Ricardo Giraldess Amricas: Reappropriation and

Reacculturation in Xaimaca (1923)

J.P. Spicer-Escalante
Travel writing, from the era of the Encounter to the present day, has played an
integral role in the dialectical envisioning of Latin America and Latin American
culture by Europeans, North Americans and Latin Americans alike. In my
analysis of the cosmopolitan Argentine writer Ricardo Giraldess novel
Xaimaca (1923), I tackle this writers grappling with the Latin American
elites customary trip of acculturation to Europe. I demonstrate that, far from
blindly supporting the belief that culture is a principally metropolitan
phenomenon, Giraldes proposes the notion of cultural (re)discovery within
the Latin American context as seen through his protagonists journey from
Buenos Aires to Jamaica. Thus, Xaimaca is more than just the narration of a
simple journey; it is also a metaphorical pilgrimage towards the autochthonous,
as well as a proposal for a de-centring of Latin American cultural production
and the creation of a new continental aesthetic in the post-First World War era.

It is not possible for one to venture forth geographically without gaining

beauty, and to gain beauty is to gain new poetic possibilities.
High culture, which up until the present time had been the exclusive
patrimony of Europe and of the few Americans who had tasted it, is
beginning to express itself, in a marvellous fashion, as an essential product
of our civilisation.
R. Giraldes1

Although never formally considered by traditional critics of Latin American

literature as a high-art genre in itself,2 Latin American travel writing, often
ignored or (mis)labelled as history or science, or reduced to the level of
kitschy Travel Channel globe-trotting gossip, is coming into its own as an
important form of cultural production. It is beginning to be tackled from a
different angle which highlights its works as meaningful literary, social and

Studies in Travel Writing 7 (2003): 928

2003 The White Horse Press

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J.P. Spicer-Escalante
cultural texts, not just as reminiscences of conquest, enlightenment writings
on epistemological pursuits in unknown geographies, nineteenth-century
junket pieces on potential business ventures, sentimental objectifications of
indigenous cultures, or simple post-modern travel propaganda. A case in
point is the recognition by current criticism of the fact that in Latin America,
travel writing has historically been most important in terms of the definition
and continual re-definition of the continent as not only a geographic, but
also an important cultural and social space. Mary Louise Pratt has pointed
out, for example, that Latin America is a cultural contact zone, a place
where disparate cultures meet and clash, and grapple with each other, often
in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.3 However,
as her analysis also demonstrates, the bounds of this geocultural construct
ripe with contact and conflict go well beyond the anthropological plane.
The phenomenon that is the contact zone also lends itself to the notion of
the existence of a textual point of contact where literary works as disparate
as the epic poem and the essay duel and wrestle with each other in terms
of representation, ideology, and competing notions of epistemology, often,
at least initially in the colonial/imperial period, in disparate relations of
authority and subjugation.4
The general source of conflict which characterises the contact zone has
to do, in fact, with the varied ways in which it has been envisioned historically.
Although it has been a reality for its inhabitants for millennia, in spite of
their lack of general consciousness of this fact, Latin America was first
conceived from the outside as part of a mythical European geopolitical,
socioeconomic and fictive imaginary, spawned from generations of travelogues
and fiction. Its concrete entrance into the realm of European consciousness
can be seen via the act of appropriation and shaping that characterises travel
writing as diverse yet similar as Columbuss captains logs and Alexander von
Humboldts topographical, political and cultural mappings of late colonial
Latin America. This geotextual construct has also been envisioned, however,
through the works of nineteenth-century writers such as English businessmen
Francis Bond Head and Joseph Andrews,5 and the naturalist Charles Darwins
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of
Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). During the same century, one
of the many foreign feminine voices who envisioned Latin America is U.S.
suffragist and author of the anti-slavery work A Trip to Cuba (1860), Julia
Ward Howe. Post-modern examples which continue to elaborate an everchanging vision of Latin America abound, including a profusion of internet

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resources, as well as the Fodors and Lonely Planet guides to a plethora of its
tourist destinations, a point which confirms the eternally protean signifier
that is Latin America.
Likewise, it must be stated that the internal envisioning of Latin America
has shown itself to be equally polymorphous and conflictive. That is, Latin
American writers, at least partially in response to external representations
of their geocultural space, have continually re-conceived the continent
from a domestic perspective through travel writing via what could be called
a sort of textual intrageografa. This contestatory re-defining of Latin America
via the travel text by Latin Americans harkens back to the demystifying
revisionist accounts of Latin American creole insiders from the colonial
period and those who, in their wake, have brought the genre to new levels
of relevance. Two cases in point with respect to the colonial period are the
Mexican writer Carlos de Sigenza y Gngora and the Peruvian resident
Alonso Carri de la Vandera. Sigenza y Gngora, an intellectual partner
and companion of the illustrious Mexican nun Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz, is
best known for his 1690 work Infortunios de Alonso Ramrez, a prime
counterdiscursive travel narrative which details the picaresque wanderings
of the creole Alonso Ramrez through the vast post-1588 Spanish empire. In
a powerful statement on the decadence of Spanish royal authority, his search
for a creole identity in the midst of the overwhelming nature of belonging
to the colonial periphery is a fruitless and futile venture. Carri de la Vandera,
a travelling royal functionary charged with inspecting the governmental
posts between Montevideo and Lima in the late colonial period, is best
known for the literary product of his travel ventures, his Lazarillo de ciegos
caminantes, a clandestinely published work dating from 1775 or 1776. His
narrative, an almost costumbrista description of the lands and peoples who
inhabit the region which spans from Argentina to Peru during the late
colonial period, is punctuated by a demystifying textual dialogue between a
Spanish oidor and his indigenous travel guide, Concolorcorvo. This work, a
response to European travel writings on Latin America through an
appropriated native voice, acts as an unparalleled example of the dialogic
nature of the travel genre.
The phenomenon of contact between the Americas and Europe becomes
ever more important, however, during the post-Independence era when
technological advances made travel easier and faster. At this historical
juncture, it became the perceived duty of the nineteenth-century Latin
American elite, so recently culturally self-orphaned due to the Wars of

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Independence with the madre patria, to venture forth and to partake in
socially obligatory rites of acculturation through a mix of the viaje consumidor
and the viaje ceremonial, in the nomenclature of Argentine critic David
Vias.6 The result was that travel writing reflected an ever-increasing dialectic
nature during the nineteenth century. As Europeans and North Americans
travelled to Latin America at an increasing rate, Latin American ideologues
and aesthetes also more frequently ventured to Europe and North America
to seek out modern notions on epistemology and aesthetics, so as to diminish
via direct experience their perception of a sociocultural gap that distanced
them from Europe and North America. The result of this more balanced
cultural commerce was the consumption by Latin Americans of metropolitan
cultural production in situ, and the committing to paper, in a variety of
genres, of their visions of Europe and North America for broad dissemination
and consumption at home. A prime example of both this form of creole selffashioning and the counterdiscursive reinventing of Europe and North
America is Domingo Sarmientos Viajes (184951), written between 1845
and 1847, a work which encompasses his travel experiences in Europe,
North Africa and the United States during that period.7 However, a much
more contestatory response is seen in the Argentine writer Eugenio
Cambaceress novel Msica sentimental: silbidos de un vago, and FrancoArgentine Paul Groussacs Fruto vedado: costumbres argentinas (1884). These
works not only respond to European visions of Latin America, but address,
at the same time, the problematics of Latin American cultural identity vis-vis European cultural hegemony and the perceived need of the Latin
American oligarchy to become cultured through contact with the Old World.
Although the process of cultural identification continues to the present
day, especially in terms of aesthetics where even fashion is dictated from
North to South and East to West, the historical progress of the growing
textual exchange between Europe and Latin America is marked by a major
turning point: the First World War. Simply put, as Europe perceived by
Latin Americans in general as the centre of world-wide cultural activity at
the time cannibalised itself, Latin American elites witnessed this selfdestruction in horror. Europe, the continent they had perceived as the
paradigm of modernity, was eager for destruction, something that Marinettis
futurismo had amply foreshadowed from 1910. This reality provoked a
profound re-examination of their views in relation to their own continent
and a cultural movement towards their own autochthonous cultures.8 The

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Latin American ideological and cultural intelligentsia, in this act of necessary
self-reflection, therefore turned back to themselves and their own cultural
referents, and reflected upon the cultural and aesthetic possibilities that they
offered. This return to the domestic is seen in the (re)discoveries of numerous
Latin American writers who had been or even still were, in many cases
enamoured of Europe and of metropolitan culture. Several cases in point are
Latin American writers Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier and Julio
Cortzar. Asturias not only rediscovers, but also re-elaborates Mayan legends
after his anthropological studies in Paris under Georges Reynaud, the
translator of many Mayan texts. Carpentier, a Cuban cultural attach and
renowned world traveller, discovers the magically real during a trip to
Haiti, not Europe or the Far East, even though they serve as geocultural
referents for the rediscovery of his home continent and region. Finally, Julio
Cortzar, the Belgian-born Argentine in self-exile in Paris since the 1950s,
not only reconsiders his ideological obligations as a Latin American writer
after numerous trips to Cuba, but rediscovers them most notably after visiting
Sandinista-held Nicaragua in the late 1970s.
As a result of the turn of events that was the war to end all wars, one can
thus see that in the post-First World War era Latin America as a construct
becomes more a theme of interest to latinoamericanos themselves. This fact
amplifies Latin American travel writings scope and creates the notion of a
literature which can be conceived as a gesture of counterconquest, a means
of textual reappropriation of the often ignored quotidian the underrepresented home continent, the Amricas as well as a reacculturative
medium for the Latin American elite.
Such is the case of the cosmopolitan Argentine writer Ricardo Giraldes,
probably best known for his 1926 gaucho novel, Don Segundo Sombra.9 Yet,
reducing Giraldess literary production to only gaucho literature
tremendously limits the scope of his work, especially since travel plays an
important role in his life and his artistic vision on both physical and
metaphysical planes. The son of a wealthy Argentine landowner, Giraldes
was a perennial traveller within both his own domestic space and within
foreign spheres, as well as within diverse literary genres.10 He travelled
incessantly during his life between the Argentine capital and the familys
estancia in the province of Buenos Aires, as well as between Argentina and
Europe, and the Far East. In fact, while he was a young child, his family
resided on the outskirts of Paris, the same city where he would also die at the

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premature age of 41.11 Therefore, it seems inevitable that his constant
geographic movement should spill over into his literary production, where
travel or the concept of the journey is a common motif.12
With this in mind, I would now like to focus on Giraldess third work,
Xaimaca, a lyrical novel written in 1919 and published in 1923.13 I argue that
Giraldes utilises the travel genre, although with a dose of awkward
ambivalence so common to Latin American cultural elites even today, to
subvert the requisite fin-de-sicle journey of acculturation to Europe by Latin
American high society. In Xaimaca, Giraldes substitutes this traditional
elitist notion of travel with a journey of reappropriation and reacculturation;
in essence, of (re)discovery of Latin America as an aesthetic and ideological
milieu. As an extension, I would like to relate the protagonists quest to the
Latin American cultural artists search for lost roots in the post-First World
War period, a point that links this textual voyage of rediscovery to Giraldess
own avant garde aspirations.14
Loosely based on Giraldess own experiences during a 191617 voyage
to the Caribbean via Chile and the Pacific with his wife, the Argentine poet
Adelina del Carril, Xaimaca takes the form of a daily travelogue written by
the works protagonist, Marcos Galvn. This young, cultured Argentines
initial travel motive as he departs by train from Buenos Aires is indicative
of his quest: he seeks to immerse himself in the remains of pre-Incan
civilisation (p. 269).15 Although his original plans are to venture only as far
as the Peruvian cities of Mollendo, Callao or Trujillo, his travel companions,
Clara Ordez and her brother, Pealba, convince him to continue with
them to Jamaica. Through addressing his home continent and culture with
great emphasis during his travels and incorporating them into his own text,
Giraldess Galvn textually reappropriates his personal geographic space
and reacculturates himself with respect to his own Latin American roots,
converting Xaimaca plainly into a text of (re)discovery and (re)conquest.
Galvn gives the indication from the beginning of the text while in
Buenos Aires that his journey is reflective of a heightened individual aesthetic
impulse, a sort of self-induced hyperaesthesia. Upon embarking on his quest,
he describes himself as pre-disposed to self-inscription at the experiential
level. In the travel diarys first entry he states: Above all, I hope to personalise
my sensations, as if my journey were a point of departure towards something
definite. Things shall inscribe themselves upon me according to my own
idiosyncrasy (p. 269).16 In terms of the narrators act of (re)discovery and
(re)conquest, Giraldes allows his narrator to define himself here in a

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counterdiscursive inversion of the traditional Eurocentric Spanish
conquistador role. Thus, the narrator sees himself not as an explorer or
adventure-seeker mundanely interested in the mere accumulation of wealth
or power, but as a minor discoverer of my own impressions (p. 269) whose
only moral baggage is his great curiosity (p. 269). Beyond a quantity
sufficient to travel for five months (p. 269), his only belongings are his
suitcases and his travel documents. Thus, Giraldes characterises his narrator
in essence a self-portrait or his own envisioning of the Latin American
artist as a hypersensitive aesthete in search of ancient cultural roots and
modern vital experiences; that is, a sort of non-materially oriented, subjective
tabula rasa. The author appears to suggest that the Latin American aesthetes
is a journey of discovery in the hinterlands of Latin American (pre)history
and culture, not a quest for material riches. In addition, the fact that he has
little additional baggage, either real or figurative, to tie him down, is a
relevant point since this open posture allows for a naked, non-preconceived
rapprochement to his own continent and its cultures.
As the train crosses the vast pampas on its way to Mendoza and across the
Andes to Chile, Galvns initial impressions refer to the countryside that lies
before his eyes. Using Switzerland as a point of a comparison an element
so common to the European writers of discovery and conquest who wrote on
the Americas as to become a clich the narrator perceives that the Argentine
landscape pales in comparison with its European counterpart.17 After two
hours traversing the flatlands that make up the province of Buenos Aires,
with only brief bursts of vegetation, Galvn exclaims This is too flat. Oh
Switzerland! (p. 270). While the comparison with Europe appears initially
problematic, Giraldess text progressively displays the narrators passage
towards the recognition of the heightened aesthetic beauty of his surroundings.
Although his reaction is mediated at the beginning of his journey by the
extreme summer heat of the southern hemisphere, Galvn slowly awakes
from the heat-induced lethargy and begins slowly to respond to the terrain
before his eyes. In an entry that prefigures his later maternal characterisation
of the Argentine grasslands/Earth in Don Segundo Sombra, Giraldess narrator
begins to rediscover his origins while also finding an aesthetic impulse:
Further out, beyond suspicion, the world continues; world means pampa.
Pampa Mother, creator in me of a drop of sap that yearns to become a song
(p. 270). The narrators act of (re)discovery, which allows the reader to
dismiss his initial Eurocentric comparisons, continues as the train arrives in
Mendoza. In a prefiguration of the elevated experience he will have as he

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J.P. Spicer-Escalante
passes through the Andes, he transforms the diminutive Trasandino train
into a sheath from which the marvellous shall burst forth (p. 271). As the
train departs towards the Andes, he witnesses the surrounding mountainous
landscape and captures his impressions of the terrain in a series of staccatolike images: the broad bed of an almost dry torrential river; the tortuous
dwarf-like vegetation that grows amongst the rude, rocky cliffs that border
the mountains; the tense colours of some flowers that serve as the
ornamentation of a well-kept garden (p. 272). The progression of images
that Giraldes uses here, a metaphor in itself of the narrators anaemic
movement towards a positive sense, progresses from the dry and almost
sterile, to the aesthetically pleasing and ornamental.
In an example reminiscent of the European texts of discovery in the
Americas, Giraldes also appeals to the baroque belief in the impossibility
of mere words to characterise the concrete reality, so charged with admiratio,
that the narrator experiences. As the trip continues, Galvn perceives that
he has become limited by the folly of believing that his words are capable of
characterising the beauty which surrounds him: To speak of the cordillera in
these notes would be like trying to fit the sun in my suitcase (p. 272).
Although he demonstrates an apparent humility by stating that he is dwarfed
by the scope of the experience that which is primary bypasses me due to
its magnitude (p. 272) Galvn does, however, continue to characterise the
scenery around him, not unlike his earlier European counterparts. As the
train climbs further up into the mountains, Giraldess narrator, in a
foreshadowing of this authors later El sendero with respect to the cosmic
qualities of the earthly experience, appeals to a punctuated accumulatio in his
attempt to describe the landscape that surrounds him. This scenery, which
slowly approaches the infinite sky, takes on ultra-earthly qualities:
A snow-crested peak, pure in its whiteness as if it were sculpted in a
crystal made of time. A massif of metallic mountains separated from the
cordillera by a layer of clouds, and which appears as if it were the remnants
of another planet but composed of more precious materials ... Slopes,
on whose edges the imagination slips as if in a nightmarish vertigo. Far
away, the azure translucence of a sky more subtle than that of the plains.
(p. 272)18

The overall effect of this aesthetic experience transports Galvn to a cosmic

plane that is indirectly juxtaposed to the mundane and pedestrian descriptions
of the early Spanish explorers. The feeling he experiences is likened to an
incredible planetary insanity, which is enhanced by the thin mountain air

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which produces in the narrator a mystical dizziness (p. 272). This description
of the mountains, linked to this quasi-extraplanetary experience, is almost
hyperbolic: the multi-chromatic ribbons of stone, once raised and torn by
an unknown force, give the idea that we are to pass through the close
intersection of the vertiginous influence of the stars in rotation (p. 272).
After a border check and safe passage to the Chilean side of the Andes,
Galvn, in an appropriation of the Columbus-like discourse of bounty, finds
himself in idyllic awe of the fertile valleys on the Chilean side of the border.
He portrays the Chilean lands in terms of their abundance: tall and rare
wheat, alfalfa green to the point of saturation, and alamo trees, many alamo
trees (p. 273). Thus, although Giraldes reverts to the image of, and the
images created by, European explorers in the Americas, he offers an inverted
portrait of the conquistador in Galvn by appropriating the subtleties of the
conquistadors discourses and inverting the equation of discovery so as to
transform it into an act of appropriative (re)discovery.
The narrators process of geographic reappropriation proceeds as the
three travellers slowly progress towards the Chilean coast. There, they are
received by what Galvn describes as the livid clarity of the dawn over the
ocean which greets them as they arrive in Valparaso, whose colony of
lights appear as if they were a vague million phosphorescent lights at the
bottom of the sea (p. 280). The reappropriative process thus continues on
the Aysen, the ship which carries them on towards Panama, especially in
relation to the agricultural plenty that Galvns comments upon arriving in
Chile foreshadow. While in port in Coquimbo, Chile for a brief stay, Galvn
first witnesses the green, earthly fertility of the valley (p. 281) near the port
city. The bounty of these fertile lands then appears on the deck of the ship,
which has been invaded by flowers, fruits and cheeses, in fine baskets (p.
281), as the local vendors offer a cornucopia of products to the ships
passengers. Once again, Galvn returns to the accumulatio to describe the
scope of the abundance of their products: figs, papayas, cherries, plums,
peaches, apricots, cucumbers, carnations (p. 281).
On a similar visit in the bay at Taltal, Chile, however, Galvns tone
changes, denoting a change in mood. Both the narrator and Pealba feel
suffocated by the hostile rise of the sterile slopes (p. 283) that surround the
small port city whose arid land exists only to maintain its [inhabitants]
bodies on its surface (p. 283). This characterisation, however, points out a
textual nexus between Galvns landscape descriptions and his emotional
state. That is, the limited number of negative impressions of Latin American

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J.P. Spicer-Escalante
scenery which he experiences are textually linked to the vicissitudes that he
experiences in his relationship with his paramour, Clara Ordez. In Taltal,
he experiences an anguished separation (p. 282) from her and is affected by
her emotional distance from him. On an extratextual level, however, these
changes in mood are relevant, since they describe the often tortuous
relationship between the Latin American home continent and the Latin
American cultural elite in general that existed at this period.19
Yet, Giraldes offers an important counterpoint to the previous landscape
description via the recounting of a brief visit to a carefully protected garden
of la Quinta Casela, a laborious conjunction of earthly greens (p. 285) in the
northern city of Antofagasta. The experience provokes the following response
in the hypersensitive narrator which re-establishes the sense of wonderment
that he previously experienced in the Andes: For an hour, we ventured
through the only gardens to be found in the place, admiring the colorful
flowers as if drugged by their toxins, the voluminous legumes, or the trees
which are found to be on a satisfactory path of development (p. 285).20 Later
on during the journey, in a consciously reappropriative moment while in a
hotel in the city of Coln, Panam, Galvn perceives a fantastic view of the
Caribbean, which he describes as an immense blue happiness, under a clearblue sky (p. 309). In an important intertextual scene, Giraldes once again
repeats the notion of his narrator as a sort of reappropriative Latin American
conquistador. As Galvn sits in the window of his hotel, he evokes both
childhood literary memories of fantastic literature and the novels of chivalry
which accompanied the conquistadors to the Americas and shaped their view
of the newly discovered lands of the New World: I prop myself up in the
window so as to seize an impression upon arrival, and delve into the most
desirable theme of contemplation. I am faced with one of those images from
fantastic works, that left my admiration perplexed as a child (p. 309). His
enthusiasm carries over to their visit to the extraordinarily verdant Jamaica
(p .315), the trios final destination. Once again, a sensation linking the
aesthetic to the telluric is felt by Galvn in the heart of a Jamaican valley.
In another Columbus-like, although more poetic, moment, the travellers
find themselves suddenly dwarfed by the silent solitude of the valley, our
senses concentrated in the experiencing of its millions of trees, plants and
mosses (p. 317). Thus, Galvn appeals anew to the sensory effect of the
scenery and the experience which captivates the travellers sensations. In
Galvns own words, The Earth drugs us with a broad surge of perfume (p.
317). The fact that Jamaica is curiously the scene of both Galvns final

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experience and Columbuss final venture in the Americas is not a point that
should be ignored here. On the contrary, Galvns reconquest of the earthly
nature of the island, without ulterior motives related to material gain, is
another example of how Giraldes subverts the conquistador attitude of
colonising Europeans, both in the early colonial period and during the
period in which he wrote, as well as the viaje consumidor of Latin American
elites from the mid-nineteenth century through the authors own time
period.
Thus, Giraldes, through his narrator cum Latin American (re)conquistador, rediscovers and reconquers Latin America, and manifests this act
through a process of textual reappropriation. In other words, Latin America,
not Europe, enters into the realm of the aesthetic as a source of artistic
inspiration, not material gain. This textual reconquest is not carried out by
a European conquistador, but by a Latin American writer who rediscovers
that which makes up his world: his home continent, Latin America.
Galvns travels also describe, however, the intricate process of the
reacculturation of the Latin American elite as the narrator ventures from
one locale to another, reacculturating himself through contact with elements
which compose a common set of Latin American cultural baggage. In short,
Galvn participates in a process of rapprochement with respect to
autochthonous Latin American culture. This geocultural reapproximation,
however, takes on increasingly dialectical proportions when inserted into
the anti-imperialist discourse, vis--vis both Britain and the United States.
Although contact with specific Latin American people and cultural
elements is limited up to the stay of the trio of Galvn, Ordez, and Pealba
in Chile, an unexpected automobile breakdown between Santiago and
Valparaso leads to a fortuitous rediscovery of the simple pleasures of local
culture, a fact which distances them from the European culture that
characterises the cosmopolitan Buenos Aires in which they live. In the
provincial town of Curacav, the three travellers, who are awaiting the
arrival of replacement vehicles for their trip to the coast, journey out into the
night air after dinner. They find themselves immersed in a place from another
time that exhales the subtle aroma of an unreal, centenary remembrance
(p. 278). The travellers are captivated by the sounds of distant music that
comes from a voice which sings out a simple and measured air, that ventures
out from a window like an uncontainable, tender word (p. 278). They are
thus provoked, by an intimate impulse, to seek out the musics source for they
want to see the cueca that they have heard and savoured be danced. However,

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as they take up a voyeuristic stance to peer into the home from which the
music emanates and spy a presumptuous young man, with a young girl
(p. 278) who are dancing the cueca, the sound of their Buenos Aires shoes,
a clear reference to the travellers cosmopolitan nature, startles the musician
and dancers into silence. Their continued march through the streets is
interrupted, however, by the narrators description of a group of musicians
who, arriving for a musical celebration in a local family home, envelop the
three urban travellers in laughter and exclamations (p. 279). As the singers
and dancers of the caravan say goodbye, Galvn brings to a close this cultural
scene from yesteryear with yet another cosmic reference: The musical
murmurs die off in the distance with the benevolence of a celestial shower.
The night returns to cloak the simple locale with its vast calm, and the
homes allow lunar rays to once again penetrate their walls with
phosphorescent passiveness (p. 280). The narrators depiction of beloved
local customs thus serves as a textual record of a simpler, purer era that is
(re)discovered by Galvn, Ordez, and Pealba via their journey.
Galvns process of cultural reawakening proceeds as the excursion
continues on the Aysen. However, the events that the narrator describes
begin to reveal a burgeoning and conspicuous anti-imperialist discourse in
Xaimaca, written not long after the inauguration of the Panama Canal and
during the First World War.21 In fact, the position that Giraldes takes in
this novel with respect to the extension of imperialist control in the Americas
by Great Britain and the United States, rampant at that chronological
juncture, points to the growing abyss that opened between what was later to
be called the First World and the Third World in the post-World War I era.
As the Aysen journeys towards Panama, the three passengers witness an
altercation which breaks out between an English seaman and an indigenous
Peruvian woman on board to sell her wares during a brief stopover in port.
In Galvns words, which carry a great amount of ironic weight as they
describe the sailors actions and reflect the authors characterisation of his
perceived attitude, the sailor pushes the Indian woman with all the rudeness
that the superiority of his race permits him (p. 298).22 Galvns ironic stance
with regards to the sailors perceived thoughts of supposed superiority takes
the form of a manifestation of the civilisation/barbarism dichotomy so
prevalent in Latin American letters. For Galvn, in the mind of the English
seaman Only the rejects come late to civilisation and it is good to dictate
authority with a big stick (p. 298), an obvious reference to Theodore
Roosevelts famous dictum on international diplomacy.23 Giraldess

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ideological position on the Englishmans actions is seen in the following
statement from the old woman in the use of an anti-imperialist ethnic
epithet: disgusting gringos (298). However, the incident also prompts the
author to reflect in more depth upon Europe, the United States and imperialist
ideology via his narrator, which locates him with respect to his own cultural
and ethnic identity and ideology. In a reference to Incan and Spanish
colonial history, Galvn writes: Atahualpa must have thought the same
when faced with the greed that made gold out of his gods (p. 298). In
continuation, he not unlike Giraldes who identified greatly with the
telluric forces of his native Argentine culture even in the light of his frequent
travels to Europe sees that he shares some common roots (p. 299) with the
Incan ruler. In a diachronic moment, he relates the abuses of the Spaniards
during the conquest to the underlying reasons that lead to the First World
War: my current sentiments lead me to think of the utilitarian culture that
is making Europe abort itself in blood, with hatred (p. 2989). Therefore,
in the authors mind, there is a common element in both the Spanish
conquest and the war to end all wars: they are a testament to utilitarian
greed with dire cultural consequences.
A similar observation that binds indigenous culture to Giraldess antiimperialist thought appears when the ship traverses the Panama Canal
Zone, seen as the principal representation of U.S. imperialism in Latin
America. Here Galvn inverts the execution of Atahualpa at the hands of
the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1533 death by dismemberment
of the corporal extremities by inverting the operative dialectical terms that
are the symbol of imperialism: the docking Aysen, and the executed Incan
ruler. Turning the English ship into an object at the will of the slain indigenous
leader, Galvn writes: The ship is held subject on all four sides, as if it were
to place itself at Atahualpas mercy (p. 305). As an extension of this theme,
Giraldes portrays the Canal Zone as a sign of the destructive imperialist
process. Its construction makes the Panamanian countryside become a barren
wasteland, a strange landscape of sadness, where Through the vast flooded
regions, a forest of barren trees extends: an army of standing skeletons, whose
last bones rot in the humidity (p. 306). The construction of the continental
passage has created a Botanical Necropolis that extends for kilometres
(p. 306). Galvns response to the strident nature of the locus he surveys, the
busy Canal Zone which represents utilitarian modernisation, is the urgency
of flight: Given that it was impossible for us to remain enslaved by the
brutality of the iron and gears, which chew at the prevailing silence with a

22
J.P. Spicer-Escalante
strident nature, we fled in search of greater calm (p. 307). The main symbol
of U.S. imperialism, the Canal Zone, is therefore reduced by Giraldess
highly sensorial narrator to the role of an agent of destruction, imposed upon
Latin America by foreign interests in the name of global capitalist expansion.
Their tour of Kingston, Jamaica, extends this anti-imperialist discourse
by linking it to the temporal reality that is the First World War. The European
hostilities require the immediate embarkation of Afro-Jamaican soldiers, a
point that neither the narrator nor Giraldes misses. In a violent
characterisation that foreshadows and places blame for the contingents
ultimate demise, Galvn states that From the Port of Kingston, where the
palm trees are decapitated by the wind, the Fifth Jamaican Contingent
departs for the European war (p. 322). For the Jamaican soldiers who have
only played war games as part of their basic training, The game of Toy
Soldier has concluded in an anguish-laden reality (p. 322). In a curious
textual ex-abrupto, Galvn points out that the war, the product of capitalist
arms makers from apparently civilised metropolitan nations, will lead only
to destruction: Destiny already points to the brutal combat of the civilised
nations, avid as merchants of power and riches. There will the fields, ploughed
by the iron forged for death, be laid barren (pp. 3223). In addition, Galvn,
replete with irony, points out an important dialectical distinction between
the metropolis and the periphery. This war will radically affect the lives of
the peripheral colonials who will be forced to fight and die in a metropolitan
battle that is not of their making. Their destiny, death, is almost sure as
projectiles will make red liquid of the mass of black muscles (p. 333) that
make up the Jamaican bodies. In like manner, the calm that will remain after
the war is over will be at the expense of the Jamaican soldiers extinguished
lives: The silence that surrounds them will be the eternal silence of the
Jamaican contingent (pp. 3323). In other words, Giraldes points out that
the supposedly barbaric Jamaican soldiers are nothing more than cannon
fodder for civilised European warlords who are thirsty for material progress,
even at the expense of numerous innocent lives.
Therefore, as in the case of the hitherto studied textual reappropriation
which Giraldes carries out in Xaimaca, one can also perceive the existence
of the notion of reacculturation in this work. However, as the previous
examples demonstrate, this process goes well beyond a simple reacquaintance
with colourful local customs in quaint and remote provincial hamlets. It also
extends to the works ideological plane where the anti-imperialist discourse
operates to convert the text into an ideological foreboding vis--vis the

23
Ricardo Giraldess Amricas
relevance and survival of autochthonous culture. Thus, through Galvns
travel diary, Giraldes not only shows an appreciation for the traditional
culture of Latin America, but also acts as a voice that clarifies and warns of
the dangers of an ever present threat from imperial powers which will radically
change the nature of Latin American and Latin American culture if given
the chance.
In his early 1970s reflections on Argentina in the essay The Return of
Eva Pern, the Nobel Laureate and post-colonial writer from Trinidad,
V.S. Naipaul, comments that: To be Argentine was not to be South
American. It was to be European; and many Argentines became European,
of Europe. The land that was the source of their wealth became no more than
their base Between the wars there was a stable Argentine community of
100,000 in Paris; the peso was the peso then.24 Notwithstanding the truth
that is found in this statement, a clarification in the case of Ricardo Giraldes,
frequently a member of that same Argentine expatriate community in Paris,
must be made since he was most definitely an ardent Latin American and
defender of all things Latin American.25
As seen through this particular reading of Xaimaca, Giraldes uses the
travel genre not to condone or support the traditional bourgeois Latin
American journey of acculturation to Europe so common in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and so recognised in Naipauls
declaration. On the contrary, here he demonstrates, via the words, reactions,
and emotions of his narrator, his own process of continental reappropriation
and reacculturation, a fact that was recognised by his readership and his own
convictions.26 In other words, through his text, he shows other members of
the Latin American elite the validity of the process of reappropriation and
reacculturation vis--vis the autochthonous. This underlying discursive
project results in an invitation to discover or to rediscover the local, the
national, the continental, not just necessarily the metropolitan which operates
in such hegemonic form. Giraldes, therefore, demystifies the fin-de-sicle
journey of cultural consumption to Europe, suggesting an important revisiting
of both Latin America and Latin American culture through a process of
reappropriation and reacculturation in the wake of the First World War.
This revisiting of the autochthonous in Giraldess novel can also be
seen as another important step towards his own personal avant-garde aesthetic,
his Cencerro de cristal being the first.27 In the aftermath of the First World
War, which horrified the author, as seen in his Notas sobre la Guerra
Europea,28 Giraldes sought ever more to promote an autochthonous vision

24
J.P. Spicer-Escalante
of an autochthonous Amrica in his work. Nowhere is this more noticeable
than in his Don Segundo Sombra, where the development of his own aesthetic
can be seen while highlighting the domestic and rural cultural contexts,
not the borrowed European culture seen in Buenos Aires. In fact, as he states
in an essay published in Proa, We are, I have heard, a nation of swallows; we
wait for everything to be said and done abroad because we have money to buy
it. Many who differ with regards to this criterion exist and would like to
dignify our America making it give whatever it can as a continent, as a
nation, and as individuals (p. 679). Giraldes most definitely sought to
dignify the Amricas in his cultural production and as editor of one of the
periods most influential literary magazines. Likewise, as this analysis has
proven, his Xaimaca is more than just the narration of a simple journey. It
is also a fitting message to the Latin American cultural elite in terms of the
important task of fomenting a necessary cultural repositioning as a whole in
Latin America, of a broader de-centring of Latin American cultural production
in particular, and of the creation of a new continental aesthetic in the vast
contact zone that the Amricas continue to be.

Notes
1

Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emec, 1962), pp. 627 and 605, respectively. All
translations of Giraldess and other authors work are my own unless otherwise stated.
2
A prime example of this fact are the scant, if not wholly parenthetical, references made
to travel writing in the most traditional of all Hispanic American literary histories:
Enrique Anderson Imberts Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana (Mxico: Fondo de
Cultura Econmica, 1970). Although he recognises its existence, he accords it very little
special significance at the level of genre.
3
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York:
Routledge, 1992), p. 4. Although Pratt utilises this term initially in reference to the
indigenous Peruvian writer Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayalas writings, it must be stated
that her intentions are to interrogate the imperial meaning-making apparatus that is
travel writing, as part of both a study of genre and a critique of ideology (p. 4) in general.
Given the ubiquitous nature of travel writing in the colonial/imperial world, and the
common ideological platform which colonialist/imperialist designs tend to display, it is
quite logical, as Pratts analysis demonstrates, that this term be malleable enough to grant
it applicability in virtually every colonialist or imperialist context, even though specific
tendencies may differ in the application of colonialist/imperialist ideology. Although
British colonialism/imperialism differs from its Spanish counterpart, common ideological
strands of cultural domination can be found in examples of travel literature from both of

25
Ricardo Giraldess Amricas
these national backgrounds, as well as a common contestatory grappling with the texts
of the hegemonic centre by creole subjects.
4
Traditional distinctions between fiction and non-fiction seem to melt away in Latin
American travel literature. This is due to the existence of a common thread that fictive
and non-fictive works share in relation to the envisioning of a changing Latin America,
even though they might be of different genres the novel and the essay, for example
and ultimately have very different ideological platforms and readers in mind.
5
Bond Heads Rough Notes of Some Journeys across the Pampas and in the Andes (London:
J. Murray, 1826) and Andrewss The Journey from Buenos Aires to Santiago de Chili and
Coquimbo in the Years 182526 (London: J. Murray, 1827), are part of the body of writing
from those whom Mary Louise Pratt calls the capitalist vanguard (Imperial Eyes, p. 148)
in terms of European economic investment in South America in the immediate postIndependence period. For a more thorough discussion of this form of travel writing, see
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 14471.
6
Vias offers a broad terminology to characterise the longitudinally differing and requisite
trips to Europe by Latin American elites. The consumers trip, the viaje consumidor
characterises the common perception of Latin American travellers that Europe was a
locus of material and increasingly aesthetic consumption. Viass ceremonial trip, the
viaje ceremonial, is the institutionalisation and sacralisation of the concept of the elites
travel to Europe for travel-sake alone. Literatura argentina y realidad poltica (Buenos Aires:
EUDEBA, 1972), pp. 149184.
7
The phrase creole self-fashioning is from Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 172, 189.
8
As Hugo Verani has recognised, this redressing helped give birth to the plethora of isms
that characterise the avant garde movements in post-First World War Latin America:
The second decade of the twentieth century is a key, necessary period to understand the
current development of Latin American letters. It is the decade in which the sumptuous
and preciosista rhetoric of modernismo is discarded and the bases for an absolute schism vis-vis the immediate artistic past are set; after this rupture, the dominant literary modalities
recognise a common root. Those are the years of manifestos, proclamations and violent
polemics, of an intense search for originality, of an insurgency of expression and form,
which explodes in works that radically transform the course of continental letters. Las
vanguardias literarias en Hispanoamrica, 3rd edn (Mxico: Fondo de Cultura Econmica,
1995), pp. 9 and 10.
9
(San Antonio de Areco, Argentina: Editorial Proa, 1926.) The subgenre of the gaucho
novel is the logical culmination during the early twentieth century of the nineteenthcentury romantic and nationalistic tendency of Argentine writers Hilario Ascasubi,
Estanislao del Campo and Jos Hernndez. These writers sought to rehabilitate the image
of the archetypal inhabitant of the Argentine pampas, the gaucho, so maligned by
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in his 1845 treatise, Facundo.
10
Giraldes knew from first-hand experience the life of the gaucho. He was the
member of a wealthy family who knew Paris perfectly, as well as all of Europe, and even
the Far East. During the course of his life he travelled greatly and was the friend of many
European writers, especially Valry Larbaud. Jean Franco, Historia de la literatura
hispanoamericana a partir de la independencia, trans. Carlos Pujol (Barcelona: Seix Barral,

26
J.P. Spicer-Escalante
1980), p. 243. Giraldes cultivated poetry, the novel, and the essay, and was the first
editor of the Argentine literary magazine Proa.
11
This experience served as the beginning of an affection for continental culture and for
European languages and literatures in general. In his memoirs, Giraldes states My
parents went to Europe when I was one and spent four years there. I returned speaking
French and German (p. 27).
12
From his Cencerro de cristal (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Jos Tragant, 1915) through
Don Segundo Sombra and his posthumous publication El sendero (Mstricht: A.A.M.
Stols, 1932) Giraldes refers constantly to the notion of travel. Initially, this motif relates
to covering large expanses of the Argentine Pampas, or to the search for identity that
characterises Fabio Cceress travels in Don Segundo Sombra. In the poetry from El sendero
(The Journey) the notion of travel has more of a cosmic relevance within the context of
an evolutionary spiritual view of the future. For an analysis of the search for otherness
in Don Segundo Sombra, see Juan Pablo Spicer, Don Segundo Sombra: en busca del otro,
Revista de Crtica Literaria Latinoamericana, 38, 2 (1993), 36173.
13
(San Antonio de Areco, Argentina: Establecimientos Grficos Coln, 1923). All
quotations are from the version of this novel which is found in Giraldess Obras completas.
Franco considers Xaimaca a lyrical novel (Historia, p. 243), whereas John Blackwood
considers it a poetic narrative, La novela hispanoamericana del siglo XX: una vista panormica,
trans. Raymond Williams (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1984), p. 56. Both
critics thus recognise the poetic nature of this work, an extension of Giraldess
revolutionary poetics in his Cencerro de cristal.
14
In the words of Franco, Giraldes was far from being a simple primitivista; he was, on
the contrary, a writer who was enormously conscious of his art (p. 243). Likewise,
Francine Masiello regards Giraldes as an important member of the avant-garde movement
in Argentina. She sees Jorge Luis Borges, Oliverio Girondo, and Ricardo Giraldes as the
masters who organized the Argentine avant-garde of the 1920s and structured their
innovations as a filial rebellion against their literary fathers. Between Civilization and
Barbarism: Women, Nation and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina (Lincoln, Nebraska:
University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 147.
15
Although I offer a translation of the cited passages, I include the original pagination
in the text for reference-sake. As Evelyn Picon Garfield and Ivan A. Schulman point out,
Galvns type of search dovetails with Giraldess own search for a centre in the post-war
era. Alluding to a metaphorical seed that is the initial essence of the creative process,
they state that: The primitive force of the seed, is, in the case of Giraldes, his spiritual
identification with gaucho culture; and it is, in terms of the dialectic of modernity, the
manifestation of a search for an origin and the reconquest of an inheritance. Las entraas
del vaco: ensayos sobre la modernidad hispanoamericana (Mxico: Ediciones Cuadernos
Americanos, 1984), p. 112. Here, Galvns search for the remains of the pre-Incan
civilisation is tantamount to Giraldess own search for cultural identity on the Argentine
pampas.
16
Curiously, the as if qualification of the initial statement problematises the narrators
quest since it relies on the hypothetical, not on the concrete. Giraldess point here
appears to be that this journey of reappropriation and reacculturation has no definite

27
Ricardo Giraldess Amricas
ending point, a notion which I explore in my previously mentioned analysis of Don
Segundo Sombra.
17
The constant comparisons of the Americas vis--vis European referents during the age
of the encounter with the Americas were rampant, as seen, for example, in Columbuss
logs and Cortss letters. Oddly enough, it is only after the Peruvian mestizo Inca Garcilaso
de la Vegas writings in the early seventeenth century that the geographic referent
changes, since his works describe the Americas, but now from the vantage point of the
Latin American in European residence.
18
Un pico nevado, puro en su blancura como si fuera tallado en un cristal que se me antoja
hecho de tiempo. Un macizo de metlicas montaas separadas de la cordillera por un
plano de nubes, y que aparece como un trozo de otro planet , pero constitudo por
materias ms preciosas Pendientes, en cuyas laderas la imaginacin resbala en vrtigo
de pesadilla. Lejos, la diafanidad cerlea de un cielo ms sutil que el de las llanuras.
19
The use of erotic linkages in works by male authors is also important here. Clara
Ordez can be seen in an allegorical fashion in Xaimaca as the Latin American continent
who is romanced by the Latin American aesthete, Galvn.
20
Una hora paseamos por el nico planto del lugar, admirando las flores de colores como
exasperados por toxinas, las legumbres voluminosas o los rboles que van en satisfactorias
vas de crecimiento. The narrators italics here denote a sense of irony, especially when
noting the extremely positivist notion that they convey.
21
In this sense, I cannot agree with Ivonne Bordelois, who states: Neither an imperialist
messenger nor a defender of the oppressed, Giraldes, an indecisive liberal, prefers to
venture forth into another space, that of the small discoverer of his own impressions.
Genio y figura de Ricardo Giraldes (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1966), p. 78. Although
somewhat ambivalent, Giraldess anti-imperialist discourse is more than evident in this
text.
22
con toda la grosera que le otorga la superioridad de su raza .
23
Roosevelt became famous for his belief that international diplomacy should entail
speaking softly while carrying a big stick.
24
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, The Return of Eva Pern with the Killings in Trinidad
(New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1981), p. 123.
25
In a 1924 letter to Francisco Contreras, in response to a missive in which he criticised
Xaimaca, Giraldes vehemently defends his Latin American identity: I possess not
only an Hispanic American, but a Latin American spirit (p. 751). Likewise, he states that
he actively sought out continental integration: As director of Proa I attempted to put
into practice every possible means to achieve Hispanic American unity (p. 751).
26
Between Argentina and Spain, the novel went through five different editions from
1923 to 1960, not including its incorporation into two different sets of complete works.
Giraldes himself, in fact, believed that Xaimaca was his most important literary creation,
The best of my worst (p. 758), in the authors own ironic self-evaluation.
27
In the words of Hugo Verani, The Avant Garde boom in Argentina occurs between
1921 and 1927. The process of change begins before, but the premature freedom from
literary conventions goes unnoticed until the next generation of writers is able to appreciate

28
J.P. Spicer-Escalante
it. Two names stand out as direct ultrasta precedents during the 1920s: Ricardo Giraldes,
who anticipates ultrasta motifs experimentation with form, rhythmic freedom, audacious
metaphors in El cencerro de cristal (1915), and Macedonio Fernndez, a writer of a
disconcerting conceptual humor and paradoxical metaphysical speculations, whose affinity
with Borges is well known (p. 39).
28
Giraldes described the First World War as a mixture of Love, hate, interests and its
beginning by referring to The tumour of hate which has burst (p. 693). According to
him, he had foreseen the advent of the war in previous visits to Europe since he had sensed
a feeling of putrefaction (p. 695) on the continent. In sum, for him the war was A bloody
fact that soiled Old Europa (p. 693).