Chapter One

Wither the Latifundio?:

Spanish American Regionalismo and the Romance of Regression

DRAFT: DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF AUTHOR

Latifundia perdidere Italiam

Pliny

Todo vuelve a ser Altamira

Rómulo Gallegos, Doña Bárbara

A Homecoming

We begin in medias res, along a path traveled by a landowner. In the opening pages of

Rómulo Gallegos’s landmark 1929 novel Doña Bárbara, the novel’s male protagonist, Santos

Luzardo, travels toward his ancestral estate deep in the vast plains region of Venezuela. Two

‘bronzed’ oarsmen alternately plunge poles into the muddy water to propel a bongo (a kind of

canoe) forward under a blazing midday sun. Santos, meanwhile, dressed in the manner of ‘the

city dweller who is careful of his appearance,’ contemplates the wilderness from under an

awning. His objective, we soon learn, is to sell the family estate, Altamira, and move to Europe,

in keeping with the predilections of an absentee landed class. But upon arriving to the plains, he

encounters a new reality that changes his mind: an evil upstart mestiza, the eponymous Doña

Bárbara, has used feminine wiles to usurp vast tracts of land, including a portion of the Luzardo

1
estate. For the rest of the novel, Santos will remain in the plains region to fight the ‘backward

forces’ personified by Doña Bárbara, and attempt to instate ‘progress’ on the plains.

Santos Luzardo’s travel to the plains is emblematic of literary homecoming of sorts in

Spanish American literature that began in the 1910s and 1920s, one known in broad terms as

regionalismo. As an umbrella term for various subcurrents, such as criollismo, novela telúrica

and novela de la tierra, Spanish American regionalismo marks a decisive phase in the

continent’s literary production. In broad terms, whereas a previous generation of poets and

novelists had faced outward in an embrace of European aesthetic forms, objects and

civilizational ideals, early 20th-century regionalisms turned inward, in an attempt to identify and

incorporate local or home-grown materials for literary expression. As an example of this shift,

one of the dominant literary currents of the previous generation Spanish American modernismo,

was famous for its references to foreign authors (Paul Valéry or the Goncourt brothers),

interminable catalogues of bibelots, and sumptuous interiors cut off from the outside world.

Early 20th-century regionalismo, however, completely inverts this aesthetic. On a spatial level,

as we see in Santos Luzardos’ travel to his remote estate, the literary gaze does not take its

inspiration from Maxim’s in Paris but a blazing mid-day sun illuminating the plains. The

enumeration of imported luxury goods found in modernista poetry gives way to the proliferation

of locally made objects like the bongo, as well as other localisms explained in the glossary

appended to Doña Bárbara. As an extension of this logic, the satyrs, nymphs and marble statues

that populated previous modernista texts such as the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s Azul (1888)

gave way to real-life oarsmen, mestiza ‘witches’ and ranch hands. And on a larger level, Spanish

2
American modernismo’s deification of art (and particularly poetry) gave way to a renewed

commitment to reality—and more specifically, rural reality--examined by way of the novel.

When tasked with explaining why this homecoming take place when it does, critics often

turn to a narrative of cultural identity: as a well-known story goes, regionalists looked to the

rural to find ‘traditional’ materials with which to craft a more authentically Latin American

literary aesthetic. And while this narrative is not wholly incorrect, it is incomplete in so far as if

fails to account for the larger structural dynamics at play in the regionalist turn inward, and, as a

result, the precise ways that novels might encode some sort of transition occurring not just in

literature but in societies across Latin America in the early 20th century.

At the very least, regionalism marks, on a spatial level, a recalibration, away from

European metropoles and national capitals and toward rural hinterlands. But I would go a step

further to argue that this recalibration itself anticipates a larger transition that sought to reverse

export-led growth by means of national development. Placed in this context, the homecomings

staged by early twentieth-century regionalist fiction mark a move away from a liberal, export-

oriented model and toward the search for a long-delayed and stunted home market. In proposing

we look at the economic lineaments of regionalism, I do not mean to suggest, of course, that

literary texts mark a one-to-one correspondence with economic transitions: the mediations

between texts and social contexts remain to be examined. Nor do I mean to suggest that the

regionalist turn inward immediately succeeded on its own terms: for just as artificial and

escapist modernista fantasies might provide insight into the real conditions governing artistic

production (and societies) in Latin America, regionalist tropes and themes did not automatically

3
lead us into a more ‘authentic’ set of representations.1 The closed modernista salon filled with

bibelots might alert us to the real conditions governing Latin American artistic production (and

societies), just as a regionalist depiction of a gaucho, in its performance of autochthony, might

just as well blind us to those very conditions. What should become clear, however, is that the

preoccupations of regionalismo, not matter how fixated on local color, were always more-than-

regional.2

But if the hypothesis that the regionalist search for the national bases of culture broadly

anticipates a new, national phase of capitalist accumulation, it remains to be stated why, on the

level of manifest content, this search took place in the rural hinterlands of the nation-state, and

not, say, in expanding urban zones. It is certainly the case that literature in the 1920s had

important urban aspects: we might think of the avant-gardes that stretched from Buenos Aires

and São Paulo to Mexico City. And yet, as outlined in the introduction, wide swathes of Latin

American literature, and particularly the novel, became resolutely attached to rural zones,

beginning with regionalism. Critics most often assume that rural settings began to appear in

fiction because they were traditional and unique elements of national identification. While this is

on some level correct, I propose a rather more blunt explanation, one that will be refined in due

course: Quite simply, it was because any reorientation of Latin American economies inward

would necessarily pass through the continent’s vast rural hinterlands. This was not only because

the vast majority of the region’s inhabitants lived and labored there, but because of the fact that

1
Carlos Alonso’s key study of regionalism already challenges this notion of unmediated autochthony to reveal, in a
deconstructionist vein, great formal and linguist instability in texts themselves; my study attempts to bring this
analysis back into the fold of dialectical analysis, to reveal how texts mediate concrete historical movements and
social dynamics.
2
Here I borrow from Roberto Schwarz’s observation that the true originality of Brazilian literature is revealed when
examined in conjunction with the dynamics of the world market; only then does it reveal its ‘more-than-national
significance’ (“Misplaced Ideas,” 27-28). In a similar spirit, regionalism, no matter how local-seeming, is likewise
always ‘more-than-regional.”

4
Latin American societies were organized around agriculture, the variegated terrain through

which any wide-scale transformation of the nation would have to pass in a new moment of

history. In this manner, regionalism did not emerge as an absolute other to urban modernisms,

but rather their dialectical counterpart.3

On one level, then, the regionalista novel symbolizes a shift in the center of gravity of

Latin American literature, from an export-oriented economy to a home market that would have

to pass through agrarian zones. On another level, however the regionalist novel brings into view

the seemingly intractable obstacles that very endeavor. As I explore throughout this chapter,

regionalist novels were drawn to the rural world not because it was a site of stable tradition

(though this is often the ideological effect of reading them), but because this world had become,

as the result of some transition, a problem in need of a solution. This problem, I explore

throughout this chapter, was none other than the agrarian problem in its earliest instantiation,

especially with respect to the defining feature of the Latin American countryside: the persistence

of the large estate or latifundio. So long as export economies dominated, this large estate

structure had not been a pressing problem: in some cases, preexisting latifundia were

modernized and adapted to the needs of export commodity production (frequently on the basis of

unfree labor); in others, the weak state of the internal market allowed them to persist, unbothered

by either economic exigency or the state. But in a moment of transition, the estate did become a

problem. As an indication of the scope of this problem, scores of tracts began to be published in

the early decades of the 20th-century, bearing names like El problema rural de México (1917), El

problema de la producción agrícola (Chile, 1919), Cuestiones agrarias (Argentina, 1921), and

even El Latifundio (Venezuela, 1937). In spite of the national differences such texts call forth,

3
Tavid Mulder, focusing on 1920s, urban modernism, makes a parallel argument in Modenrism in the peripheral
metropolis.

5
all begin with the exact same premise: the colonial latifundium, instead of being abolished by

the Independence, was strengthened, leading to any number of national ills. These include the

parasitism of absentee landlords, a non-productive use of land, non-existent national markets,

and brutal oppression of peasants. And while authors would propose radically different solutions

to this problem depending on their political leanings, they all agreed on the intractable nature of

the latifundio as the veritable cornerstone of the Latin American agrarian question.

The question of the large estate, I explore throughout this chapter, was also the

cornerstone of the regionalist novel. Much like the Latin American countryside itself, the

particularity mobilized by the Spanish American regionalist novel took is specific shape in

relation to the large estate. In most cases, the protagonists of regionalist novels are themselves

landowners. This is true of the aforementioned Santos Luzardo in Doña Bárbara, but it is also

true of another key novel of the regionalist canon, Ricardo Güiraldes’ Don Segundo Sombra

(Argentina, 1926), as well as any number of lesser-known examples such as Mariano Latorre’s

Zurzulita (Chile, 1920), and Enrique Larreta’s Zogoibi (Argentina, 1926), among others.4 In

Northeastern Brazil, a context considered in the next chapter, the first three novels of José Lins

do Rego’s sugar-cane cycle focused on the experiences of a young landowner. The plots of these

novels, in turn, hinge on the fate of the estate itself, along the lines of inheritance, marriage,

modernization schemes, and upstart peasants. In this way, the so-called ‘novel of the land’ is,

fundamentally, a novel of and about the latifundio in a moment of transition and change. Again,

this seems obvious: the Latin American novel, when traveling to the countryside, could neither

4
Barr-Melej enumerates several early examples from Chile, all of which revolve around a landowner and his estate:
Rafael Maluenda Labarca, Escenas de la vida campesina (1909), Latorre, Cuentos del Maule (1912), and Federico
Gana, Días de campo (1916). These texts, Barr-Melej argues, respond directly to the crisis of export agriculture and
questioning of the large estate as a vehicle for national development. See Reforming Chile: Cultural Politics,
Nationalism and the Making of the Middle Class

6
avoid the large estate, nor develop perspectives beyond those of the landed classes to work out

its problems. As studied in later portions of the book, only the possibility or actuality of

revolution in the countryside would dislodge the oligarchic view from its position of dominance.

Already, this serves to explain why regionalism was dominant in Chile and Venezuela but not in

Mexico, where peasant insurrection in 1910 gave way to a radically different kind of novel, the

so-called “Novel of the Mexican Revolution.” Regionalism, and more specifically criollismo,

tends to crop up in regions where landowner rule has not been fundamentally challenged by the

possibility of revolution. Even so, at the very least, the regionalist novel’s gravitation toward the

large estate alerts us to a crisis of some sort, one that authors attempted to solve by narrative

means.

But if the regionalista novel is a novel of and about the latifundio, this is only a first step

of analysis. Placing texts in an economic context allows us to see them in a new light, but it is

not an end in itself. Rather, my aim in the following pages is to show how the regionalista novel

posed and answered agrarian questions in a manner only the novel could, on the level of

aesthetic form. As critics such as Antonio Candido have remarked, regionalismo was at bottom

an attempt to render Latin American reality in its dominant rural guise.5 And indeed, the novels

chosen for study in this chapter all take a concrete rural reality as a point of departure:

concretely, the latifundio as a problem in need of a solution. What is most intriguing about these

texts, however, is that they can’t find solutions to their real-world problems in the realm of

reality, if nothing else because they would be forced to abolish the very landed perspective they

employ, not to mention the property system undergirding that perspective. Lacking alternatives,

5
Candido sees regionalism, while deeply flawed on ideological grounds, as ‘a necessary step, which made literature,
above all the novel and the story, focus on local reality,’ particularly with respect to the continent’s
underdevelopment (“Literature and Underdevelopment,” 137).

7
they must solve their problems elsewhere, in an older, fantasy-laden region of romance. As

Northrop Frye has remarked, romance tends to be the favored form of ruling classes, an

observation that rings particularly true in Latin America.6 At the same time, however, because

they take reality as a point of departure, regionalista novels can’t function purely as romances

either. Taking a cue from Roberto Schwarz’s analyses of 19th-century Brazilian literature, I

propose that this aesthetic disunity is precisely what allows the chosen novels to shed light on

some wider social dynamic, one that, as I explore below, reaches from the rural estate to the most

abstract realms of the global market. And while, as many have noted, novels by Güiraldes and

Gallegos present us with rather naked class apology that confirms the goodness of the landed

classes, their wildly contradictory textual dynamics attest to something far less obvious and self-

assured: on the one hand, social contradictions that refuse to be banished; on the other, the

reactionary energies called forth to contain any attempt at change.

Ricardo Guiraldes: Landowner Crisis and Homonational Gaucho Romance

Regionalist narrative marks a decided becoming-rural of Latin American literature in the

early decades of the 20th century, an orientation that would persist throughout the 20th century in

a lengthy and contradictory engagement with the agrarian question. From a previous generation

of European-focused literature, regionalist novels suddenly and forcefully turned to the

countryside to forge a new sense of the national in times of continental shift. The Argentine

writer-landowner Ricardo Guiraldes is emblematic of this regard: born the scion of a wealthy

family of ranchers, he grew up between his family’s estate in the pampas and Paris. His first

6
Frye notes: ‘the ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance, where the
virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the villains the threats to their ascendancy” (Anatomy
of Criticism 186)

8
writings were entirely in French, the undisputed language of ‘culture’ for the Argentine export-

era elite. But at a certain point, Güiraldes began to speak the language of the gaucho, the

legendary horseman and cattle rustler who had long served as an icon of national barbarism but

also authenticity, manliness and valor. Güiraldes, of course, wasn’t the first man of letters—or

indeed landowner-- to speak this language: a far-reaching 19th-century tradition called the

gauchesque, dedicated to representing gaucho lifeways and speech was one of Argentina’s

dominant literary traditions in the 19th century, which reached its apex in José Hernández’s epic

Martín Fierro (1872). But Güiraldes was, perhaps, the first writer-landowner to want to become

a gaucho, a choice made even more notable by the highly Europeanized predilections of the fin-

de-siecle landed elite. This desire can observed in studio photos of Güiraldes dressed as a

gaucho, an attire he reportedly liked to don while performing duties on his estate, La Porteña. In

response to this performance, the French writer Paul Groussac quipped that a bit of Guiraldes’

tuxedo always peeked out from beneath his chiripá. But Güiraldes’ desire to become a gaucho

was most powerfully rendered in his literary production, in which the landowner enters into

spiritual and homosocial communion with the gaucho. His landmark novel Don Segundo

sombra (1926), along these lines, is dedicated to none other than “[e]l gaucho que llevo en mí,

sacramente, como la custodia lleva la hostia.”

The question, however, is, why the Frenchified landowner-writer suddenly wanted to fuse

with the gaucho. In Güiraldes’ case, this sudden desire can only be understood in conjunction

with the crisis of Argentine export economy in the early twentieth century, and with it, the

uncertain status of the large estate as the cornerstone of Argentine sociability. At different

moments in the nation’s post-Independence history, the large estate had been tied to the

persistence of Spanish colonialism in the countryside. Memorably, for the liberal intellectual

9
and eventual president D. F. Sarmiento, the large ranch (estancia) was a sign of Spanish colonial

‘barbarism’ and feudalism, and would preferably be replaced with smallholdings akin to those in

the US plains.7 Across Latin America, 19th-cetury republican and liberal intellectuals

manifested a similar republican-minded preference for smallholdings over large estates. The list

is too long to enumerate here, but we might recall Andrés Bello’s identification of the

smallholder as a fount of civic virtue in his georgic poem “Silva a la agricultura de la zona

tórrida”, an iteration that would persist in novels and essays throughout much of the nineteenth

century. But in Argentina as in other parts of Latin America, the aesthetic and political ideal of

the smallholding collided with the material imperative of integrating national economies into

global markets as producers of agricultural commodities and raw material, a transformation that

would not eliminate but strengthen the large estate throughout the 19th century.

This was especially true in the last quarter of the 19th century, when, following a bloody

episode of enclosure and genocide on the pampa, liberal elites managed to integrate Argentina

into the global market as a producer of beef and wheat. As Ruy Mauro Marini has remarked,

England was able to industrialize in part because it outsourced food production to its colonies

and semi-colonies.8 With this movement, Argentina became, effectively, a far-flung extension of

the British countryside, or, as the great poet and landowner José Hernández put it matter-of-

factly, a ‘rural colony of Europe’9 In Argentina, the large estates that flourished to furnish the

7
Hora. In his travels to the US in the 1840s, Sarmiento displays clear admiration for the small farmers of the
Midwest. When he became president in 1868, however, he made no effort to eliminate the large estate; the same was
true later liberal presidents, because the large estate, especially when mechanized after 1880, was quite productive.
This was the reason that even the mid-20th-century populist Juan Domingo Perón saw no reason to eliminate it,
meaning that Argentina, unlike much of the rest of Latin America, never experienced any meaningful agrarian
reform in the 20th century.
8
Marini, also Friedmann and McMichael on the first ‘global food regime,’ from 1870-1930, in which colonies and
settler colonies provided tropical foodstuffs and grains for the world market, altering agriculture the world over.
9
Hernández, Manual del estanciero (342). Hernández is best known for his epic poems Martín Fierro and La
Vuelta de Martín Fierro, which trace the process of the enclosure of the pampas from the point of view of the

10
global market with beef and wheat were by no means feudal. While sometimes attached to

colonial- or Independence-era families, they operated according to the logic of the world market,

both in terms of production (with land shifting from beef to grain production depending upon

market conditions) and property values (with land used as an instrument of widespread financial

speculation). During the golden era of export-led modernization from 1880s to the 1910s,

Argentine landowners became the closest thing the country had to a national bourgeoisie: men

like Ricardo Güiraldes’ father, Manuel, became arbiters of ‘progress’ who connected the country

to foreign markets and installed fashionable monuments to ‘civilization’ in the opulent port city

of Buenos Aires, in the form of hippodromes, operas, wide boulevards.10 The countryside,

meanwhile, was the ‘mother industry’ (Díaz Alejandro) that made opulence possible; the

landowning class, modeled after the English agrarian bourgeoisie, presented itself as a forward-

looking dynamic social force.

But, of course, the Argentine landed class was not an English bourgeoisie, agrarian or

otherwise, but a dependent, comprador class; agrarian export economies were not national

industries but appendages of the global market. For this reason, they were notoriously unstable:

in 1890, fierce land speculation resulted in a financial crisis that bankrupted the entire country,

The slow recovery was interrupted by the arrival of World War, which cut Argentina off from its

main market in Great Britain. At the same time, the latifundio system provoked social unrest,

especially among Southern and Eastern European immigrant tenant farmers (chacareros), that

conscripted gaucho. But, as David Viñas notes, as an allegory of this historical process gaucho poetry gives way to
landowner prose, in the form of Hernández’s manual for landowners. (Literatura y realidad, 24).

10
Hora notes that, interestingly, “these old territorial elites highlighted their ‘bourgeois’ rather than their
‘aristocratic’ facets. Rather than publicly admitting any aspiration to decorative idleness, Argentine estancieros
expressed the view that the European landed classes' contributions to agricultural and rural improvement were a
major source of their power over people and land.” (The Landowners of the Pampas, p ).

11
resulted in a wave of strikes beginning in 1912. In such moments of crisis, the progressive

character of the landed class (as ‘national’ and ‘bourgeois’) could be inverted to reveal its

regressive side (as “foreign” and “aristocratic”). Landowners, once nearly synonymous with

bourgeois progress and civilization, increasingly became identified by reformers as a bane on

national existence. Increasingly, in popular press and pamphlets, this figure became identifiable

as the ‘selfish and indolent latifundista, the cruel exploiter of workers of the land.”11

While this critique was most often articulated in essays and journalism by liberal and

populist reformers, it also animated Güiraldes’ first novel, Raucho (1917), to which I now briefly

turn as an early attempt to redeem the figure of the parasitic, export-dependent landowner by

way of symbolic communion with Argentine soil. Published at the height of World War I,

Raucho is an autobiographical bildungsroman that begins with the protagonist’s birth on an

idyllic ranch in the province of Buenos Aires, surrounded by a salubrious countryside and loving

peons. At an early age, however, Raucho (a nickname for Ricardo) is sent to Buenos Aires for

an education, where, in the context of booming cereal and beef exports to Europe, he develops a

predilection for French literature, the Jockey Club and the theater. Raucho’s father, Don

Leandro, a landowner whose ranch produces hundreds of steers for the English market, becomes

even richer by renting his lands to immigrant tenant farmers (chacareros), wealth that allows

Raucho to travel to Paris. There, the prodigal son cavorts with courtesans, dines at Maxim’s and

gambles. After being cut off by his father, who is having economic difficulties of his own

11
“ latifundista indolente y egoísta , cruel explotador de los trabajadores de la tierra”. Hora further notes the
emergence of the agrarian question tout court as a result: “La principal novedad de las tres décadas posteriores al
Grito de Alcorta fue la emergencia de una literatura de análisis de los problemas agrarios centrada en las dificultades
y frustraciones del chacarero en tierra ajena , y en las limitaciones de la agricultura arrendataria para dar forma a una
sociedad rural próspera y pujante , capaz de nutrir un denso tejido comunitario” Hora, “El problema del latifundio”
(Kindle)

12
because of a drought, Raucho gambles away his inheritance at the tables in Monte Carlo.

Plagued with debts, his nerves destroyed, he ends up in a Swiss sanatorium.

Just as the instability faced by export economies at the end of the nineteenth century was

not limited to Argentina, the crisis faced by the male protagonist of Raucho was by no means

unique to Güiraldes’ fiction. Indeed, the plot of this novel unfolds in a manner very similar to a

whole slew of novels that appeared in different corners of Latin America to form a subgenre we

might reframe as the fin-de-siècle ‘narrative of dissolute oligarchic youth.’ This subgenre

includes novels such as the Eugenio Cambaceres’ Sin rumbo (Argentina, 1885), José Asunción

Silva’s De sobremesa (Colombia, 1896 [1926]), and Orrego Luco’s Casa grande (Chile, 1908),

and continues in early regionalist works like Rómulo Gallegos’ El último solar (Venezuela,

1920) and Enrique Larreta’s Zogoibi (Argentina, 1926), all of which trace the moral crisis and

disintegration of a landed male protagonist. On a more structural level, these novels allegorize

the imbalanced, distorted, and outer-directed nature of fin-de-siècle export economies

themselves: their male protagonists are invariably drawn outward, almost fatally, to cities like

Buenos Aires or Paris. They tend toward wild speculation and gambling rather than production

and accumulation, sickness rather than health, and illicit rather than matrimonial sex. As a

general rule of the narrative of dissolute oligarchic youth, there is no solution to this imbalance:

instead, in the manner of decadence or naturalism, dominant literary models of the late

nineteenth century, the novels end with the enervation, madness or death of the protagonist.

Along these lines, the dissolute protagonist of Sin rumbo memorably disembowels himself at his

estancia, flinging his excrement onto the walls.

What separates Raucho from previous naturalist and Decadent narratives of dissolute

oligarchic youth and transforms it into a founding text of regionalism, however, is precisely its

13
attempt to forge a solution to the crisis facing the export-oriented landed class. This move is by

no means subtle on Güiraldes’ part: in a chapter titled ‘Solution’, another Argentine landowner

rescues Raucho from the Swiss sanatorium, pays his debts, and brings him home to Argentina.

On his friend’s ranch, far from the corruption of Europe and the contaminatory presence of

luxury and women, Raucho is able to fulfill the desire that had suddenly manifested itself during

his European illness: to ‘embrace a gaucho.’ With this literal and figurative embrace, Raucho

unlocks a kind of homonational mysticism able to cleanse himself of the feminizing and foreign

‘dirt’ (polvo) that had sullied his ‘chiripá’, allowing him to begin anew.12 As a result of this

embrace, both the gaucho and the landowner are radically transformed. Earlier in the novel, the

gauchos of Raucho’s childhood had been depicted as ranch hands whose days of epic grandeur

had given way—with the very processes of enclosure narrated by poems such as José

Hernández’s Martin Fierro—to waged work and a life of ‘comforts’ (13). But when called upon

as a solution to landowner crisis, the gaucho reacquires his lost mythical potential, this time as an

abstract, nameless entity. This reconstituted myth, in turn, allows the landowner to disavow the

foreign market that had corrupted him, and return home to a countryside seemingly cleansed of

its corruption and instability. At the end of the novel, Raucho resolves to stay on as a mere

administrator of his friend’s ranch, ‘aunque fuera de peón’ (255). As a final image, he lays

down, his arms outstretched in the shape of a cross under the wide-open pampa, melding with the

elements but also transubstantiating into a spiritual cipher for the land itself. In contrast with

naturalist narratives of dissolute oligarchic youth, which taken to their conclusion end in the

12
This solution was not restricted to Latin America: the North American Western genre (a comparable form of
regionalism) was born of a similar attempt to cure the neurasthenia and effeminacy of urban industrial life: the
western in her reading offers a ‘West cure,’ most notably in Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) (cite critics). The
Argentine version, however, in keeping with this country’s class structure, cures an absentee landowner by returning
him to a corner of his own huge estate.

14
destruction of the ‘sick’ protagonist, Raucho saves his protagonist from this fate with a crypto-

Catholic telluric romance. Put more simply, the principle of reality that almost destroyed the

protagonist is abandoned in favor of a form of romance, a wish-fulfilling dream of how the

world should be.

Romance, of course, had long been a prominent narrative mode in Latin American

literature. Indeed, it had been the dominant mode of narrative in Latin America until it was

overtaken by naturalism and decadence in the late 19th century. As Doris Sommer argues in her

classic study of this mode, romance held special appeal because it allowed authors to imagine

symbolic resolutions to political problems in the post-Independence period, ranging from

ongoing civil war and the abolition of slavery, to, we might add, the grave distortions of

neocolonial economic dependency.13 Raucho reveals the resilience of romance as a mode for

solving crisis, re-emerging as it does here out of the ashes of decadence and naturalism, but with

new contours. Earlier 19th-century romances had most often been couched in terms of

heterosexual love matches (an aspect Sommer reads as symbolically uniting different factions

within the nation). But this coupling disappears entirely in Güiraldes, perhaps because women

have themselves been irremediably associated with the corrosive aspects of an enervating and

debilitating world market. If on the one hand, the elimination of heterosexual union from

national romance creates its own problems for ruling class ideology (to be examined in due

course) it provides the temporary grounds upon which the male landowner can reinvent himself

as a national figure: upright, unsullied, and disinterested. The fusion of the landowner with the

nation depends in the first instance upon his removal from the spheres of production and

exchange, and reorientation toward an invisible fund of spiritual value residing in ‘the land’.

13
Sommer, Foundational Fictions

15
The landowner solves his crisis, in other words, by shifting ground away from the original

problem: the estate is no longer a problem if abstracted from property into an aestheticized

vision of “the land”; rather than speculate or collect rents on land, the landowner figures himself

as the self-appointed steward of its spiritual dividends.

This solution reaches its maximum expression—and necessary limit—in Güiraldes’ much

more famous novel Don Segundo Sombra (1926). If in Raucho the landowner regenerated

himself through a disinterested embrace with a gaucho, in Don Segundo sombra, the landowner

becomes a gaucho, if only so that he can become a landowner once more, albeit on higher—

though still privately owned--ground. Like Raucho, Don Segundo sombra takes the form of a

bildungsroman, but this time, the action of the novel will studiously avoid both Europe and

Buenos Aires, to stage a five-year journey across the vast Argentine plains. It will also

studiously avoid, until its final pages, oligarchic characters like Raucho to instead focus on two

popular characters: the boy Fabio, a mestizo orphan (guacho), who undertakes an apprenticeship

with the eponymous old gaucho, Don Segundo. For some two hundred pages, Fabio recounts,

from a position of middle age, his walk about the pampa with his eponymous mentor. The

narrative, episodic in quality, alternates between the description of prosaic but noble task of

cattle herding and existential musings about fate, hardship, and death. In comparison with

Raucho, there is notably little in the way of plot tension: while Fabio and Don Segundo meet

different characters or attend cockfights, forward-moving narrative is subordinated to lyrical

description of the landscape and labors of the gaucho. Work itself becomes like a dream: as

Fabio notes at the conclusion of a particularly exhausting day: “Later your ideas, as well as your

actions, keep getting confused in an unreality that parades roughly by, as you pay only casual

attention. In the end, there’s no vital capacity left except to do what you propose to do without

16
flagging: to go on forever” (185, emphasis added). As an extension of this dream-like

temporality, nature acquires its own spare beauty. In one instance, for example, a herd of cattle

breaks up ‘like limestone,’ joining the two in an image of geologically inspired transcendence.

This simultaneously elemental and spiritual quality of the landscape extends to the novel’s title

character: his craggy, ‘Indian-like’ (aidiada) face and tall stature identifies him a real being, just

as his name alludes to an ethereal presence as ‘shadow’ (82).

Güiraldes’ gaucho is both concrete and abstract, sensuous and metaphysical. These are,

of course, characteristics that shares more than a passing resemblance to the dominant form

taken by social relations under capitalism—the commodity—than with any spiritual essence of

the nation’s soil. And indeed, the commodity order into which Argentina was enveloped in the

19th century is indeed the original problem Güiraldes’ literary works try to solve. This order,

however, is at least on the surface entirely erased from view in Don Segundo Sombra. Since the

novel’s publication, critics have noted the pains this novel takes to evoke a hazy, indeterminate

past, carefully scrubbed of precise historical referents. It’s important to mention in this regard

that the gaucho Don Segundo Sombra sets to walk about the pampa is a self-consciously

constructed anachronism. As Güiraldes’ earlier novel Raucho had already noted, the epic era of

the gaucho had been ended by enclosure and export agriculture. In Don segundo sombra,

though, the gaucho is allowed to roam the pampa again, now as a figure who is half craggy

grandeur, half ghost. Along similar lines, Güiraldes evokes a countryside that is simultaneously

pacified by enclosure (the ‘campo tranquilo’ invoked in the novel’s first pages), but also

somehow anterior to the capitalist order that this pacification called forth. Güiraldes’ friend

Jorge Luis Borges was perhaps the first to notice this contradiction, wryly noting that Fabio and

Don Segundo walk about the pampa for five years without ever seeming to encounter a fence or

17
immigrant: “ya la chacra y el gringo estaban ahí, pero Güiraldes los ignora.” Or, as the critic

Beatriz Sarlo notes, cattle in the novel still have their long horns, which in reality had been cut

off decades earlier so that they could better fit into train cars (Kirkpatrick ed 250). As a

metaphor for the entire aesthetic premise of Don Segundo sombra, cattle grow back their

longhorns, and the gaucho is set once again to roam free, seemingly outside the disciplinary

mechanisms of fences and clocks. The countryside invented by Don Segundo Sombra can be

called ‘traditional,’ then, only to the extent that it actively suppresses the historical processes that

brought it into being as the country’s most active node in the global market.14

But it isn’t just the connection of the pampa to the global market that Don segundo

sombra seeks to suppress, but, at least initially, the very existence of property and class relations

in Argentina. Fabio and his gaucho mentor don’t so much work as perform ‘activity’, as Carlos

Alonso observes.15 In similar manner, their relationship seems to float outside of the realm of

property altogether to offer itself up as a site of spiritual communion. This, at least, is how

Güiraldes saw it when he responded to a questionnaire in the literary journal Martín Fierro in

1924, on whether national character existed: “Yes, there is an Argentine sensibility and an

Argentine mentality. If that were not the case, we would have no reason for being except as

fallow land, ready to be sold by the lot. [qtd in Alonso 88]. Now of course, from the perspective

of the world market—not to mention from the perspective of the country’s landed class—this

14
Many critics examine the ideological relevance of Don Segundo Sombra in light of a country-city divide between
a ‘traditional’ pampa and an expanding, cosmopolitan Buenos Aires irrevocably altered by Southern and Eastern
European immigration. While this is certainly consistent with the novel’s worldview, such a reading often leaves
out the fact that the pampa was itself part of a global countryside that called immigrants to Buenos Aires in the first
place; the pampa was, as Cortés puts it, the ‘industria madre’ at the center of Argentine patterns of accumulation.
The country-city divide in Latin America, and especially Argentina, is thus always a global affair, no matter how
national-seeming. Indeed, if anything, regionalist texts like Don Segundo Sombra constitute an initial attempt to
reduce the scale of the city-country divide to a national one, even as texts themselves return us over and again to the
sphere of the global market.
15
Alonso, 75

18
was exactly what Argentina was: a collection of land to be bought and sold by the lot, and its

resulting commodities sold on the global market. For the budding nationalist writer, however,

assailed by the crisis of this neocolonial economic model, Argentina was something else: the site

of a brotherly communion with a ‘land’ that belonged to all Argentines, regardless of class or

status.

And it would seem, by reading Raucho alongside Don Segundo Sombra, that this is the

solution proffered by Güiraldes: a disavowal of the property relations and world market in favor

of a de-commodified and spiritually inflected ‘national’ landscape. But, after 200 pages of

leisurely wandering, the novel introduces, suddenly and without warning, a plot twist that

restores property to its rightful role as regulator of Argentine society. With only three chapters

remaining, Fabio receives a letter informing him that the man he assumed to be his benefactor,

was in fact his father, who upon his death has left him his last name and property. In the instant

he inherits property, Fabio literally becomes a different character, the continuation of the social

personage that is Fabio Cáceres, the landowner. More importantly, he immediately acquires a

new perspective: “The countryside, everything, seemed different to me now. I was looking out

from inside another person” (189). With this sudden change in social status, Fabio’s journey

must conclude. In the last two chapters, he undertakes a second but no less important

apprenticeship as a landowner, this time under the guidance of none other than Raucho, the

eponymous protagonist of his first novel and alter-ego for the author, and his father Leandro. In

contrast with the 200-plus pages that recounted a 5-year journey in which precious little actually

happens, the two remaining chapters of the novel speedily recount a period of three years in

which Fabio learns about accounting, literature and estate management. At the culmination of

19
this second apprenticeship, Fabio knows that he must bid a painful farewell to the gaucho Don

Segundo, who—much in the manner of Hollywood Westerns--rides off into the sunset.

This abrupt turn in the narrative is fully consistent with the ideological tenor of the text:

Fabio’s previous work as a gaucho justifies his property as just rewards for knowing and

working the land. Often, critics bracket this ideological stance from the artistic or discursive

complexity of the text, in an attempt to avoid the purported reductiveness of class analysis. But

the fact is that it is only by way of class that we can explain why a novel that begins along one

road must double back and return down another, even at the cost of its carefully constructed

aesthetic unity. The earlier parts of the novel, although based on historical suppressions, were

internally cohesive in aesthetic terms. But the windfall inheritance plot totally breaks this

cohesion through the sudden transformation of the orphan-gaucho into a landowner. After

keeping property relations at bay for most of the novel, they suddenly return, like the repressed,

to restore property to a place of dominance in the narrative. Whether or not he was conscious of

this maneuver, Güiraldes’ ending introduces an element of material necessity into the text,

revealing against its aesthetic message that the true force moving Argentine societies was not a

patriotic love of the ‘land,’ but property. “Land ready to be sold by the lot,” indeed.

In formal terms, the inheritance plot marks an encounter with reality in so far as it marks

a kind of material principle shaping Fabio’s trajectory: after inheriting property, he cannot

continue as apprentice to the gaucho, but is instead forced to become something else, a

landowner. As a formal corollary, what had unfolded as a leisurely walk about the pampa

suddenly transforms into a condensed and sped-up plot in which Fabio learns letters and

accounting, manages his estate, and says goodbye to his gaucho mentor, all in the space of a few

pages. Thus, if in Raucho a problem originating in reality is resolved by a kind of romance in

20
which property is suspended, Don Segundo Sombra reintroduces, as if by some invisible

mechanism, a reality principle that restores property and class as the true mechanisms guiding

Argentine society. At the same time, however, it would be foolish to call this resolution ‘realist’

in so far as it subjects even material exigency to romantic wish fulfilment. We will recognize

this gesture from contemporary soap operas or romantic comedies, in which any material

problem can be solved through virtue aligned with unfailing luck. In this manner, borrowing

categories from Northrop Frye, we might say that Raucho employs a ‘high’ mode of romance, in

which the landowner loses his property but gains his soul. This resolution is corrected, so to

speak, with a ‘low’ mode of romance—melodrama--in which the aims of commercial society are

fulfilled.16

From an aesthetic perspective, the melodramatic register that concludes the novel is

jarring, to say the least, especially in its substitution of a spiritually disinterested masculine

aesthetic with one associated with women and commercial society (even as women remain

conspicuously absent from the narrative). From a class perspective, though, the rupture

becomes necessary: aesthetic disunity is a small price to pay to reestablish property relations as

the true if still mystified force governing Argentina. While perhaps not a conscious choice, the

formal break in the narrative—in which the story of the gaucho’s apprentice splits off from that

of a newly minted landowner—alerts us to a contradiction in need of suturing. In this manner,

the inheritance plot runs like an invisible fence through the text, one that ultimately does not fuse

but divide owners from non-owners. The novel’s function, as romance, is to conceal this

division, just as the formal break announces the irreducible antagonism that called forth the need

for romance in the first place. The fact that this antagonism does not announce itself plainly, but

16
Cite Frye.

21
instead appears on the level of the novel’s innermost form, attests to its necessity, at least from

the perspective of the propertied class. The landowner and gaucho, after fusing, must separate

from one another once again, like wheat from the chaff.

Notably, in this regard, this separation is carried out with some help from foreign literary

sources, in what amounts to a final appeal to the same regulating principle Güiraldes’ literary

project had tried to avoid at every turn: the global market. To make this argument, we can note

that the novel’s resolution—the revelation of the orphan’s true status as heir to an estate—is not

a common feature within Güiraldes’ Argentine literary sources. It does not appear in the

gauchesque, which usually ends with the expulsion or confinement of the gaucho, and it certainly

does not appear in earlier romanced or naturalist novels, which typically end with the destruction

of the male protagonist: here we might think of the exploding unitario at the end of El

matadero, the murdered protagonist of Amalia or the self-disemboweled estanciero of Sin

rumbo. But this resolution is common within English literature, in 18th-century novels like

Fielding’s Tom Jones, or as was most likely the source for Güiraldes’ ending, Dickens’ Oliver

Twist, in a mechanism widely known as the foundling plot [fn]17

Such literary borrowings happen all the time in peripheral contexts and is not on its own

remarkable. What does seem remarkable, however, is the extent to which a decidedly Victorian

plot swoops in to set the Argentine novel on its proper class footing, almost as if Güiraldes

couldn’t count on national mechanisms (much less the landowner’s national garb) to do so on

their own.18 If the gauchesque moves the nationalist writer in Güiraldes toward Argentina, the

17
Note on foundling plot
18
One Argentine novel that does have similar ending is Juana Manuela Gorriti’s Oasis en la vida (1888?), in which
an impoverished but virtuous writer learns that is the beneficiary of a life insurance policy issued by the British
company that hired Gorriti to write the novel. The melodramatic resolution is much more scandalous in DSS,
however, since it reveals the traces of all it had previously rejected—the foreign, the commercial and the feminine—
deep within its structure.

22
Victorian plot twist fittingly drives the landowner toward England—the main destination for

Argentina’s agricultural products--once more. Put differently, if the lyrical-nationalist plot

suppresses the existence of Argentina as a commodity enclave whose existence is governed by a

global market centered in England, the Victorian foundling plot reinstates this external market as

a higher regulating power. The ‘god’ in the novel’s deus ex machina is, from this perspective,

perhaps nothing other than the global market; the ‘machine’ is, of course, British. Upon closer

inspection, the interjection of this jarring plot twist is akin to what Roberto Schwarz, in a

different context, has named ‘the local and opaque effect of a planetary mechanism.” 19 But if

the admittance of a ‘foreign’ regulating principle by way of the Victorian inheritance plot signals

an admission of defeat for the nationalist writer, it offers some comfort to the landowner residing

within him: for after walking about for five years on the pampa, it allows him to find his true

home again, not just in the world market but in Argentine class society. In some manner, the

deep regulating principles of informal empire liberate the landowner from promises made in the

heat of his nationalist embrace with the gaucho.

More than any representation of the plain or the gaucho, perhaps what is most

‘Argentine’ about this novel is the inevitable return of the peripheral bourgeois, dressed up as a

gaucho, to the imperatives of private property and empire. Here we might recall Borges’ famous

proclamation—made as a rejoinder to regionalists like Güiraldes—that the Argentine author

need not wear local color on his sleeve to be counted as national.20 The same holds true for Don

Segundo sombra, though perhaps not in the way Borges imagined: the Victorian foundling plot

as a melodramatic means of restoring the peripheral landowner’s fortunes turns out to have an

even more deeply national resonance than his wanderings as a gaucho. To adapt the words of

19
Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas,” 30.
20
Borges, “The Argentine writer and Tradition”

23
Schwarz once more, we might say that the visual imagery of Don Segundo sombra focuses on

‘the country of our hearts’ (in which everyone is equal, nothing is commodified, and spiritual

values abound), while its resolution cannot help but thrust us back into ‘the real country of social

classes.’21

And this real country of social classes is, of course, not constituted by a loving embrace

between landowner and gaucho, or between owners and non-owners, but by a permanent

antagonism between them. So long as this antagonism exists, there can be no ‘nation,’ at least as

Guirlades pretends to imagine it. Most of the time, the existence of this antagonism is

suppressed by romance, and becomes available only on the level of form, through the jarring

dissonance between the novel’s two plots. In at least one instance, however, it comes bubbling

to the surface, only to be quickly quashed. Immediately after learning he has inherited property,

Fabio briefly fantasizes about refusing the inheritance, and dividing the estate among the landless

poor: “Me encontraba en mis posesiones como un hombre de ley, dictándole mis propósitos de

hacer picadillo de aquellas tierras, para repartirlas entre el pobrío” (297). For a moment, Fabio

seems to behave according to his previous training, in line with the communal, brotherly ways he

had been taught by the gaucho. Such an impulse was also in tune with the increasingly militant

strikes that roiled the Argentine countryside beginning in 1912, most notably the Alacorta strike.

Tenant militancy, Roy Hora notes, increasingly put land reform on the table as a means resolving

Argentina’s agrarian problem. “For most analysts, the break-up of large properties was a

precondition for the transformation of land-intensive livestock raising and itinerant grain

growing into owner-based, more prosperous farming.” 22 Fabio’s initial idea to break up the

estate he has just inherited, however is initially discarded with an embarrassed rejoinder:

21
Schwarz, Objective form, 18
22
Hora, latifundio

24
“Gracias a dios me cansé de tales ejercicios” (Thank God, I tired of such exercises, 191). In the

space of a single sentence, as if with an inaudible shudder, the young Fabio decides that the large

estate must prevail. Though the narration does not stop to articulate why this should be the case,

the novel’s previous sections provide an aesthetic argument for why it should be that way:

properties divided into ‘mincemeat’ could never approach the grandeur invoked in the novel’s

earlier approach to the Argentine landscape, which might only be preserved in the form of estates

so large they become confused with nature itself. In this manner, the two competing sections of

the novel do complement each other, if only as two sides of the same class apology. In some

manner, the apology comes late: as Hora notes, by the 1920s, landowners had made a definitive

shift away from cattle ranching, and toward grain production (which relied upon smaller parcels

rented to immigrant farmers). In this manner, Güiraldes’ aestheticization of the large cattle ranch

is more nostalgic than future oriented This vision would become clearer as time went on, when

beginning in the 1930s national industry did displace export agriculture as the country’s main

node of accumulation. At the same time, however, the gesture is future-oriented in so far as it

projects a narrative of class regeneration for landowners ready to reclaim their bourgeois and

national (rather than rentier and foreign) qualities, while maintaining their property.

This class narrative involves Fabio himself, a mestizo orphan who rise to join the ranks of

the propertied, in the novel’s paltry offering to class mobility. But it is perhaps strongest in the

appearance of don Leandro and Raucho in the final pages of the novel, characters who reemerge

from the novel Raucho to occupy a new role. Don Leandro is no longer the speculator of

Güiraldes’ previous novel, but a stolid, salt-of-the-earth rancher. His son Raucho knows about

literature, but his sunburned skin and cowhand attire attest to a newly infused work ethic. Along

similar lines, the novel’s final scene, which conforms to the classic structure of the European

25
bildungsroman, confirms the deeply bourgeois worldview of the text. As Franco Moretti has

argued, the 18th- and 19th-century bildungsroman is fundamentally a genre of compromise, in

which the dynamism of youth must be relinquished, painfully, in exchange for the stability of

adulthood. As if to highlight the bourgeois character of the pact, Fabio prepares for the farewell

by looking at his watch (“It was five o-clock” [202]), in what appears to be a recognition of a

new regulatory force in his life. The goodbye, while necessary, is painful; as Don Segundo rides

away, Fabio feels the loss ‘like someone who is bleeding to death” (204). Property ownership is

thus figured as a sacrifice worthy only of the most mature and responsible adults, who, luckily,

turn out to be legitimate heirs.

Of course, if, as Moretti argues, the resolution of the bildungsroman marks the painful

but necessary moment in which the European character gives up the illusions and freedom of his

youth to become an adult in European bourgeois society, Don Segundo Sombra drapes itself in

the somber gravitas of this moment while asserting a peripheral difference that is at once comical

and serious. In the time-honored manner of Latin American elites, the propertied youth gets to

have things both ways: he is able to inherit an enormous estate, while at the same time

experiencing it as a sacrifice. At the same time, he gets to be a bourgeois who is ‘national’ in

feeling, if not in actual orientation. The external market—as we saw via the novel’s awkward

appeal to an inheritance plot—is the force that not only regulates the Argentine landowner’s

destiny; it saves him from his nationalist embrace with the gaucho. None of this is to say, of

course, that the Argentine landowner was not a legitimate bourgeois. He was an agrarian

bourgeois through and through—just not a national one. And it is the international (not national)

character of this class that allows us to identify its most regressive tendencies, not as an element

26
inherited from some feudal past, but as an up-to-date expression of class rule in an agrarian

enclave of the global market.

Here we can return once more to Güiraldes’ dedication of Don Segundo sombra the

gaucho who resides within in himself, ‘as the monstrance bears the host.’ This religious

metaphor invokes the gaucho as sacred essence held within the body of the writer. But just as

the novel itself retreats from its spiritualist register to introduce an element of material necessity,

we might literalize this metaphor to see the landowner for what he really is: not a monstrance

guarding a sacred host, but a vampire who, after sucking the vital forces from the gaucho,

transforms him into a ghostly referent for landowner legitimacy. If this marks a national vision,

it is a quite regressive one indeed, one that only a landowner might conceive. Along these lines,

we can think of 19th-century European vampire narratives that inevitably revolve around

landowners (Dracula as a case in point), as a kind of archaic social power in a bourgeois world

[Moretti]. Closer to home, Latin American peasants have frequently cast the landowner in

similarly vampiristic terms (the naqaq in Peru is a case in point). Whether dressed in a French

tuxedo or a gaucho’s chiripá, this Latin American vampire will always represent a deeply

regressive social principle, no matter how bourgeois, or now nationalist, he purports to be. An

industrial bourgeoisie would eventually succeed in displacing the Argentine landed class (in

some cases growing from its own ranks); a robust internal market would succeed, at least for a

time, in subduing the whims of the global market. All the while, however, an allegiance to

private property would remain the bloody cornerstone of subsequent bourgeois appeals to

nationhood. It is here, more than in any appeal to autochthony, that Don Segundo sombra’s

contemporary relevance lies.

27
Rómulo Gallegos’ Barbarous Compromise: Junker Realism and Cacique Romance

Argentina was unique in that it was the first country in Latin America to have a fully

capitalist agriculture, even as the form it took was that of the large estate subservient to the

demands of the global market. As a result, the Argentine ‘tradition’ invented by Güiraldes’ figure

draped bourgeois property regimes and market imperatives in national clothing, without

fundamentally challenging their dominance. Outside of this context, though, a rather different

picture emerges in the Venezuelan writer and statesman Rómulo Gallegos’ landmark novel Doña

Bárbara (1929). For the problem Gallegos sets out to resolve is not simply that of an absentee

landowner, which it may infuse with local spirit, but the kind of large estate that would become

nearly synonymous with the agrarian problem across much of Latin America: the unproductive,

isolated and ‘feudal’ latifundio.

In the novel’s opening pages, Santos Luzardo returns to his family’s remote cattle estate

in plains region of western Venezuela after many years spent in Caracas (where he studied as a

lawyer). While his original plan, in keeping with the behavior of absentee landowners of the era,

is to sell the estate and move to Europe, he decides to stay. The reason is that an evil upstart

mestiza, Doña Bárbara, has plunged the region into ‘barbarism,’ Over the course of the novel,

Santos Luzardo will fight to transform the estate into a more productive and ‘civilized’ entity.

Already we will note the specifically allegorical tenor of this novel, which toggles back and forth

between real-world specificity and allegory: Doña Bárbara, as her name suggests, stands for the

forces of feudal non-productivity and superstition: some of her habits include consulting blood-

28
drinking birds to make decisions, burying her money in a hole in the ground, and accumulating

vast properties so as to be ‘in the center of her possessions, wherever I should roam’. Her

sidekick “Mr. Danger,” an Alaskan miner, stands for rising US imperialism. Doña Bárbara’s

daughter Marisela, alternately referred to as a ‘sleeping beauty’ and compared to a domesticated

mare, stands for the Venezuelan masses. And Santos Luzardo, as his name suggests, stands for

enlightenment and civilization as he sets out to eradicate what the narrator calls ‘the forces

hindering the prosperity of the plains’ under the reign of Doña Bárbara.

Doña Bárbara is perhaps the most famous Latin American novel before the publication

of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967. In history and criticism, it

is most frequently approached as a national allegory, with strong ties to a 19th-century tradition

studied by Doris Sommer under the rubric of national romance, a form that has stayed alive in

the film’s several adaptations into films (the most famous starring the Mexican film star María

Félix) and, more recently, telenovelas. But if Doña Bárbara is the last great national allegory in

the manner of 19th-century novels like María, it is just as much the first novel of the 20th century,

in so far as it asks posits and attempts to solve specifically 20th-century problems, which are on a

deep level agrarian problems. The closest historical referent for Gallego’s allegorical romance

was the regime of Juan Vicente Gómez (1908-1935), a kind of autocratic leader familiar to turn

of the century in Latin America, who suppressed dissent at home while opening the country to

foreign economic interests: along these lines, Gómez presided over the discovery and rise of oil

in Venezuela, and infamously let U.S. corporations write the legislation. Gómez also

accumulated and distributed vast land holdings to his cronies, transforming the country’s

interiors into a huge cattle-walk (Acosta Saignes). These cattle walks were very different from

the estancias of turn-of-the-century Argentina however, in so far as they were geographically

29
isolated and economically unproductive. Doña Bárbara’s allegory organizes itself as a critique

of Gómez’s export-dependent, autocratic, regime, and tries to point to a new path forward—out

of imperialism and latifundismo, and toward an internal market that passed through agrarian

soil.23

Coincidentally or not, Doña Bárbara was published in 1929, the year historians mark as

auguring a new phase of inward-oriented capital accumulation in Latin America. Export

production would remain the main motor of peripheral economies (particularly in Venezuela,),

but the possibility of ‘substituting’ imported goods for nationally produced ones emerged as a

key tenet of reformist—and even revolutionary-- thought from the 1930s onward. In Venezuela,

this reformist project was led by Acción democrática, the mass populist (and anti-communist)

party founded by Rómulo Betancourt in which Gallegos actively participated, as intellectual and,

for a brief period, as President of Venezuela (a stint cut short by a military coup). As John

Beverley has argued, Doña Bárbara is the “founding text” (638) of Acción democrática that

proposes a new alliance between a ‘progressive national bourgeoisie and peasantry’ in the

marriage between Santos Luzardo and Marisela. Along similar lines, Julie Skurski notes that as

a figure for a crusading national bourgeoisie the character Santos Luzardo inspired generations

of reformists and even communists (for whom bourgeois revolution was a necessary first step

toward a socialist one), not just in Venezuela, but across Latin America.

But to identify Santos as a progressive national bourgeois is a mistake, one whose stakes,

are as we’ll see, are not merely literary. For in the end the novel does not portend the triumph of

a bourgeois revolution in agriculture, but instead the impossibility of there ever being one. In

23
Gallegos’ allegorization of Gómez, who himself hailed from the plains region, as a woman was supposed to be an
insult. Much to Gallegos’ chagrin, however, Gómez loved the book, and reportedly had it read to him by one of his
minions in the headlights of a car after dark. Gómez even offered Gallegos a post in his government, after which the
author promptly self-exiled.

30
keeping with Gallegos’ own approach to the agrarian question, only landowners could lead the

fight against ‘feudalism,’ if nothing else because members of the popular classes were too

frightening to countenance as guardians of the bourgeois order. Gallegos thus favored not the

breakup of large estates but their modernization along the lines of what Lenin termed a Junker

road (in reference to modernizing Prussian landlords).24 But—and this is key to my reading—

Santos is unable to succeed on these terms: all of his modernization plans, which I’ll soon

discuss, fail, and miserably so. The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier was perhaps the first to

notice this contradiction. Speaking of the resolution of the novel, in which Santos marries

Marisela, thus regaining all of the property lost to Doña Bárbara: “Has there been any progress?

No. The former property of the Luzardos returns to its original boundaries; the owner goes back

to the manor and the only progress that has come with Santos Luzardo from the University of

Caracas is a spool of barbed wire.”25 A novel that begins by staging something like a bourgeois

revolution ends up with a restoration of the same forces it had set out to defeat, albeit dressed in

bourgeois clothing. It is not enough, however, to note that the novel ends up restoring what it

seemingly fought against, but rather, how and why it can’t succeed on its own terms.

For Lenin, a “road” to capitalism is forged when a specific tendency becomes dominant,

at the cost of others. Doña Bárbara models one path, that of the modernizing bourgeois

landowner, but can’t take it; it must take another, much more conservative and archaic road. I

should note here that the text is itself deeply concerned with the notion of the path or ‘road’

(camino), which appears 34 times in the text. At times, this word is literal (“camino a…”); at

others, however, it appears to mark a decisive turn in a character’s direction within the text:

Santos Luzardo, for example, announces at a key juncture in the novel’s action: “Ahora estamos

24
Gallegos and Bourgeois Revolution book
25
Cited Alonso 112—check translation).

31
en otro camino” (Now we’re on another path, 271). Likewise, Doña Bárbara, upon deciding to

leave the llano, imagines what her life would look like had it taken a different path, ‘un camino

diferente’ (317). At the same time, the novel is equally concerned with blockages and limits to

these ‘roads,’ in the form of a dried riverbed (madrevieja) where water ceases to flow, and a

morass (tremendal) where animals sink to their death. But as I’ll argue, these blockages

function, in the manner of Jameson’s political unconscious, as figures for history itself, the set of

determining factors that open certain ‘roads’ and foreclose others. Taking a cue once more from

Roberto Schwarz, Santos Luzardo’s failure provides insight, in turn, into regressive and

reactionary tendencies that capitalism does not ‘overcome’ but actually calls forth in peripheral

contexts.

This opening and foreclosure is best tracked on the level of the novel’s form, as a parallel

battle between modes of a realist register dedicated to evoking the unique reality of the plains,

and a mode of romance that reduces that reality to a quasi-magical fight against good against

evil. While a tension between romance and realism is, to be sure, not unique to Doña Bárbara,

but characteristic of 19th-century national allegories in general, it takes on special significance in

this novel’s attempt to map a ‘road’ to capitalism in Venezuela. As a first approximation to the

tension between romance and realism, we can see how the allegorical function of the two main

characters always operates within a specific historical milieu that exceeds their intended

meaning.26 Santos, for example, is identified, on an allegorical plane, with the forces of

civilization; at the same time, however, he is linked to a violent past by way of his family, to

place allegory at cross-purposes with history. The founder of the Luzardo estate displaced and

killed the indigenous inhabitants of the land; according to local legend, an indigenous cacique

26
Like Alonso’s observation, but made historical…

32
cursed the land, which in turn opens onto the never-ending feud two branches of the family. In

the latest chapter of this feud, Santos’ father killed his older brother, an act of filicide that

prompted Santos’ mother to remove him to Caracas. It is this history Santos Luzardo will try to

overcome: upon hearing of the threat presented by Doña Bárbara, he removes the lance-head his

father placed there twenty-five years ago.

Given his family’s sordid and violent past, Santos Luzardo might not be the first choice

to lead a bourgeois revolution on the plains. But, as the novel takes pains to show, he is the only

choice, given the monstrosity of Doña Bárbara. Allegorically speaking, this character functions

as the feminine and mestiza inversion of Santos, the negative example against which bourgeois

“civilization” can be measured. Each arrives to the plains, in turn, from an inverted location: the

capital city, Caracas, as a beacon of civilization, and Doña Bárbara from the furthest reaches of

the Amazon jungle, a topos of ‘barbarism’ par excellence for 19th-century Latin American elites.

At the same time, a crucial historical detail emerges that disturbs the neatness of the allegory:

Doña Bárbara, we learn, hails from the Amazon basin of the late 19th- early 20th-century rubber

boom. Her mother was an indigenous woman raped by a ‘white adventurer’; the young Bárbara

(Barbarita), in turn, fell in love with a man, Asdrúbal, who taught her to read, placing her on a

course to ‘civilization’. This course was dramatically cut short when Asdrúbal is killed, and

Barbarita horrifically gang raped by a group of rubber traders. Though clouded in romance, the

text nonetheless inscribes the rapes of Doña Bárbara and her mother within a particularly brutal

history of accumulation in Latin America, when demand for rubber on the world market sparked

by mass automobile production led to the enslavement and near extinction of indigenous tribes in

the Amazon by rubber traders. And so, if this character functions as an allegory of barbarism, it

33
is a barbarism borne directly of a bourgeois civilization, one that reproduces itself through rape

and genocide.

In alluding to the historical baggage that accompanies these allegorical characters, the

novel shows us that characters will not have unlimited choices in how to behave. They will

always, in some sense, be constrained by the wider social forces the text alternately evokes and

suppresses. Romance—in all of its colonial and misogynistic inflections--permeates Doña

Bárbara, even as the text’s realist register cannot avoid gesturing toward concrete histories that

exceed romance. These competing narrative registers do not merely coexist, however, but

interact in specific ways. It is only by tracking the tension between realism and romance, I argue,

that we can understand why a novel that begins by announcing a bourgeois revolution ends as a

patriarchal restoration, with its most reactionary aspects not only intact, but intensified, in the

very name of modernization. I now turn to examine the two radically different “paths” that

Santos Luzardo takes to defeat Doña Bárbara, paths expressed in 1) a failed realist register rooted

in bourgeois production 2) a successful romance plot rooted in patriarchal sexual domination.

Road 1: “Algún día será verdad” [Some day it will be true]: Junker realism

At the heart of the battle between Santos Luzardo and Doña Bárbara, we must never

forget (the novel never does, in any of its registers) is property. With doubts initially cast upon

both Santos Luzardo’s and Doña Bárbara’s fitness to own property (since both are both children

of barbarism, though in different ways), the novel initially gravitates toward a wholly bourgeois

justification of ownership in production. In contrast with the landscape in Don Segundo Sombra,

34
where a highly capitalized agrarian sector is assumed but suppressed (until it is brought back

again through a highly dissonant inheritance plot), the ‘problem’ of the Venezuelan plains is that

they are not productive. Doña Bárbara buries her money in the ground, consults blood-drinking

birds for advice, and owns land for the sake of being ‘in the center of wherever I roam”. In this

she functions as a lurid representative of Gómez-era latifundismo. As Acosta Saignes notes in

his 1937 tract El latifundio, during this era vast tracts of the plains were distributed to Gómez’s

cronies and transformed not into commercial agricultural installations, but enormous cattle

walks. Doña Bárbara fits this description, but so too does Santos Luzardo, who at the beginning

of the narrative is an absentee landowner who lives off from the rents of his anscestral estate,

which no one in generations has done anything to improve.

Doña Barbara sees this as a grave problem and will begin by trying to make Santos

Luzardo a productive, modernizing figure, along the lines of Lenin’s Junkers. Santos Luzardo’s

own “Junker road,” I want to argue, is explored in what to my mind is the most strongly realist

section of the novel, one I will for the sake of convenience call the dairy subplot. This subplot,

faithfully revisited revisited in each of the novel’s three sections, centers on Santos’ attempt to

improve the estate by introducing a dairy farm. This is a prosaic episode, especially when

measured against the monstrosity of Doña Bárbara or the mystical potential of gargantuan

crocodiles, and perhaps this is why it is rarely discussed. But its prosaic ordinariness—rather

than allegorical excess—holds the key, to my mind, to understanding the stark limits of Santos

Luzardos’ attempt to transform the plains. This is because, as episodes in which the realist

impulse of the novel is at its strongest, they introduce an element of necessity into the narrative

that will drive its plot toward a specific resolution.

35
 In the first of these scenes, a loyal peon, Antonio, gives the recently arrived Santos a tour

of the estate, Altamira, suggesting that the heir bring back the dairy farms that once produced

cheese and milk. Such an improvement would have the benefit, the peon notes, of taming the

Luzardo cattle, thereby making them less susceptible to cattle rustling by Doña Bárbara. Santos

immediately imagines something much greater, though, and quickly conjures in his mind not

only the construction of a dairy farm, but also the enclosure of the entire estate with barbed wire

fences and—in a flight of fancy—the quasi-magical unspooling of railroads across the plain.

“Suddenly, the dreamer, truly hopeful in a momentary forgetting of the reality surrounding him,

or indulging his fantasy, exclaimed: “The train! There goes the train!” (emphasis added).

The centrality of a dairy farm in sparking Santos’ dream vision is worthy of note.

Nineteenth-century Latin American novels and essays are full of the same kind of fantasies of

commercial progress. Elsewhere I have named this mode ‘export reverie’, because it almost

inevitably oriented itself toward export markets (with authors swooning over the productive

potential of coffee plantations or mines).27 In keeping with the twentieth-century shift to which

regionalismo responds, however, Santos fantasizes about dairy, a product of local consumption

oriented toward the internal market. Lenin, in The Development of Capitalism in Russia singles

out dairy farming in diversifying production and subordinating one product to others, points to “a

complete revolution in agriculture”. Closer to Gallegos’ context, Acosta Saignes’ 1937 text El

latifundio held similarly that dairy farming on Venezuela’s immense cattle estates held the key to

more efficient and integrated agricultural production for the home market.28

27
Capital Fictions
28
This focus on dairy as a mode of agricultural modernization continued in a developmentalist guise with the
Rockefeller foundation’s program to develop Venezuelan agriculture in the 1940s. See Missionary Capitalist.
Beyond Venezuela, socialist modernization programs also took dairy as a point of departure: as a case in point, we
might think of Fidel Castro’s attempt to breed Holstein cows able to withstand tropical climates.

36
 But it is not just the turn toward the internal market that I want to note here, but its realist

coordinates. For even as Santos Luzardo announces a dream version in which he forgets ‘the

reality surrounding him,’ the dairy subplot constitutes the place in the novel where the realist

impulse is at its strongest. First, it is one of the least allegorical sections of the novel. This is

because in these scenes, Santos engages with only with characters like Antonio, a peon with no

allegorical referent outside himself (whereas Marisela is often doubled as a mare or Doña

Bárbara as a crocodile). Even more fundamentally, however, what truly marks this scene as

realist is its rehearsal of central problematic of classic (European) realism: what Lukacs first

pointed to as the struggle between interior and exterior worlds, in which the failure to realize an

equality between the two is ‘the subject of the work’ (115). And indeed, if we follow unfolding

of the dairy plot in Doña Bárbara, Santos Luzardo’s dreamed of revolution in agriculture fails,

and miserably so. To underscore this failure, the novel returns faithfully to this subplot in its

subsequent two sections, to mark the crisis and final failure of his vision. In part II, Santos is

bitterly disillusioned when he sees the rudimentary dairy built by an itinerant cheesemaker

charged with the task. When he sees the rudimentary cheesery put ‘en el mismo sitio donde

hacia más de veinte años habia existido otra construccion identica.’ (the same place where an

identical construction had existed twenty years ago, 221), Santos seems doomed to repeat the

past, rather than found a ‘modern farm’ like those that exist in “civilized countries’ (221). His

hopes, so exuberant in the first section, have almost just as quickly been dashed by the dense

material reality of the plains. This material reality, composed of history as much as by

indomitable nature, is no match for what he, as a single person, no matter how dedicated to

progress, can achieve. Santos meets this realization with some petulance, as he tells his peon

Antonio that all of his efforts have been in vain: “That’s what my forefathers did and that’s what

37
I’ll do too, because this land is a grindstone that dulls the edge of the hardest-tempered will’

(286) [‘Así hicieron mis antepasados y así hare yo también, porque esta tierra es un mollejón que

embota el filo a la voluntad más templada” (221)]

Just a couple of pages after he expresses dismay at his inability to create a modern, more

productive farm in part II, the omniscient narrator shifts registers, to describe peons setting out at

dawn to collect heron feathers in crocodile-infested lagoon. “At dawn the collecting began. The

pickers start out in canoes, but end up by jumping into the water; up to their waists in it, they

defy death in a dozen hidden forms, shouting and singing, for the Plainsman never works in

silence. If he does not yell, he sings.” (293) [“Con el alba comienza la recolecta. Los

recogedores salen en curiaras, pero terminan echándose al agua y con ella a la cintura, entre

babas y caimanes, rayas tembladores y caribes, desafían la muerte gritando o cantando, porque el

llanero nunca trabaja en silencio sino grita, canta’ 226]

Here we can begin to see how the text, in the immediate aftermath of the failure of

Santos’ plan, turns to romance. As x and x have shown, is a classic mode of colonial conquest

and the heroics of early capitalism, an ideology deeply embedded in the passage above. As

Michael Niblett notes of commodity frontier narratives in Brazil, romance corresponds with the

early phases of the frontier, its hazy past and heroics. What is striking here, however, is how this

romance of extraction occurs not to describe an earlier moment, but instead the aftermath of the

failed attempt to modernize agriculture on the estate. The irruption of romance, that is, signals a

regression of sorts, from a future-oriented plan to improve agricultural production (and forge an

internal market, a dominant concern from the 1920s onward, and especially after 1929), back to

the dominant mode of export-driven extraction. During the time of the novel’s action, heron

38
feathers were a commodity in high demand on the global market for women’s hats, the

harvesting of which nearly led to the extinction of the birds. In the aftermath of the novel’s

failure to imagine the bases for an internal market, the extractive sector reasserts itself, almost

inevitably, not as realism but as romance. In contrast with the earlier dairy scenes, Santos is

nowhere to be found in the collection of feathers. Although we later learn that Santos uses the

money earned from the feathers to buy barbed wire fences, we don’t see or hear him order peons

to collect the feathers. Instead, it happens behind his back, as it were. As in Don Segundo

Sombra, when a Victorian foundling plot suddenly interrupted Fabio’s spiritualized journey

through the pampa, it is as if some irresistible force intervenes, as it would in the domination of

the Venezuelan economy by oil throughout the entire century.

And so, a kind of Junker realism suddenly gives way to the romance of the rentier. In

the third section, in turn, the realist problematic highlighted in the dairy subplot is resolved by

naturalistic means, when a puma kills the cheesemaker’s grandson. Santos reasons that the

plains are simply too savage to sustain his plan, a move that mystifies nature—and not the

dynamics of the world economy, a lack of capital, or a social class other than that of Santos

Luzardo—as the force that makes ‘civilization’ impossible on the plains. At any rate, ‘cruel and

implacable reality” dashes Santos’ illusions, a reality principle that he cannot beat, and that

inevitably sends him on a new ‘path’.

Road 2: “Ahora estamos en otro camino” (271) [Now we are on another path]: Cacique

Romance

39
 If the realist and naturalistic impulses were left unchecked in Doña Bárbara, we would

witness the utter defeat of Santos Luzardo by the same ‘cruel and implacable reality’ that

destroyed his dairy dreams. If this were a truly realist novel, the failed landowner would most

likely be defeated by a rising peasantry (as in José Lins do Rego’s Bangue). Or, if this were a

truly naturalist novel, he might be swallowed by an anaconda, or killed by one of Doña Bárbara’s

minions. This is indeed what occurs in another foundational regionalist novel, the Chilean

author Mariano Latorre’s Zurzulita (1920), in which the idealistic young landowner is killed by

an upwardly mobile peasant, his body left to rot in the forest. But instead, Santos emerges

triumphant, ejecting Doña Bárbara peacefully, marrying her daughter, and coming to own all of

the property in the region. As a side benefit, Mr. Danger, the representative of the feudal-

imperial alliance, leaves of his own accord as well. In order for this triumph to occur in the

aftermath of Santos’ failure to improve his estate, some principle other than reality has to

intervene: romance. We already saw how romance stepped in as a kind of compensation for the

failure of Santos’ dairy plans; its function takes on more specific contours in the allegorical

triangle between Santos Luzardo, Doña Bárbara, and her adolescent daughter Marisela. First, we

can observe that the turn away from failure in the realm of realism to success in the realm of

allegorical romance implies a shift from the individual facing objective social forces (which

inevitably produce disillusionment) to the individual facing social forces condensed allegorically

onto single characters: Doña Bárbara as an allegory of barbarism, and Marisela as an allegory of

the undeveloped forces of the llano. We will also note a shift from ‘man’ before society and

nature to a male before two women, a move that makes it possible for Gallegos to posit a solution

to Santos’ failure in the realist plane through sexual domination in the plane of romance. What

40
he can’t accomplish as a modernizer he can only accomplish with a magical phallic power, as a

man; and, more to the point, as a white, propertied man.

This is revealed in pivotal scene in the second part, dedicated to the yearly cattle round-

up, when Santos encounters Doña Bárbara and her minions on the open plain. In the course of a

cattle stampede, Santos—suddenly "overtaken by the plainsman’s instincts”—lassoes the bull

and orders it castrated on the spot. Even though the narrator notes that Doña Bárbara knows how

to lasso and castrate a bull with even greater skill, seeing Santos do it returns her to what the

novel suggests is her proper place as a woman. “She was just a woman who had witnessed an

interesting man’s accomplishment” (171). In direct contrast with the scenes in which he tries to

re-found the dairy, he does not need to plan or think. Instead, drawing from instinct and muscle

memory, he acts. It is obvious to see, especially given the novel’s penchant for allegorizing

people through animals, that Santos does not only prepare a bull for castration; symbolically, he

castrates the castrating female figure (the ‘devourer of men”), and returns her to rightful place as

a woman. Earlier, Santos had fashioned himself as a rational and superior economic force vis-à-

vis the money-burying Doña Bárbara (a woman incapable of planning, the narrator notes). But

in the cattle stampede scene he confronts her as a superior masculine force, which while coded as

‘instinct’, and therefore natural, is of course nothing more than the expression of his social power

as a landed patriarch. We are far from the modernizing Junker road he set out in the dairy

subplot. Instead, as Santos says at one point: ‘Estamos en otro camino’ (we’re on another

path)”.

Doña Bárbara doesn’t resist this transformation into ‘mere woman’; instead, by some

mysterious necromancy of the phallus (which might run parallel to the necromancy of the world

market), she becomes more and more feminine, sheds her sexuality (she is in her forties, after all,

41
the narrator keeps reminding us, and nearing the point of decrepitude), and finds ‘maternal love’

for her daughter Marisela. Realizing that Santos will never love her, she voluntarily slinks away

from the llano in the third part of the novel, leaving her estate to her adolescent daughter

Marisela, who upon marrying Santos transfers it back to him. Mr. Danger, a kind of metonymic

extension of Doña Bárbara, likewise voluntarily leaves the region. At least one critic has

complained that this operation is beyond silly, even as romance. For at the same moment in

which the narrative tension brings hero and heroine toward a ‘deadly encounter,’ Gallegos

suddenly makes Doña Bárbara submit to Santos, ‘with the passivity and nuzzles of a lap dog”

(Latcham 62, my translation). I am less concerned with the fact that this flaw exists than why it

does—namely, in order to provide, by way of magical masculine thinking, the only grounds

upon which Santos—as both man and patriarch--can emerge triumphant.

A similar move occurs in Santos’ relationship to Dona Barbara’s teenaged daughter

Marisela, who becomes the conduit for the reconstitution of the Luzardo-Barquero estate. He

teaches her to speak proper Spanish and to read; he also teaches her to stay at home, and not run,

as she was wont, to through the brush. [A project of female enclosure/housewifization—cite

Federici, Mies] Santos is allowed to triumph with Marisela in a way he could not triumph when

faced with the foils to his dairy subplot. A kind of miniature process of enclosure via

housewifization] No wonder, then, that he refers to his tutelage of Marisela as ‘his best work”

(mi mejor obra). Even though his domestication and enclosure of Marisela is phrased in

bourgeois terms (in the order of ‘civilized’ manners, and the ‘choice’ of the bourgeois marriage

contract), the principle of masculine domination is even more archaic than that wielded by Doña

Bárbara (who, as noted, is a new figure, not an old one like Santos’ family). In the end, Santos’

marriage to Marisela is less a bourgeois affair than one that returns family property to the male

42
heir, allowing him to preside over a huge estate. Indeed, the marriage marks a restoration in the

language of the novel in which, “Todo vuelve a ser Altamira”—everything becomes Altamira

again.

But this victory is, by the very terms established by Gallegos’ novel, necessarily also a

failure. This is because, at least on material grounds, the problem of the latifundio is not solved:

Santos’ estate is scarcely more productive than Doña Bárbara’s. It has simply, as Carpentier

noted, reverted to its original (older) owners and been enclosed in barbed wire. Moreover,

Santos is no longer the purposive, transformative character he set out to be. Instead, he is a

figure who allows ‘instinct’ and muscle memory course through him, seemingly outside of his

will, as in his tacit acceptance that export extraction will replace dairy production on the estate.

In a word, he is a character who is unable to do anything except return things to the way they

were before the arrival of the upstart to the region. Moreover, for all his puffing up by the

narrator, Santos’ patriarchal authority is generally weak. In a key scene, when Santos confronts

Balbino Paiba over the stolen heron feathers, El Pajarito (a peon) hides behind Santos and shoots

Balbino to protect his master. Santos, who knows nothing about El Pajarito’s actions, thinks the

bullet came from his gun, and is distraught that he has fallen into ‘barbarism’. Santos can only be

calmed when El Pajarito and Marisela collude to present him with an explanation of what

happened. In this, the novel unwittingly reveals how patriarchal power functions: the patriarch

thinks he is in complete control, but his whole reality is organized by others.

All of this would be comical were it not for the hoary energies this face-saving operation

releases. For in order for Santos’ to ‘win,’ even as a weak patriarch, the novel is forced to give

up on its dreams of bourgeois revolution and cede to the most reactionary forces imaginable:

patriarchy, white supremacy, and hereditary property. As Santos himself announces, ‘ahora

43
empieza un buen cacicazgo’ (now a good chieftanship begins). A ‘good’ chieftanship, in

contrast with Doña Bárbara’s ‘bad’ one, but a chieftanship nonetheless. In this manner, the

landowner road to capitalism begins by projecting into the future (“algún día será verdad”, some

day it will be true), but ends up summoning energies from the hoary ancestral past of the

caciques who first enclosed the plains. A bourgeois project that cannot be completed, that is,

begets an archaic response; in literary terms, a failure in the realm of realism seeks compensation

through romance. From a formal perspective, this restoration must occur. The road Santos sets

out in is, according to the inner organization of the novel, impossible. In broader terms, the

conservative resolution of Doña Bárbara is perhaps indicative of the inevitably conservative

nature of bourgeois reformism itself in peripheral societies dominated by landed oligarchies like

the Luzardos and dependent on the global market. In other words, it is not in spite of the fact that

Gallegos himself harbored bourgeois reformist hopes that he arrives at a reactionary conclusion;

it is because he was a bourgeois reformist that it occurs.

Such an insight is not new. In a foundational reading of Leon Tolstoy, Gorgy Lukács

writes that a novel like Anna Karenina reveals a marked tendency in Russian society, “not to

destroy or eliminate the worst aspects of an autocracy already superseded by historical

development but merely to adapt them to the requirements of capitalist interests’ (162). One of

Tolstoy’s great contributions, Lukács writes, was to reveal the that beneath their ‘polite and

polished exterior’, Russia’s landed nobility was “a gang of vicious imbeciles,” who ‘show and

increasing resemblance….to the stinking Yahoos of Jonathan Swift (165). Roberto Schwarz

takes this analysis one step further to show, via his analyses of Machado de Assis’ nineteenth-

century novels, how elite norms of bourgeois ‘civilization’ were always accompanied by

regressive tendencies; most notably, an acceptance of slavery and patriarchalism as the guiding

44
forces—together with the world market—of Brazilian society. With an irony similar to that

Lukács identifies in Tolstoy, Machado de Assis reveals “the adaptability of civilization to

purposes that read contrary to its very idea” (107); or, in other words, a form of regression that is

not eliminated but rather produced by a peripheral society’s integration into the global market.

Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara reveals a similar revelation that regression is the counterpart to

civilization, although on grounds much less ironic and self-aware than authors like Tolstoy and

Machado de Assis. At the same time, this novel provides a new angle on this two-step dance in

its straight-faced performance, which closely mirrors the devil’s bargain of bourgeois reformism

in 20th-century Latin America: support for reforms so long as they did not threaten class power;

retrenchment into regression as soon as they did.29 Doña Bárbara is memorable because it

arrives at this conclusion through narrative means, long before, say, the military dictatorships of

the 1960s and 1970s would cement this patter in real life. Even more notably, however, the

novel no sooner performs this regression as it asks the reader, politely, to forget it has done so.

In an uncharacteristic moment of insight regarding this operation, the novel recognizes the

suppression of history necessary to the proper functioning of its resolution. As Doña Bárbara

slinks away, into an unknown fate, a disembodied voice presents itself to her, saying that to be

loved by a man like Santos Luzardo, ‘es necesario no tener historia’ (it’s necessary to not have a

history). This is surely meant to be read as a gendered coding of sexual virtue; taken literally,

however, it is an accurate description of the novel’s chief accomplishment in the realm of form:

29
Ironically, this was the fate that awaited Gallegos himself as president of Venezuela: after winning what is widely
considered Venezuela’s first truly free election, his mildly reformist government was ousted after a scant 9 months
by a military coup d’etat.

45
to forget that instead of a bourgeois revolution, all Santos Luzardo can offer is a restoration of

hoary ancestral power.

And yet, against the grain of this neat closure, the novel reveals traces of paths not taken

or foreclosed on the road to patriarchal restoration. Even as the author makes Doña Bárbara

accept the erasure of her history, she briefly sees ‘the spectacle/shadow of herself on a different

path.’ (el espectáculo de sí misma por otro camino). Again, this can be read in the gendered

terms the novel offers us, to imagine what would have happened had Doña Bárbara not become

an evil, man-eating monster, but a docile and loving wife. But we might also ask: what if the

novel had set her on a different path, in order to direct her energies not toward the center of a

monstrous property regime, but toward its dissolution? Gallegos’ commitment to private

property as the only possible resolution to the agrarian question (even when it means that land

stays in the hands of the most reactionary forces imaginable) forecloses this question from the

start; and yet, its echoes haunt the text, especially in the form of the popular speech and legends

that circulate within it. As one example, we can remember the peon Antonio’s laconic words to

Santos amidst of the latter’s ecstatic conjuring of fences and railways crisscrossing the plain: “el

llanero no acepta cercas.” (The plainsman/person doesn’t accept fences). We might also

remember the cacique’s curse against the Luzardos for the genocide they committed in the

course of founding the estate. The novel ultimately suppresses this popular indigenous curse

with a ruling class fairy tale, and yet its echoes perhaps constitute a suppressed utopian vision in

which the expropriators might yet be expropriated.

Indeed, the social energies clamoring for an end to the large estate (and landowner class)

would soon make the mode of landowner romance I have examined in this chapter impossible.

In Mexico, the conditions for landowner romance had already been destroyed by the Mexican

46
Revolution of 1910, giving birth to the so-called “novel of the Mexican revolution,” which

necessarily imagined different solutions to the agrarian problem via armed insurrection. In other

places, landowner rule was challenged by the intensification of peasant and indigenous resistance

on the one hand, and economic decline, on the other. In this context, landowner romance was

forced to take one of two new paths. In the first, authors would give up any pretense as to the

progressive role of the landowner, to double down on his reactionary role, not as an

embarrassment to be hidden, but as a necessary social force. The action of the oligarchic Chilean

novelist Joaquín Edwards Bello’s La chica del Crillón (1935), for example, is resolved when a

flapper-like modern woman from Santiago marries a landowner from the South in the aftermath

of the financial crisis of 1929. This landowner, who comes late to the novel, is admired not

because he is in any way progressive, but because he forcefully puts down indigenous revolts on

his estate. This position hardens even further in a novel like Eduardo Barrios’ Gran señor y

rajadiablos (1948), which perhaps represents the dying gasp of landowner romance in its open

celebration a god-fearing, ‘feudal’, ‘ferociously virile’ landowner.

A second path, studied in the next chapter, was much more typical. For landowners

would be forced, increasingly, to meet up with the historical forces that could no longer be

managed through recourse to romance. The response was sometimes a kind of landowner

realism, in which the landowner was forced to countenance his defeat by forces larger than

himelf. In more dramatic moments, a gothic mode would stage lurid fantasies of the engulfment

and disintegration of the landed class by ‘monsters’ of history, suppressed by romance, returned

to roost.

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