Sarmiento's Chilean Types

T HE classic study of Argentine national character, for all its haste of composition and despite the political bias of the moment, is Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo (1845). Perhaps the best, certainly the best-known pages of this, Sarmiento's most important book, are those few which are devoted to his masterful characterizations of the gaucho types.' These descriptions of the genus gaucho in its four main species -the rastreador, the baqueano, the gaucho malo, and the cantor--are little classics, not only of Argentine literature, but of Argentine sociology and social history as well. They are fundamental to any comprehension of the character and history of the limitless pampa whose products and people have made Argentina great. And, incidentally, they are related to one phase of the widespread costumbrista movement of the time-that of the gallery of types.2 During some sixteen years of exile Sarmiento lived across the Andes, in Chile.3 One regrets that he wrote there no book as essential to the understanding of Chilean life and institutions as Facundo is to the interpretation of his own land. Yet among the people of the trans-Andean republic were significant and picturesque social types worthy of his penfor example, the huaso, Chile's counterpart of the gaucho, though he was never idealized as the latter was. In one of his newspaper articles Sarmiento himself lists some of the Chilean types which merited description and analysis

Art · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · Historical and Literary Studies · Literary and Cultural Studies