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Gauchos This forum post is dated 08/07/10. If you feel it is old or outdated, please follow up with a question or comment and someone may be able to update it, or reply with newer information if you have it.
Forum Post08/07/10 13:54Santo Domingo, love Uruguay | Gauchos  One of my favorite "genres" of litarature is gaucho literature of Argentina and Uruguay.That, and the associated poetry and music, creates a complete culture that is hard to beat in regards to a deep human involvement with nature. My question is whether that gaucho culture really exists, currently or before. It has been documented that cowboy culture as it exists in the United States is really a romantized construct originated years after the famous "wild west". is this the same in Uruguay? Was Martin Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra made-up characters that never existed? I need some feeback for a high school report I am preparing. |
| "Gaucho and romanticism."
As I say to you in another post, gauchos and gaucho life correspond to an era long time ago gone. The culture described in the literature you name really existed. However, literature may add some romanticism to reality. Both Güiraldes and Hernandez, the authors of Don Segundo Sombra and Martin Fierro were born to high rank urban families of Buenos Aires, and never lived the realities of the gaucho life, though Hernandez at least may have close contact with rural life and gauchos. Anyway their literature may have portraited quite well gauchos since it became very popular in rural areas as soon as it was writen. Martin Fierro is quite a political manifest as long as a poem. You could have plenty of gauchesque literature also in Uruguay, like Tacuruses writen by Serafín García; and even in Southern Brazil (in portuguese of course). One of the characteristics of gauchos were that they were nomad. They rode the country and just hired for short periods where they found jobs. Their most priced possesion was their horses. And if they made any money, they carried it with them (that's the origin of the belts with coins they used). Thay way of life ended during the XIX century when the estancias started to be wire-fenced, and production passed from cattle "hunting" to cattle breathing. Then cowboys became more settled, depending on more permanent job relationships with the land owner, and less allowed to be completely "free". Before that, a gaucho could eventually live without any relationship with any "boss" because at least he could eat a cow or a sheep of the millions that lived wild (and unmarked) in the fields. Nowadays Uruguay is 95% urban. The few cowboys needed to take care of the millions of cows and sheep still there have to know how to manage pedegree cattle, mark them with a chip with tracing identification, give them the appropiate vaccine at the propper time of the year, etc.. They still widely use horses for work, but when going to town in saturday nights they would use a moped or motorcycle. They widely use a cel phone and MP3s, and since a couple of years ago their children would have a laptop to use at school! So I don't think you will find real gauchos anymore. Anyway, you could anyway certainly find some traces of their culture in music, language, some psico-social characteristics, and some customs as gathering to chat and tell tales around a fire in a round of mate. |
Comment #208/07/10 23:23Rural east Colonia departmento | "Gauchos"
We still see a few around here both of the itinerant and settled types. Sad to say they are mostly old men now but one of my neighbours who deal in horses employs and trains up youngsters who have yearnings for the gaucho way of life. Alberto is right though... they all seem to have mobile phones and mp3 players :-) |
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