflein attended in 1910. On the one hand, it echoes
the involvement of the National Congress with the interior and the return to
the land; on the other it champions a model of womanhood which the mem-
bers of the internationalist feminist conference applauded. The "other" in
Elflein's text is the Moor (morisco), a reference to the Hispanic past but also to
the "other" of the Hispanic past. In this way, she can reconcile the two ideolo-
gies (in the same way she reconciled them by attending the two conferences)
and include modern unchaperoned women of immigrant origin into the na-
tion.
   The modern woman, whom Elflein envisions as also the patriotic woman,
takes elements from the Hispanic past (a system of values, an attachment to the
land) and integrates them with the positive elements of northern European
feminism (freedom of movement, intelligence).This modern patriotic woman
has enough freedom of movement to travel, but in doing so she does not look
for foreign models to imitate but rather for what is "Argentinean." Elflein uses
the adjective "Argentinean," even in contexts in which it is completely redun-
dant, to stress the existence of a national (albeit unstable) unifying entity.

Gender Trouble
Ada Maria Elflein is an interesting figure to consider the intersections of gender
and nation in Argentina during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Elflein is traditionally seen as a proto-nationalist even when a detailed analysis
of her work shows important areas of disagreement with the nationalists of the
time, especially in terms of gender. I want to suggest that Elflein constructed a
self-image as the rural teacher surrounded by children in order to create an
interstitial space in the society of the time to lead an independent life. Joan
Riviere defined femininity as a masquerade that a woman chooses in order to
disclose and present herself within the confines of patriarchal society. In her
analysis of Gabriela Mistral, Licia Fiol-Mata investigates the ways in which
Mistral uses patriarchal discourse to create for herself a space in which she is
free from the determinants of patriarchal mores. According to Fiol-Mata,
Mistral echoes heterosexist and procreationist ideologies to present herself as
the teacher of America and the mother of the continent in public, in order to
be able to avoid marriage and motherhood and to be a lesbian in private. In this
sense, Fiol-Mata contends, gender serves as a closet to Mistral. Elflein uses
similar tactics to those employed by Mistral. Like Mistral, she defines herself as
a teacher; she does not teach, however, but rather uses her education as a
teacher to become completely involved in literature. In her private life, Elflein
presents herself as a single woman who lives for decades with a female best





i    -"Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


friend.Julieta G6mez Paz, Elflein's biographer, describes this relationship as the
union of two orphans, but it was most probably a lesbian relationship. Elflein,
of course, never discusses her own sexuality, but she emboldens women to
travel alone, "brave, enthusiastic, and happy!" (April 28). Elflein herself will
always travel with her partner and lead women-only rock climbing and sailing
excursions.17
   Reading Elflein's travel texts, it is difficult to associate her with men of her
generation such as Gilvez, Rojas, and Lugones, although she shares their preoc-
cupation with nationality. In her textbooks and children's stories, Elflein strives
to contribute to an educational project that would assimilate immigrant chil-
dren into Argentinity.When one reads Elflein's nationalist texts, on the other
hand, it is difficult to associate her with the first generation feminists such as
Cecilia Grierson and Julieta Lanteri. It is only in the intersections of Elflein's
textbooks and her travel books that we can account for her combined concerns
with the homeland and the role of women in its history. Elflein contributes to
the nationalist discourse with innumerable legends, traditions, and children's
stories. She does, however, distance herself from the nationalists of the time vis-
a-vis women's roles. In that area, Elflein's commitment to the normal school
movement is unfaltering.What she presents in her texts, therefore, is a way to
bare nationalist discourse of the reactionary and sexist elements that limit
women's participation in public life.

Reading/Writing Margins
Elflein's descriptions, like Grierson's, echo those of Sarmiento, sometimes to
the point of using the same words to describe the same regions. The whole
collection of articles which make up her Por campos serranos is organized around
the contrast between civilization and barbarism, city and country. Even the title
of one of her books-De tierra adentro-exemplifies the economic organization
of the pieces: Buenos Aires as the center, the provinces as "tierra adentro," the
regions to which access from Buenos Aires required (still in 1918) a difficult and
troublesome trip.The longer the trip from Buenos Aires and from the cities, the
more the regions are described as enclosed areas, closed flowers which would
bloom once the civilizing forces from Buenos Aires (especially normal schools
and railways) opened them up. Elflein's trip is always narrated as a movement
into the "interior" from the cities, the few cities as the point from which the less
civilized interior-"adentro"-can be visited. And the city has "una atracci6n
ativica" [an atavistic attraction], reversing the use that Sarmiento makes of the
adjective: what is "ativico/a" in Facundo is the impulse toward barbarism, while
in Elflein's writing, civilization has already triumphed and has become natural-
ized. Alerting her readers to the possibility of a relapse into barbarism, she





Globe-Trotting Single Women - 111


includes a reference to the desert as exercising its primeval influences on her.
This only stresses the power Sarmiento had bestowed on the desert: it could
even corrupt an educated woman of European origin:

   Pronto dejamos atris los pesimos caminos del ejido y nos hallamos en la
   campana, donde segun hist6rica frase politica, todo suele ser camino.Atrave-
   sibamos la regi6n mediterrinea argentina tipica: esa zona arenosa, espinosa,
   seca, en cuyo suelo podria caer el diluvio sin dejar huellas, donde el viento
   se calienta y el sol arde furioso, zona que en mi ha ejercido siempre una
   fascinaci6n quizi ativica. (April 21)

   [Soon we leave behind us the terrible roads of the communal land and we
   find ourselves in the country where according to a historical political slo-
   gan everything is a road.We crossed the typical Argentinean Mediterranean
   region: that sandy, thorny, dry area on whose ground it could rain in torrents
   without leaving a trace; where the wind warms up and the sun blazes furi-
   ously, an area that has always exercised a perhaps atavistic fascination in me.]

In Literatura autobiografica argentina, Adolfo Prieto argues that the interest in
describing the Argentine scenery appeared in Argentina only after massive
immigration. Unlike some of her contemporaries, Elflein's interest in the scen-
ery and its inhabitants is undermined by her urge to see that scenery dramati-
cally changed by the forces of civilization. Even if she agrees with criollista
writers on the importance of the scenery in the definition of the national, she
captures it in the process of being modified, of being interfered with. Unlike
other writers whose contribution is depicting an unobliterated preindustrial
landscape, she shows the landscape begging to be obliterated and included in
capitalist exploitation. Elflein's travel writing interrupts the discourse of the
vanishing country life since it actually shows it as still existent but quickly
disappearing. This conflation of the extant and the disappearing is articulated
by her through the use of conventions from older forms of travel writing and
of Sarmiento's appropriations of this form.The very nature of the trip, from the
cities into the landscape, from civilization into barbarism, is paradigmatic. Some
parts of her narrative echo that of previous travelers:

   Por siglos ha caminado a traves de nuestros campos la tropa de carretas y por
   siglos mis caminar6 lenta, serena y pintoresca hasta que la via ferrea triunfe
   sobre ella. (April 17)

   [For centuries the troop of wagons have crossed our lands and for many
   more centuries they will cross, slowly, serenely and picturesquely until the
   railroad triumphs over them.]





I    -zPart 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


Elflein also situates the "criollos" in an anachronistic situation vis-a-vis the rest
of the country:

   La franqueza y generosidad con que los criollos de hace cien anos recibian
   al forastero desconocido, alli subsisten, alli florecen hoy como hace un siglo.
   (April 21)

   [The frankness and generosity with which the creoles of a hundred years
   ago received unknown foreigners, there they subsist, there they flourish
   today like a century ago.]

If we remember the debate after the Campaign to the Desert to decide the
nationality of the Indian populations, in which some congressmen had sug-
gested considering them foreigners (see chapter 3), this definition of the criol-
los reiterates the elements of the debate. The criollos are Argentine-born but
they are foreign inasmuch as they represent an older order. Travelers (Elflein,
the British travelers to whom her "forastero desconocido" is a veiled allusion)
have discursive authority over the criollos since they represent modernity and
progress. As representatives of the metropolis (Europe, Buenos Aires), these
travelers have the descriptive authority to represent these anachronistic beings.
This authority is exemplified by Elflein's use of the naming trope, another
convention of travel writing which allows the traveler to use his/her authority
to confer names, to codify the world. Elflein does this by first showing how
uninterested criollos were in codifying their own world:

      -C6mo se llama esta planta?

   -No se io.

     -Y aqu61 Arbol?

   -Arbol no mis es el nombre. (May 13)

   [What's the name of this plant?

   I don't know.

   And that tree?

   It's just called tree.]

By another related strategy, Elflein appropriates phrases and expressions from
the countryside and incorporates them into her text:

   El clima (segnn la expresi6n de una criollita que nos inform6 al respecto, en
   la regi6n "llueve mis mucho que poco") es sano y agradable sin extremos
   de calor ni de frio. (May 19)





Globe-Trotting Single Women - r13


   [The climate (according to the expression of the creole girl who told us
   about it: in the area "it rains much more than little") is healthy and pleasant
   without extremes of heat or cold.]

The language from the interior becomes then a tokenistic expression of na-
tionality in much the same way as the landscapes are incorporated into the
national consciousness as marks of Argentinity.
   Gender roles further illustrate the temporal distance between the time of the
narrative and the perceived anachronism of the order which is narrated: "Pa-
reciamos a veces,"Elflein writes,"estar en un hogar colonial como lo describen
los viajeros de otras 6pocas" (April 21) [Sometimes we seemed to be in colonial
homes like the ones the travelers of other times describe]. Elflein then describes
in detail being pampered and attended to, and she finishes the piece with a
description of the siesta, the house closed, everyone inside in indolent abandon.
The nostalgia that permeates the description, however, alerts the reader to the
anomalous characteristic of this situation. The following piece on the same
city  San Francisco del Monte-describes the counterpart of the placid situ-
ation described before: the normal school "en la que tantas esperanzas cifran los
habitantes de San Francisco y de toda la campana ..." (April 28) [in which the
residents of San Francisco and of all of the countryside place so much hope].
The anomalous nature of the placid siesta described is also stressed when, in
one of the few asides specifically aimed at informing the reader of tourist
options, the region is described as a nice place to spend "una temporada
agradable" (April 28) [a pleasant time].The departure from the tone is narrated
in "modernista" prose which further distances San Francisco:

   No se la trag6 [the Fenris wolf] aquella noche, pues el disco luminoso [the
   moon] brillaba plicidamente sobre San Francisco, cuando nuestros caballos
   cruzaron al galope sus calles olfateando la querencia. (April 28)

   [The Fenris wolf didn't swallow the moon that night, for the luminous disc
   shone placidly over San Francisco, while our horses galloped through its
   streets scenting out their home.]

The conflation of a German classic legend with the creole "querencia" serves
to distance San Francisco more from the present time where Elflein situates
herself.The horses, which replace the car Elflein and her friend use for most of
the trip, are used metonymically to refer to Elflein and her friend, who use the
energy and virility of the horses to distance themselves from the town where
they were included in a colonial family organization, which was of course very
limiting compared to the active space they inhabit as modern single women.
The use of the noun "querencia" situates the narrative in an authentically





1 14 - Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


criollo environment but also distances the time spaces further. "Querencia," a
criollo version of melancholy, becomes something which is sensorially appre-
hended by the horses. It is a new expression of the melancholic state in which
the undeveloped areas submerge Elflein. "Querencia" is therefore an Argen-
tinean version of melancholy as well as an idiosyncratic symbol of belonging in
the nation.
   To escape melancholy, the cities from the interior have to follow the ex-
ample of Buenos Aires. The interior is repeatedly referred to as melancholic,
lacking the energy and life of Buenos Aires. The descriptions of these cities
stress the lack of modernity:

   Pasada la primera impresi6n de interes que despierta todo lo nuevo, nos
   sentimos en la ciudad capital de la provincia, invadidos por la melancolfa [em-
   phasis added]. La edificaci6n chata, las calles flanqueadas de tapias de adobe
   y sin aceras a dos pasos del centro, escasos y pobres los sitios de recreo, la
   catedral en el mismo estado semi-concluido en que dicen se hallaba hace
   veinte anos, las calles vacias de gente, sin tranvias, y el conjunto dormido
   silencioso ... tal es San Luis.- No tiene vida esta ciudad?-preguntamos
   a amables vecinos y todos nos responden con la cohibici6n del enfermo
   que confiesa su mal:-No tiene ... (April 8)

   [After the initial interest that all new things awaken, we felt invaded by
   melancholy (emphasis added) in the capital city of the province. The flat
   construction, streets flanked with adobe walls and without sidewalks just a
   few steps from the center, scarce and poor recreation areas, the cathedral in
   the same half-finished state in which they say it was found twenty years ago,
   streets without people, without trams, and altogether asleep in silence ... so
   is San Luis. "Doesn't this city have any life?" we ask friendly neighbors and
   everyone answers with the restraint of the sick naming their ailment: "No
   it doesn't ..."]

I have already discussed how melancholy has been considered one of the ail-
ments of the contact zone. In the nonmetropolitan areas, the metropolitan
traveler is enslaved by the indolence and lack of activity prevalent in the region.
Melancholy and indolence are always presented as gripping phenomena from
which the metropolitan writer has to flee or run the risk of remaining forever
trapped. This connotation of the word "melancholy" merges in the quotation
above with another definition of the state coinciding also with colonialism: the
"mal du siecle." In my section on Lina Beck-Bernard, I have discussed how she
implicates the indigenous populations in this illness, how they become multi-
valent metaphors for colonialism, expansion, and disappearance. Elflein's de-





Globe-Trotting Single Women - 1 5


scription is at the intersection of the two definitions of melancholy: the city of
San Luis is therefore described as producing melancholy in its visitors but also
as melancholically waiting the demise of this melancholic state. Rather than
explicitly prescribing the solution, Elflein voices it through the inhabitants
(who are always referred to as "criollos"):

   Pero otros decian:

   ... Por eso el puntano, en general,-aparte de ser, como todos los criollos,
   muy sobrio y de pocas necesidades-no siente estimulo ni acicate. Que
   vengan obras de irrigaci6n, que vengan ferrocarriles. . . .Y que vengan
   muchos extranjeros-agreg6 otro caballero que se hallaba en la rueda.Y
   todos, al unisono repitieron:-;Ah, si! Que vengan muchos extranjeros
   sobre todo, con capital que es la fuente de las iniciativas. (April 8)

   [But others say:

   ...That is the reason why the inhabitant of San Luis, in general-aside from
   being, like all creoles, very sober and with few needs-does not feel any
   stimulus or incentive. Let them bring irrigation works, let them bring rail-
   roads...."And let them bring many foreigners" added another gentleman
   who found himself in the circle.And everyone repeated in unison:"Oh yes!
   Let them especially bring many foreigners, with their capital that is the
   source of initiative."]

This last sentence summarizes what Elflein puts forth as a model for Argen-
tinity: the mythification of the hilly and desertic landscape of the interior that
Sarmiento had blamed for being a source of barbarism, coupled with the
modification of this landscape through the modernizing forces from the lit-
toral.Elflein unequivocally suggests that the railways, the normal school system,
and industrialization will put an end to the malaise-producing elements of the
landscape.Yet she recovers them in writing; she codifies them and reserves them
a place in the imaginary construction of the nation in which she so actively
participated.
   Elflein's travelogue, like the entire corpus of her writing, is didactically
aimed at educating Argentineans in the glories of their history and the beauties
of their country. It is therefore not surprising that a large part of her work is
specifically produced to provide young readers with a code of landscapes and
historical figures against which to trace their own national identity. Her project
is different in tone and content but very similar in intent to that of the travel
writer I treat in the next chapter: Delfina Bunge de Gilvez. Bunge was also a
textbook writer and a writer of children's stories (as well as a poet, essayist, and





116 - Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930

autobiographer). Bunge's work, like Elflein's, is militantly didactic. The cause
she champions is, however, quite different from Elflein's. Bunge attacks lay
education and modernization, and her work expresses the need to reintegrate
Catholicism into the nation as a defining element. It is not surprising, therefore,
that although she traveled to Europe several times, she writes a travelogue on an
experience in the Middle East. Set against Jews and Arabs as "others," Bunge
celebrates the glories of Catholicism and calls the Catholic Church her "patria,"
the space where Bunge's definitions of her own identity did not have to include
non-Catholics and even non-Christians. Written in the second half of the
1920s, Bunge's travelogue anticipates a reactionary and racist discourse which
was at the heart of the insurrectionary military movement which in 1930
overthrew President Hip6lito Irigoyen and initiated a cycle of military r6gimes
that would mark the civil life of Argentina for the next fifty years.


















8


The Spiritual Trip: Delfina Bunge de Galvez's

Tierras del Mar Azul




In Viaje alrededor de mi infancia, perhaps Delfina Bunge's most widely read book,
there is an episode that is illuminating in the context of the present volume.
Young Delfina is required by her teacher to write a travel account. Perplexed,
the child decides to plagiarize from one of the travel books her father has
written and published. The ploy is discovered and Delfina is punished. The
episode is interesting because it points to several elements which are suggestive
in an analysis of her work and of her time. The assignment in itself shows that
the teacher was used to instructing students who were indeed exposed to
traveling en touriste.1 Delfina's response to the assignment-" C6mo de escribir
sobre viajes yo que nunca he viajado?" [How can I write about travel if I've
never traveled?]-is paradigmatic of the meaning of travel and traveling at the
time. Bunge has indeed traveled before she is assigned this task: she spends her
life between Buenos Aires and the family estancia, but she does not interpret
this as traveling. Traveling is what she reads in the books her father and uncle
wrote on going to Europe; for Bunge, the trips from the family casona in
Buenos Aires to the family estancia in C6rdoba are just another form of imma-
nence, of immobility, an immobility which she will greatly praise in her Viaje
alrededor de mi infancia and to which I will return later in the chapter. I will claim
that by the end of her literary career, Bunge had not only written against the
autobiographical tradition to which her Viaje alrededor de mi infancia belonged
but had also subverted the forms of travel writing in Argentina with her Tierras
del mar azul.





S18  - Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


   Tierras del mar azul is a travel book in which Bunge challenges modes of self-
representation for women of the upper class in Argentina. With this text she
also adds a site to the European trip: the Mediterranean and the Holy Land. By
this very conscious gesture, Bunge includes religion in travel literature (she is
the first woman to do so) and coins a landscape where anxieties about immi-
gration appear in the form of an ethnographic study on Arab and Jewish cus-
toms.The travel book Delfina Bunge published during the 1920s about a trip
taken in 1926 with her husband and her three children-Tierras del mar azul-
is a description of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem through Brazil, African and Arab
countries, and culminating in Rome. In Memorias de la vida literaria, Manuel
Galvez describes how he and his wife sold their house to take this trip because
they needed a respite from life in Buenos Aires. Both Bunge and Gilvez were
commissioned to write about the trip; Galvez produced travel accounts for
Caras y Caretas, Bunge for La Prensa. While both of them planned to have their
accounts published in book form, only Bunge achieved this purpose.We can
only speculate on the reasons, but I believe that the involvement both writers
show with spiritual issues was more welcome in women than in men. In Visto,
oido y recordado, Daniel Garcia Mansilla (Eduarda Mansilla's son) claimed that he
would never become an important figure in Argentina because he was related
to Rosas and he was a Catholic. Garcia Mansilla argued that the discourse of
spirituality was not welcome in men, although by the 1920s it was becoming a
privileged discourse for women. Most of Bunge's other prose works also advo-
cate religiosity and spiritual growth and condemn social movements such as
socialism and feminism for subverting the order of family life and leading to the
spiritual depravation of women and young people.
   Manuel Galvez published a travel book called El solar de la raza (1913) early
in his career. Like Bunge's Tierras del mar azul, El solar was an unconventional
travel book because it was devoted to his trip to Spain and to glorifying
Hispanism as well as Castilian culture, its spirituality, and its religious faith. One
of the most outstanding characteristics of this travelogue is that it sets up Spain
as the center of what should be the trip to Europe of the Argentinean elites.
Together with Ricardo Rojas's El alma espaiola, El solar reevaluates the role of
Spain in the definition ofArgentina.
   Delfina Bunge's work goes one step further in reevaluating the role of Eu-
rope and the Middle East as others against whom to construct Argentina as an
imagined community. The corpus of her work is very diverse and includes
poetry written in French, textbooks, spiritual essays, her autobiographical Viaje
alrededor de mi infancia, and her travel book Tierras del mar azul. The last two texts,
Viaje alrededor de mi infancia and Tierras del mar azul, are autobiographical in
different ways, and a comparison of them can serve to theorize the kind of





Delfina Bunge de Gilvez's Tierras del Mar Azul -119


subjectivity Bunge is putting forth in her later text. Viaje alrededor de mi infancia
can be read together with other works by upper-class women written at ap-
proximately the same time. These texts idealize childhood and narrate the life
of women of the upper class as an uninterrupted continuum of parties, social
visits, and cultural diversions. In these texts, the personal is something to dwell
on, to narrate in detail. These writings always include a thorough journey
through the intricacies of family and blood relations. In Tierras del mar azul, in
contrast, Bunge moves away from the conventions of the autobiographical into
a text where ideas and ideology are explicitly privileged and the personal is
erased in the process. Delfina Bunge, therefore, shares with the other travel
writers in this chapter the type of impersonal discourse where the personal and
the interior, characteristics par excellence of female travel writing, are com-
pletely absent. In Bunge's case, this anomaly not only marks a departure from
the conventions of the genre but also a distancing from her own class status and
from the kind of writing women in her social class produced at the time. Her
writing on this trip is far less personal than that of her husband's, and she is the
one who gets her travel accounts published as a book. Her work not only erases
the personal in terms of family relationships and of accommodations but also
in terms of her husband's literary successes. Whereas Gilvez dwells on the
meetings with famous literary figures of the stature of Marinetti, Bunge pre-
sents herself as the anonymous traveler, deeply involved in the religious expe-
rience that traveling in non-Christian but biblical lands can afford her.
   Bunge's travel book also challenges the premise that the traditional Euro-
pean trip of the Argentine elites is flawed because it appeals to the aesthetic and
not the spiritual needs of the travelers:

   jCuintos hay que van a Europa, cinco, seis veces, y no piensan jamis en ir
   a Jerusalem! Cristianos que no suenan sino con Londres y con Paris. Son,
   sin duda, intensas las impresiones de arte que Paris o Londres pueden
   darnos. Pero, aes esto comparable con lo que en Palestina nos espera? (195)

   [How many go to Europe, five, six times, and never think of going to
   Jerusalem! Christians who dream but of London and Paris. Powerful in-
   deed are the impressions of art that London and Paris can offer us. But, is
   this comparable with what awaits us in Palestine?]

Structured as the narration of a pilgrimage, the trip Bunge narrates starts in
Brazil, takes her through the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and ends in
Rome with the conflation of the two elements that Bunge sees as antithetic in
the quotation above: the artistic and the spiritual. It is not surprising that what
Bunge says about Rome is that





120  - Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


   Yo s6lo quise dar esta impresi6n de Patria que en Roma nos aguarda. Esta
   alegria de ser recibido como un hijo en el abrazo de las columnatas de San
   Pedro. (214)

   [I only wanted to give this impression of fatherland that awaits us in Rome.
   This happiness of being welcomed like a son in the arms of Saint Peter's
   colonnades.]

This embrace is particularly suggestive if we read it in the context of another
embrace Bunge had referred to before. In her description of"the old Cairo" as
she calls it, she mentions a mosque with special characteristics:

   Esto pasa cerca de la entrada, en una especie de patio que precede a la
   mezquita o forma parte de ella, y no lejos de dos columnas cercadas por
   alambres. Entre estas columnas, dice la leyenda, s6lo puede pasar un hombre
   honrado, y han tenido que cercarlas por los muchos que, queriendo hacer
   alarde de honradez, han muerto apresados por ellas. (106)

   [This takes place near the entrance, in a kind of courtyard that precedes the
   mosque or forms part of it, and not far from two wire fenced columns.
   Between these columns, goes the legend, only an honest man can pass; but
   they have had to close them off due to the many who, wanting to make a
   show of their honesty, have died in their grasp.]

It is interesting to note the contrast between the loving, embracing columns of
Catholicism and the dangerous, murderous columns of Islam. In her trip,
Bunge sets herself and what she considers Argentinean against two foreign
peoples: Muslims and Jews. Her portrayal of both groups responds to very
different prejudices. In her portrayal of Muslims, she echoes prevalent European
views of Islam and Argentinean rewritings of these views which always associ-
ated Muslims with barbarism. In her portrayal ofJews, her discourse is imbued
with the anti-Semitism of the contemporary nationalistic discourse in the
country. Muslims are presented as metaphors for the barbaric elements within
Argentina, Jews as an imminent danger to Argentinity as spirit.
   Bunge's writing is defined by a hierarchy in which being Argentinean is
associated with the past, with ancestry, and with a connection to the land, but,
above all, with Catholicism. Bunge repeatedly uses the word "patria" to refer
specifically to the motherland of the Catholic Church. Immigration is pre-
sented as a dissipating element which has brought on the current spiritual crisis
of the country. It is therefore important to recover the spiritual elements, which
is exactly what Bunge is doing in her trip to Jerusalem. Europe and the Middle
East do not represent aesthetic pleasure for her but rather spiritual growth.The





Delfina Bunge de Gilvez's Tierras del Mar Azul - 121


contrast between wealth and poverty, the economic and the spiritual, is at the
forefront of her writings. Let us examine her judgment on possible immigrants:

   Pienso que quiz5 alguno de estos pequenuelos que ahora chapotean en el
   barro, con los pies descalzos se ir5 a probar fortuna a aquella ciudad que bien
   conozco.... Qu6 le ofrecemos alli? El conventillo horrendo y la fibrica,
   con el solo respiradero del cinemat6grafo norteamericano de deshecho
   (ladrones y"vampiresas").Y cuando se haya civilizado tanto que sepa ya leer,
   se le venderin, por pocos centavos, revistas de un lodo mis pernicioso, por
   cierto, que 61 de estas callejuelas.Y me entra una gran pena y el deseo de
   gritarle: "Quedate, pequenuelo, aunque sea en las cercanias del Templo de
   Serapis; si en estas ruinas se oculta algin demonio adverso, mil otros te
   esperan en la gran ciudad.... No dejes que por un poquito menos de
   miseria material-jy ain quien sabe!-tanta riqueza como estas tierras
   ofrecen a tu espiritu." (78-79)

   [I think that perhaps one of these little ones, now splashing in the mud, with
   bare feet, will go and try his fortune in that city I know so well....What do
   we offer him there? The horrible tenements and factory with the only
   respite of North American cinema in disarray (thieves and "vamps"). And
   when he has been civilized to the extent that he knows how to read, he will
   be sold, for a few cents, magazines of mud certainly more pernicious than
   that of the narrow streets.And I feel a great sorrow and the desire to yell to
   him: "Stay here, little one, even if near to the Temple of Serapis; if some
   adverse demon is hiding in these ruins, a thousand others await you in the
   big city.... Don't leave for a little less material misery-and who knows!
   so much richness as this land offers your spirit."]

This portrayal of the life of the recent immigrants to Buenos Aires is populated
by the stock images used by the incipient nationalistic movement: the "con-
ventillo," lay culture, public education. The ironic reference to the forces of
civilization envisioned by the generation of 188o, especially public education
and its massive literary campaigns, is compared to the mud of the streets of
Naples.The spirituality Bunge finds in her trip to Europe is contrasted with
the worldliness and poverty of spirit she finds in Buenos Aires. Poverty is
presented as dignified in Italy, where it is close to the origins of Western
civilization, but as the source of evil and corruption of spirit in a lay (and
heretic) society such as urban Argentina.
   Muslims had been used by writers such as Sarmiento in comparisons with
the gauchos. The gauchos and their culture were likened to nomadic Islamic
groups in Palestine in a portrayal undoubtedly borrowed from French Roman-





122  - Part 3. Shifting Identities, 1900-1930


ticism. In Bunge's portrayal, however, Muslims represent barbarism because
they are not Christian, and the gaucho is therefore absent from the comparison
since by the time Bunge is writing, gauchos had already become canonized
figures representing what was Argentinean in opposition to the foreignness of
immigrants.
   In Bunge's text, the narrative of self takes second place to the narrative of
nationality, which is reinterpreted as a spiritual narrative. Bunge uses Orien-
talism, in Lisa Lowe's terms,"as a matter of cultural quotation, or of the repeti-
tion of cultural signs" (2). Her cultural reservoir includes French Romantic
novels andArgentinean quotations of French Romantic Orientalisms. She con-
centrates, however, very specifically on what Arabs do in open spaces, neglect-
ing completely the discourse of the interiors which seemed particularly attrac-
tive for other women travelers.There are no references to family relations and
domestic arrangements in either her own world or in the places she visited.
   Tierras del mar azul undermines the relevance of her own public life in an
attempt to highlight her mission as a Catholic propagandist. Her book, how-
ever, could not be read as a compendium of gossip and travel suggestions like
many travel books published at the time but rather as an invitation to join in the
spiritual search of its writer.
   As we have seen, the three travel writers I treat in this part of the book
Cecilia Grierson,Ada Maria Elflein, Delfina Bunge-do not fit into the char-
acteristic delimitations of female travel writers: they do not write about the
private or the "feminine," and their self-configuration is not carried out in
terms of a "personal" self but rather in terms of a professional or a collective self.
The mere existence of these texts bears testimony to changing attitudes in
Argentina toward the professionalization of women and toward the strict divi-
sion of public and private as the spaces of men and women. Cecilia Grierson
fought for the opening up of public spaces for women.Ada Elflein gave these
new female spaces a national content. Delfina Bunge added a religious ele-
ment to the definition of nation and created a racist and reactionary discourse
to resist the laity and the cosmopolitanism of the new nation. Even if in the
193 Os her ideology gained momentum, it was ultimately doomed to failure,
although some of its contents live uncomfortably on in the present.

























Introduction
   i. There are conflicting views regarding the veracity of the official version of
Argentinean history that places the first singing of the national anthem in Mari-
quita Sanchez's soiree. Chilean painter Pedro Subercasseaux painted El himno
nacional en la sala de Maria Sanchez for the hundredth anniversary of the May
Revolution in 1910 basing his portrayal in the narration of the event that appeared
in Pastor Obligado's Tradiciones. See Sienz Quesada 64, 327.
   z. For an analysis of the connections between different forms of subalternity,
see Rodriguez (1996).
   3. See Salessi.
   4. See Clifford (11997), Pratt (1987), and Taussig.
   5. Grewal ties the two terms to show how they functioned together within
European colonialism: "Both 'home' and 'harem' are, I argue, relational national-
ist constructs that require the deployment of women and female bodies within the
antagonistic and comparative framework of colonial epistemology" (Home and
Harem 5). Feminist scholars have been examining the complex relationship be-
tween women travelers as witnesses and participants in colonialism. See, for ex-
ample, Chaudhuri and Strobel; Grewal and Kaplan; Lowe; and Mills.
   6. See Prieto (1996) and Vinas (11971, 1998). Recent works on travel writing
published in Argentina include Kupchik, Monteleone, and Szurmuk.
   7. See Franco (11979).
   8. Feminist scholars have been working on the role of gender in the construction
of national identities in Latin America for more than a decade. See, for example,
Fletcher (11994), Garrels (1987), Masiello (1992), Rodriguez (11994), and Sommer.

1. A House, a Home, a Nation: Mariquita Sanchez's
Recuerdos del Buenos Ayres Virreynal
   i. See Ribera 298-99.
   z. This letter is published in Sienz Quesada's biography of Mariquita Sinchez,





124  - Notes to Pages 20-28


Mariquita Sanchez: Vida politica y sentimental. Laiseca's Cartas de Mariquita
Sanchez contains the most thorough collection of Sanchez's correspondence.
   3. Mariquita Sinchez traveled to Montevideo in 1838 and lived there off and
on until 1852.
   4. In Jose Mirmol's Amalia, one of Argentina's foundational novels, for ex-
ample, the scene that depicts the party includes an example of "bad poetry"
penned and read by Mercedes Rosas de Rivera. To be a Federal poet was synony-
mous with being a "bad poet" and with lacking sensibility and aesthetic apprecia-
tion. By class extraction, Mercedes Rosas could have been a good poet, but her
relationship with Rosas and the Federals ruined that possibility. The scene in
Amalia also points to something else: Mirmol, a staunch Unitarian, shows Rosas
unsuccessfully trying to imitate a Unitarian event, producing a poet (and a female
one at that) and appreciating poetry, when poetry and poetic sensibility were asso-
ciated with the Romantic Unitarians.
   5. Sanchez's mother opposed the marriage on economic grounds. Marriages
between cousins were common and were encouraged by colonial society. The
wealthy groom who had been selected by Sanchez's parents to marry their only
daughter was much older than she. Sanchez's second marriage was as scandalous
as her first. She married her daughters' piano teacher, seven years her junior, nine
months after her first husband's death, and she gave birth to their first child seven
months after the wedding. For more on Sanchez's private life, see the biography by
Maria Sienz Quesada.
   6. Susan M. Socolow has analyzed the institutionalized procedure by which
children could challenge their parents' opposition to an undesirable marriage in
the colonies. For more information on the mechanics of the ecclesiastical proce-
dure, see Martin 104-40. Both Socolow and Martin stress the increased flexibility
of patterns of marriage in the Spanish colonies in contrast to Spain.
   7. The level of unrest brought on by Camila O'Gorman's elopement with a
priest and the seriousness this elopement had in the context of Rosas's government
is symptomatic of the way in which the level of control a government had over its
middle- and upper-class women was an index of its legitimacy. Drawing from the
same discourse, Unitarians and Federals used the metaphor of the abducted daugh-
ter (a victim, undesiring, passive) and the fallen woman ad nauseam to discuss the
ills of the nation. An article published in El Mercurio de Chile expresses this prob-
lematic very clearly:

   Ha llegado a tal extremo la horrible corrupcion de las costumbres bajo la
   tirania espantosa del "Caligula del Plata," que los impios y sacrilegos sacer-
   dotes de Buenos Aires huyen con las ninas de la mejor sociedad, sin que el
   infame sitrapa adopte medida alguna contra esas monstruosas inmoral-
   idades. (Quoted by Enrique Molina)

   [The horrible corruption of customs under the tyranny of "Caligula of the
   Plata" has reached such an extreme that the impious and sacrilegious priests





Notes to Pages 29-41 -125


   of Buenos Aires Xee with the little girls of the best society without the
   infamous tyrant adopting any means against these monstrous immoralities.]
   8. Sienz Quesada's biography of Sinchez and recent publications on her writ-
ing by Maria Gabriela Mizraje have fostered a new interest in Sinchez as a more
complex and less stereotypical historical figure.
   9. Martin Thompson's father was an English Protestant, but he had supposedly
converted to Catholicism after a religious experience at sea. By converting to Ca-
tholicism, he opened up for himself a career in business in Buenos Aires and mili-
tary careers for his sons. In their analysis of Recuerdos de provincia, Altamirano
and Sarlo point out how "judio" and "hereje" function as insulting equivalents of
"extranjero" (1983: 188). It is interesting to speculate on the equation of foreign-
ness and Jewishness, which will become so clear during the first half of the twen-
tieth century.
   io. Other women writers use the trope of the dark stranger, a threatening figure
that is confused with an animal. In Emma de la Barra's Stella (discussed in chapter
6), for example, the "mushinga," a black child, scares angelic Stella who thinks the
black child is a strange animal.

2. Queen of the Interior: Lina Beck-Bernard's Le Rio Parana
   i. L'estancia de Santa Rosa was first published in the Revue de Deux Mondes
in 1864. It was recently reprinted in Argentina in a bilingual edition funded by the
National University of the Littoral and the Alliance Frangaise.
   z. For an insightful discussion of women-authored texts that resist the dis-
course of rape as the only possible way in which to narrate relationships between
white women and Indians, see Rotker (1997, 1999).
   3. For a discussion of antifigures in nineteenth-century French literature, see
Lowe 77.
   4. Her great-grandfather Conrad Pfeffel seems to have been the one who even
after his death opened the doors of the literary world for her. References to her in
French journals such as the Revue de Deux Mondes always highlight the impor-
tance of this ancestor who was responsible for her intellectual upbringing after the
murder of her father by one of his workers. The circumstances of her father's tragic
death also appear explicitly.
   5. Ezequiel Gallo explains:
   Diversas leyes se dictaron durante el periodo tendientes a estimular la coloni-
   zacion agricola. Se entrego tierra a precios bajos, alguna vez gratuita-
   mente, obligindose a quienes la recibian a subdividirla y a radicar familias
   de inmigrantes extranjeros en ellas. (Pampa, 38-39)
   [Several laws were passed during the period to stimulate agrarian coloniza-
   tion. Land was granted at very low prices, even for free sometimes. Those
   who bought or were given pieces of land were forced to subdivide them and
   populate them with foreign immigrants.]





iz6  - Notes to Pages 5 5-63


3. Eduarda Mansilla de Garcia's Recuerdos de Viaje: "Recordar es Vivir"
   1. "Recordar es Vivir" [To remember is to live] is the epigraph of Mansilla's
Recuerdos de viaje.
   z. For the British and American travelers, there was a further step: the owners
of the land also had to work it-to make it productive, to include this land and its
inhabitants in the production and exchange of capital. This argument was used to
justify appropriation and exploitation.
   3. Sommer uses these categories to talk about literary works, and I am using
them to refer to "real-life characters," but considering how the lives of these his-
torical figures were interwoven with the literary and political life of the country, I
see this analysis as a productive means for discussing social relations too.
   4. For a detailed analysis of the travel book tradition in Argentina, see Vinas,
De Sarmiento 141-211, and No6 Jitrik's introduction to Los viajeros.
   5. As a matter of fact, Maria Rosa Oliver wrote a book on the United States,
Amirica vista por una mujer argentina (1945), which is similar in tone to Eduarda
Mansilla's even though it addresses practical issues of being a female tourist more
directly.
   6. In Stella, a best-seller from the beginning of the twentieth century that I will
refer to in further detail in chapter 6, Emma de la Barra makes extensive use of the
space of the family "estancia" and contrasts life in the "estancia" to life in the city.
The "estancia" is used as a setting by women writers of this social class such as
Beatriz Guido and Silvina Bullrich well into the 1970s and 198os. Arturo Jauretche's
discussion of Beatriz Guido's Fin de fiesta and El incendio y las visperas in El
medio pelo en la sociedad argentina analyzes the trope of the "estancia" and of
the upper class's literary perceptions of space from a nationalist perspective.
   7. Eduarda Mansilla could exorcise the past in a way that her brother Lucio V.
could not do. Both Prieto (1966) and Molloy (1980, 1991) have studied the ways
in which the ghosts of General Lucio Norberto Mansilla and of Juan Manuel de
Rosas hovered around Lucio V. Mansilla and interfered with his possibilities of
political success.
   8. Buenos Aires became the capital of the country in 1880, and since the yellow
fever epidemic in 1871, the city had been going through a gradual transformation
from "la gran aldea" to a Paris-inspired metropolis. For a detailed description of
this process, see Francisco Bullrich.
   9. In Visto, oldo y recordado, Mansilla's son, Daniel Garcia Mansilla, devotes
a few lines to the impressions his family had on their return to Paris in 1873 after
their second stay in the United States:

   La capital de Francia presentaba todavia cicatrices de la derrota del 70 y de
   los graves incendios de la Commune. Las ruinas del Palacio de las Tullerias,
   con todas sus ventanas negras y quemadas, nos impresionaron hondamente.
   (122)





Notes to Pages 63-75  "127


   [The French capital still showed scars from the defeat of 70 and of the
   serious fires of the Commune.The ruins of the Palace of the Tuileries with
   all of its black and burned windows, deeply impressed us.]

   io. See for example Un amor.
   I I. Whenever Mansilla writes about North American women, she insists on
their whiteness, natural or obtained through the use of cosmetics:

   En ninguna parte existe mayor variedad de blanco de perla, blanco de lirio,
   blanco de cisne, blanco deVenus, y de cuantos blancos puedan ocurrir a la
   imaginaci6n fertilisima de un quimico poeta, que en el drug store de los
   Estados Unidos. (122)

   [Nowhere is there a greater variety of pearl white, iris white, swan white,
   Venus white, and of all the many whites that can occur to the fertile imagi-
   nation of a chemist-poet, than in the drug store of the United States.]

4. Interlude in the Frontier: Lady Florence Dixie's Across Patagonia
   i. This is often referred to as the ethnographic gaze.
   z. According to Mary Louise Pratt, the "arrival scene" is a stock scene in travel
narrative and a trope in the "language of conquest" ("Scratches" 35-37). Late-
nineteenth-century travel narratives dwell on the arrival scene in narrative but do
not include this scene in their sketches and, in turn, include sketches from where
the describing viewer is absent. The reason for this exclusion might be that the
visual similarity between sketches of conquest scenes (for example, of Columbus's
landing) and the observer/scientist arriving is too disturbingly overt for the scien-
tific nineteenth-century chroniclers who see themselves as writing against the tra-
dition of conquest glorification.
   3. Other sketches characteristic of the genre depict different activities in differ-
ent sketches. The European observer is always absent. See, for example, the illus-
trations of Guinnard's account in the Le Tour du Monde.
   4. Gayatri Spivak asserts that "[a] basic technique of representing the subaltern
as such (of either sex) is as the object of the gaze 'from above"' ("A Literary
Representation" 264).
   5. Maybe this kind of comparison can be looked at as a precursor of the work
of "Second Wave" feminist anthropologists who have, for some time, been using
fieldwork among tribal groups to make generalizations on gender roles. In Dixie's
case, there is never any overt declaration of why she is describing women.
   6. Even the use of terms such as "husband," "wife," and "matrimony" is un-
usual. Most travel writers refer to this type of relationship among Indians as
"mates" or "savage companions."
   7. See Newton, Ryan, and Walkowicz.





iz8  - Notes to Pages 78-94


5. Traveling/Teaching/Writing: Jennie Howard's
In Distant Climes and Other Years
   i. For an analysis of how these contradictions played themselves out in the
context of Argentina's political arena, see Guy.
   z. It can be argued that Sarmiento could have saved himself many problems if
he had selected Catholic teachers instead of Protestant ones. There were very few
Catholic teachers among the ones hired by Sarmiento, and several of them ended
up working for the upper-class ladies Sarmiento antagonized so much.
   3. Howard's narrative is self-effacing except in the very instance in which it
becomes the most racist and prejudicial. In the only instance in which Howard
uses the pronoun "I," she does so to express her prejudices, which, for some
reason, she is able to call more her own than any of the experiences or feelings she
had in Argentina:

   In general, the Argentine teachers are lacking in the matter of discipline and
   punctuality, and it is more difficult for the Latin race to speak the truth, Iam
   inclined to think, than it is for others. They also put off 'til tomorrow all
   things that can, would, or should be done today, so there were deeply
   grounded faults to be eradicated in the young teacher's training which will
   still take some generations to eradicate. (82)

   4. Work outside the home was still seen as dangerous for women as late as the
early 1900s and beyond. Women who worked outside the home were perceived as
always one step away from prostitution, which was also defined as sex outside
marriage.
   5. This we do not know for sure, since she never makes specific reference to her
own situation but to that of the American teachers in general.

6. Traveler/Governess/Expatriate: Emma de la Barra's Stella
   i. Alex is presented as a member of another race: her dispute with her cousins
is described as "[c]onflicto sin salida, porque se establecia entre personas que
siendo de la misma sangre, no eran de la misma raza . . ." (161) [an unresolvable
conflict because it was established between people who shared the same blood but
were not of the same race . . .]
   z. It is not clear where these virtues and values are supposed to come from.
They include Christian virtue, a belief in hard work, and a romanticization of the
spaces of simple life in the land.

7. Globe-Trotting Single Women
   i. An exception to the internationalist spirit of the celebrations was the Con-
greso Patri6tico de Senoras [Patriotic Conference of Ladies] presided over by Alvina
Van Praet de Sala. This conference, organized by members of the National Council
of Women, brought together mainly upper-class women from the traditional fami-





Notes to Pages 94-99 -129


lies who were active in charity organizations. The hegemonic discourse in this con-
ference was nationalistic with profuse references to the Hispanic past, to the heroes
of independence, and to the need to revitalize the spiritual values of the nation.
   z. Between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, Argen-
tina was the country which received the largest impact of European immigration in
the world. In 1910, half the population of Buenos Aires was foreign-born. See
Indec, and Korn.
   3. I am echoing Carlos Altamirano's use of the term "foundation." See his "La
fundacion de la literatura argentina."
   4. The use of "castellano" instead of "espanol" was a political decision. For the
definitions of the terms of the debate, see Alonso.
   5. Rojas and Gilvez were from the provinces, as were most of the other intel-
lectuals of the "generation of Ideas." For a discussion of how the families and
provinces of origin affected the construction of Rojas's and Gilvez's ideology, see
Cirdenas and Payi.
   6. In the 1940s, Gilvez went further in this direction with his revindication of
Rosas and the "caudillos."
   7. I am following here Masiello's analysis of Rojas's Eurindia. According to
Masiello, Rojas's representation of women "looks back to preindustrial values, to
an age when women were looked upon as the timeless yet silent protectors of state
virtue. Both an inspiration and a reward for man, this female body provides an
escape from the threats of modernity" (Between 140-41).
   8. I have briefly referred to the problematic of prostitution in the period in
chapter 5.
   9. Alfonsina Storni translated Delfina Bunge de Gilvez's poetry from French to
Spanish and was a friend of both Bunge and her husband, Manuel Gilvez. Storni -
who, like Gilvez's Raselda, became pregnant out of wedlock-showed in her life
how an economically independent woman could overcome the problems of such a
situation. Unlike Raselda, she did not have an abortion but kept her son, raised
him, and supported him.
   io. For the development of normal schools as a professional option, see Tedesco,
chapter 8. For a review of feminist movements at the beginning of the century, see
Carlson, chapters 4 through 7.
   I I. Victoria Ocampo is the Argentine writer who writes most about the prac-
tice. See parts i, z, and 3 of her autobiography. The lack of mobility for women in
Buenos Aires that Ocampo describes at length seems to have been class-deter-
mined. Researchers of the period stress the freedom of movement working-class
and lower-middle-class women had in the period. See Korn, chapters 3 and 5, the
introduction to Beatriz Sarlo's El imperio de los sentimientos, and chapter 3 of
Sarlo's Una modernidad periferica: Buenos Aires 1920-1930.
   12. Juana Paula Manso had also taken professional trips to investigate educa-
tional issues. A contemporary of Grierson, Julieta Lanteri, researched women's
health in Europe between the years 1907 and 1920.





130  - Notes to Pages 100-117


   13. This essay, which Grierson read in the Liceo de Senoritas N. i, is repro-
duced in its entirety in Taboada 127-40.
   14. The new spirit is expressed in a memo Minister of Education Eduardo
Wilde sent the principals of national schools in 1884:

   One teaches in the Argentinean Republic and for the Argentinean Repub-
   lic and everything that the Republic is concerned with physically and
   morally has to be paramount in education. (Memo ofEduardoWilde, min-
   ister of education, presented to Congress in 1883)

   [Se ensena en la Repnblica Argentina y para la Repnblica Argentina y es ella
   y todo lo que a ella interesa fisicamente y moralmente, lo que debe pre-
   dominar en la ensenanza.]

   15. This category of the adventurer - a single woman who travels unaccompa-
nied by men and has fun attempting challenging excursions -had a long tradition
in British travel writing by women. Much of the scholarship on British travel
writers stresses the exceptional quality of these women travelers and their accom-
plishments.
   16. All the articles from which I quote appeared in La Prensa during 1918. I
will therefore include only the specific dates. These articles have also been pub-
lished in my Mujeres en viaje 221-75.
   17. I have developed this aspect of Elflein's work in more detail in "Ada Maria
Elflein: Viaje al interior de las identidades."

8. The Spiritual Trip: Delfina Bunge de Galvez's Tierras del MarAzul
   1. The teacher is none other than the omnipresent governess of the children of
the rich. This same governess is also mentioned in Delfina's sister Julia's Vida and
in Victoria Ocampo's autobiography. Between Bunge's and Ocampo's text we can
reconstruct a list of students taught by the governess, which included President
Roca's daughter.



















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Index


Alberdi, Juan Bautista, 9, 26, 31, 37, 56
Alonso, Amado, 129n.4
Altamirano, Carlos, 125n.9
Amalia (Mirmol), 22, 124n.4
Arcos, Santiago, 58


Beck-Bernard, Charles, 40-41, 47, 51
Beck-Bernard, Lina, 4, 12, 17, 35, 39-51,
   64, 83, 114
Beerbohm, Julius, 70-71
Bullrich, Francisco, 126n.6
Bunge, Delfina, 6, 12, 63, 115-16, 117-
   22, 129n.9
Busaniche, Jose Luis, 40


Campaign to the Desert, 5, 55-56, 67, 77,
   112
Clifford, James, 72
Cott, Nancy F., 8 5


D'Amicis, Edmundo, 89
Darwin, Charles, 69
De Estrada, Liniers, 29
De Estrada, Santiago, 29, 33
De la Barra, Emma, 5-6, 89-93, 97, 98,
   125n.Io, 126n.6
Dickens, Charles, 83-84
Dixie, Florence, 5, 10, 12, 67-77, 83


Echeverria, Esteban, 9, 29
Elflein, Ada Maria, 6, 12, 97, 1o6-16, 122


Fabian, Johannes, 13, 74
Facundo, 3, 26, 31-32, 110
Fashion, 29, 32-36, 50
Fernindez, Juan Ramon, 82
Fiol-Mata, Licia, 109
Frias, Felix, 29


Gallo, Ezequiel, 125n.4
Gilvez, Manuel, 95-97, 110, 118-19,
   129n.5, 129n.6, 129n.9
Garcia Mansilla, Daniel, I18, 126n.9
Garrels, Elizabeth, 11
Generation of 1837, 3, 21-22, 26-27
G6mez Paz, Julieta, 110
Gorriti, Juana Manuela, 4, 21, 29
Grewal, Inderpal, 68, 13n.5
Grierson, Cecilia, 6, 12, 97-98, 99-106,
   110, 122
Guerra, Rosa, 4, 29
Guido, Beatriz, 126n.6
Gutierrez, Juan Maria, 29
Guy, Donna, 78


Hardy, Thomas, 77
Howard, Jennie, 5, 78-8 6, 104
Hudson, William Henry, 76, 82


Isaacs, Jorge, 22


Jauretche, Arturo, 126n.6
Jitrik, No6, 6






144 - Index


Kaplan, Cora, 44
Kirkpatrick, Susan, 7, 21
Korn, Francis, 129n.2, 129n.11
Kristeva, Julia, 8


Lanteri, Julieta, 98, 110, 129n.12
La Prensa, 98, 107-8
Lombroso, Gina, 98
Lopez y Planes, Vicente, 24
Lowe, Lisa, 1122
Ludmer, Josefina, 3, 12
Lugones, Leopoldo, 110
Luiggi, Alice H., 81


Mann, Horace, 79, 81
Mann, Mary, 79-80
Mansilla, Eduarda, 5, 7, 12, 29, 5 5-66
Mansilla, Lucio V., 57, 5 8, 126n.7
Manso, Juana Paula, 129n.z2
Maria (Isaacs), 22
Mirmol, Jose, 22, 124n.4
Masiello, Francine, 3, 11, 21-22, 129n.12
May Revolution, 59, 123n.1 (introduc-
  tion); celebration of, i, 94
Menem, Carlos, 13
Mistral, Gabriela, 109-10
Mitre, Bartolom6, 40, 84, 107
Miyoshi, Masao, 13
Mizraje, Maria Gabriela, 125n.8
Molloy, Sylvia, 24, 37, 94, 126n.7


National anthem, 1, z23n.1 (introduction)
Ngugi wa Thiongo, 113


Obligado, Pastor, 123 n.i (introduction)
Ocampo, Victoria, 7, 129n.11I
O'Gorman, Camila, 124n.7
Oliver, Maria Rosa, 57, 126n.
Ong, Walter, 13


Parera, Blas, 24
Pfeffel, Conrad, 39, 125n.
Pratt, Mary Louise, 6, 33, 127n.
Prieto, Adolfo, 22, III, z26n.


Prostitution, 78-79, 9 6-97
Pueyrred6n, Pridiliano, 48


Rivadavia, Bernardino, 25, 78
Robertson, John Parish, 79
Roca, Julio Argentino, 57, 77
Rodriguez, Ileana, i1
Rojas, Manuel, 95-97, 110, 118, 129n.5,
   129n.7
Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 21, 27-28, 40, 56,
   126n.7, 129n.6
Rosas, Manuelita, 42, 43-44, 47, 48-50,
Rotker, Susana, 125n.2
Rugendas, Johann Moritz, 17-19


Sienz Quesada, Maria, 20, 123n.i (intro-
  duction), 125n.8
Said, Edward, 13
Sinchez, Mariquita, 1, 4, 12, 14, 17-3 8,
   102, 123n.1 (introduction)
Sarlo, Beatriz, 125n.9, 129n.11
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 3, 5, 9, 29,
   37, 56, 58, 79, 81, 83, 85, 100, 105,
   106, 1110, 115, 128n.5
Slavery, 62; white slavery, 78-79
Society of Beneficence, 25, 29, 78, 8o, 102
Socolow, Susan M., 124n.6
Sommer, Doris, 11, 21, 56-57
Stolen, Kristi A., 41
Storni, Alfonsina, 98, 129n.9
Subercasseaux, Pedro, 29, 123n.1 (intro-
  duction)
Sugg, Redding S., 79


Teaching, 79, 82, 84-86, 129n.10,
   13on.14
Tedesco, Juan Carlos, Io6
Thompson, Martin, 25, 32, 125n.9
"Tricks of the Weak," 12


Urquiza, Justo Jose de, 40, 50, 56


Varela, Florencio, 29
Vifas, David, 7, 56, 123n.6 (introduction)







M6nica Szurmuk is assistant professor of Latin American literature at the Uni-
versity of Oregon. She is the author of Mujeres en viaje: Escritos y testimonios
(Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2000).