Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The gaucho was the ethnic product of very specific ecological, economic, social, and geopolitical circumstances that coalesced in the prairies of what is today Argentina and Uruguay from middle seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. The word “gaucho” — whose etymology, still uncertain, has inspired innumerable interpretations — originally designated the socially marginal but economically exploited semi-nomadic horseman who roamed through the uninhabited and unpoliced, though politically contested and belatedly colonized by the Spanish and Por-tuguese (later Brazilian) empires, cattle-abundant pampas. Although ethnically and culturally a mestizo — a miscellany of Spanish and Portuguese deserters, runaway African slaves, stranded French sailors and English pirates, and indigenous peoples, most prominently the Guaraní — the gaucho was the social byproduct of a proto-capitalist economy fully integrated at the margins of the colonial mercantile world-system, and the cultural byproduct of a dangerous and unruly geopolitical and utopian borderland. The abundance of herds of wild cattle (ganado cimarrón), wild horses, and bountiful plains loosely controlled by colonial authorities enabled the formation of an extremely individualistic, anarchic, and semi-nomadic society of small gangs of men who recognized no other authority than that of the caudillo, a form of authority ... log in or subscribe to read full text