Studies in Travel Writing 7 (2003): 9–28© 2003 The White Horse Press

Ricardo Güiraldes’s Américas: Reappropriation andReacculturation in Xaimaca (1923)

J.P. Spicer-Escalante

Travel writing, from the era of the Encounter to the present day, has played anintegral role in the dialectical envisioning of Latin America and Latin Americanculture by Europeans, North Americans and Latin Americans alike. In myanalysis of the cosmopolitan Argentine writer Ricardo Güiraldes’s novelXaimaca (1923), I tackle this writer’s grappling with the Latin Americanelite’s customary trip of acculturation to Europe. I demonstrate that, far fromblindly supporting the belief that culture is a principally metropolitanphenomenon, Güiraldes proposes the notion of cultural (re)discovery withinthe Latin American context as seen through his protagonist’s journey fromBuenos Aires to Jamaica. Thus, Xaimaca is more than just the narration of asimple journey; it is also a metaphorical pilgrimage towards the autochthonous,as well as a proposal for a de-centring of Latin American cultural productionand the creation of a new continental aesthetic in the post-First World War era.

‘It is not possible for one to venture forth geographically without gainingbeauty, and to gain beauty is to gain new poetic possibilities.’

‘High culture, which up until the present time had been the exclusivepatrimony of Europe and of the few Americans who had tasted it, isbeginning to express itself, in a marvellous fashion, as an essential productof our civilisation.’

R. Güiraldes1

Although never formally considered by traditional critics of Latin Americanliterature as a high-art genre in itself,2 Latin American travel writing, oftenignored or (mis)labelled as history or science, or reduced to the level ofkitschy Travel Channel globe-trotting gossip, is coming into its own as animportant form of cultural production. It is beginning to be tackled from adifferent angle which highlights its works as meaningful literary, social and

J.P. Spicer-Escalante10

cultural texts, not just as reminiscences of conquest, enlightenment writingson epistemological pursuits in unknown geographies, nineteenth-centuryjunket pieces on potential business ventures, sentimental objectifications ofindigenous cultures, or simple post-modern travel propaganda. A case inpoint is the recognition by current criticism of the fact that in Latin America,travel writing has historically been most important in terms of the definitionand continual re-definition of the continent as not only a geographic, butalso an important cultural and social space. Mary Louise Pratt has pointedout, for example, that Latin America is a cultural ‘contact zone’, a placewhere ‘disparate cultures meet and clash, and grapple with each other, oftenin highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’.3 However,as her analysis also demonstrates, the bounds of this geocultural constructripe with contact and conflict go well beyond the anthropological plane.The phenomenon that is the contact zone also lends itself to the notion ofthe existence of a textual point of contact where literary works – as disparateas the epic poem and the essay – duel and wrestle with each other in termsof representation, ideology, and competing notions of epistemology, often,at least initially in the colonial/imperial period, in disparate relations ofauthority and subjugation.4

The general source of conflict which characterises the contact zone hasto do, in fact, with the varied ways in which it has been envisioned historically.Although it has been a reality for its inhabitants for millennia, in spite oftheir lack of general consciousness of this fact, Latin America was firstconceived from the outside as part of a mythical European geopolitical,socioeconomic and fictive imaginary, spawned from generations of traveloguesand fiction. Its concrete entrance into the realm of European consciousnesscan be seen via the act of appropriation and shaping that characterises travelwriting as diverse yet similar as Columbus’s captain’s logs and Alexander vonHumboldt’s topographical, political and cultural mappings of late colonialLatin America. This geotextual construct has also been envisioned, however,through the works of nineteenth-century writers such as English businessmenFrancis Bond Head and Joseph Andrews,5 and the naturalist Charles Darwin’sOn the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation ofFavoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). During the same century, oneof the many foreign feminine voices who envisioned Latin America is U.S.suffragist and author of the anti-slavery work A Trip to Cuba (1860), JuliaWard Howe. Post-modern examples which continue to elaborate an ever-changing vision of Latin America abound, including a profusion of internet

Ricardo Güiraldes’s Américas11

resources, as well as the Fodor’s and Lonely Planet guides to a plethora of itstourist destinations, a point which confirms the eternally protean signifierthat is Latin America.

Likewise, it must be stated that the internal envisioning of Latin Americahas shown itself to be equally polymorphous and conflictive. That is, LatinAmerican writers, at least partially in response to external representationsof their geocultural space, have continually re-conceived the continentfrom a domestic perspective through travel writing via what could be calleda sort of textual intrageografía. This contestatory re-defining of Latin Americavia the travel text by Latin Americans harkens back to the demystifyingrevisionist accounts of Latin American creole insiders from the colonialperiod and those who, in their wake, have brought the genre to new levelsof relevance. Two cases in point with respect to the colonial period are theMexican writer Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Peruvian residentAlonso Carrió de la Vandera. Sigüenza y Góngora, an intellectual partnerand companion of the illustrious Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, isbest known for his 1690 work Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez, a primecounterdiscursive travel narrative which details the picaresque wanderingsof the creole Alonso Ramírez through the vast post-1588 Spanish empire. Ina powerful statement on the decadence of Spanish royal authority, his searchfor a creole identity in the midst of the overwhelming nature of belongingto the colonial periphery is a fruitless and futile venture. Carrió de la Vandera,a travelling royal functionary charged with inspecting the governmentalposts between Montevideo and Lima in the late colonial period, is bestknown for the literary product of his travel ventures, his Lazarillo de ciegoscaminantes, a clandestinely published work dating from 1775 or 1776. Hisnarrative, an almost costumbrista description of the lands and peoples whoinhabit the region which spans from Argentina to Peru during the latecolonial period, is punctuated by a demystifying textual dialogue between aSpanish oidor and his indigenous travel guide, Concolorcorvo. This work, aresponse to European travel writings on Latin America through anappropriated native voice, acts as an unparalleled example of the dialogicnature of the travel genre.

The phenomenon of contact between the Americas and Europe becomesever more important, however, during the post-Independence era whentechnological advances made travel easier and faster. At this historicaljuncture, it became the perceived duty of the nineteenth-century LatinAmerican elite, so recently culturally self-orphaned due to the Wars of

J.P. Spicer-Escalante12

Independence with the madre patria, to venture forth and to partake insocially obligatory rites of acculturation through a mix of the viaje consumidorand the viaje ceremonial, in the nomenclature of Argentine critic DavidViñas.6 The result was that travel writing reflected an ever-increasing dialecticnature during the nineteenth century. As Europeans and North Americanstravelled to Latin America at an increasing rate, Latin American ideologuesand aesthetes also more frequently ventured to Europe and North Americato seek out ‘modern’ notions on epistemology and aesthetics, so as to diminishvia direct experience their perception of a sociocultural gap that distancedthem from Europe and North America. The result of this more balancedcultural commerce was the consumption by Latin Americans of metropolitancultural production in situ, and the committing to paper, in a variety ofgenres, of their visions of Europe and North America for broad disseminationand consumption at home. A prime example of both this form of ‘creole self-fashioning’ and the counterdiscursive reinventing of Europe and NorthAmerica is Domingo Sarmiento’s Viajes (1849–51), written between 1845and 1847, a work which encompasses his travel experiences in Europe,North Africa and the United States during that period.7 However, a muchmore contestatory response is seen in the Argentine writer EugenioCambaceres’s novel Música sentimental: silbidos de un vago, and Franco-Argentine Paul Groussac’s Fruto vedado: costumbres argentinas (1884). Theseworks not only respond to European visions of Latin America, but address,at the same time, the problematics of Latin American cultural identity vis-à-vis European cultural hegemony and the perceived need of the LatinAmerican oligarchy to become cultured through contact with the Old World.

Although the process of cultural identification continues to the presentday, especially in terms of aesthetics where even fashion is dictated fromNorth to South and East to West, the historical progress of the growingtextual exchange between Europe and Latin America is marked by a majorturning point: the First World War. Simply put, as Europe – perceived byLatin Americans in general as the centre of world-wide cultural activity atthe time – cannibalised itself, Latin American elites witnessed this self-destruction in horror. Europe, the continent they had perceived as theparadigm of modernity, was eager for destruction, something that Marinetti’sfuturismo had amply foreshadowed from 1910. This reality provoked aprofound re-examination of their views in relation to their own continentand a cultural movement towards their own autochthonous cultures.8 The

Ricardo Güiraldes’s Américas13

Latin American ideological and cultural intelligentsia, in this act of necessaryself-reflection, therefore turned back to themselves and their own culturalreferents, and reflected upon the cultural and aesthetic possibilities that theyoffered. This return to the domestic is seen in the (re)discoveries of numerousLatin American writers who had been – or even still were, in many cases –enamoured of Europe and of metropolitan culture. Several cases in point areLatin American writers Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier and JulioCortázar. Asturias not only rediscovers, but also re-elaborates Mayan legendsafter his anthropological studies in Paris under Georges Reynaud, thetranslator of many Mayan texts. Carpentier, a Cuban cultural attaché andrenowned world traveller, discovers the ‘magically real’ during a trip toHaiti, not Europe or the Far East, even though they serve as geoculturalreferents for the rediscovery of his home continent and region. Finally, JulioCortázar, the Belgian-born Argentine in self-exile in Paris since the 1950s,not only reconsiders his ideological obligations as a Latin American writerafter numerous trips to Cuba, but rediscovers them most notably after visitingSandinista-held Nicaragua in the late 1970s.

As a result of the turn of events that was the ‘war to end all wars’, one canthus see that in the post-First World War era Latin America as a constructbecomes more a theme of interest to latinoamericanos themselves. This factamplifies Latin American travel writing’s scope and creates the notion of aliterature which can be conceived as a gesture of counterconquest, a meansof textual reappropriation of the often ignored quotidian – the under-represented home continent, the Américas – as well as a reacculturativemedium for the Latin American elite.

Such is the case of the cosmopolitan Argentine writer Ricardo Güiraldes,probably best known for his 1926 gaucho novel, Don Segundo Sombra.9 Yet,reducing Güiraldes’s literary production to only gaucho literaturetremendously limits the scope of his work, especially since travel plays animportant role in his life and his artistic vision on both physical andmetaphysical planes. The son of a wealthy Argentine landowner, Güiraldeswas a perennial traveller within both his own domestic space and withinforeign spheres, as well as within diverse literary genres.10 He travelledincessantly during his life between the Argentine capital and the family’sestancia in the province of Buenos Aires, as well as between Argentina andEurope, and the Far East. In fact, while he was a young child, his familyresided on the outskirts of Paris, the same city where he would also die at the

J.P. Spicer-Escalante14

premature age of 41.11 Therefore, it seems inevitable that his constantgeographic movement should spill over into his literary production, wheretravel – or the concept of the journey – is a common motif.12

With this in mind, I would now like to focus on Güiraldes’s third work,Xaimaca, a lyrical novel written in 1919 and published in 1923.13 I argue thatGüiraldes utilises the travel genre, although with a dose of awkwardambivalence so common to Latin American cultural elites even today, tosubvert the requisite fin-de-siècle journey of acculturation to Europe by LatinAmerican high society. In Xaimaca, Güiraldes substitutes this traditionalelitist notion of travel with a journey of reappropriation and reacculturation;in essence, of (re)discovery of Latin America as an aesthetic and ideologicalmilieu. As an extension, I would like to relate the protagonist’s quest to theLatin American cultural artist’s search for lost roots in the post-First WorldWar period, a point that links this textual voyage of rediscovery to Güiraldes’sown avant garde aspirations.14

Loosely based on Güiraldes’s own experiences during a 1916–17 voyageto the Caribbean via Chile and the Pacific with his wife, the Argentine poetAdelina del Carril, Xaimaca takes the form of a daily travelogue written bythe work’s protagonist, Marcos Galván. This young, cultured Argentine’sinitial travel motive as he departs by train from Buenos Aires is indicativeof his quest: he seeks to immerse himself in ‘the remains of pre-Incancivilisation’ (p. 269).15 Although his original plans are to venture only as faras the Peruvian cities of Mollendo, Callao or Trujillo, his travel companions,Clara Ordóñez and her brother, Peñalba, convince him to continue withthem to Jamaica. Through addressing his home continent and culture withgreat emphasis during his travels and incorporating them into his own text,Güiraldes’s Galván textually reappropriates his personal geographic spaceand reacculturates himself with respect to his own Latin American roots,converting Xaimaca plainly into a text of (re)discovery and (re)conquest.

Galván gives the indication from the beginning of the text while inBuenos Aires that his journey is reflective of a heightened individual aestheticimpulse, a sort of self-induced hyperaesthesia. Upon embarking on his quest,he describes himself as pre-disposed to self-inscription at the experientiallevel. In the travel diary’s first entry he states: ‘Above all, I hope to personalisemy sensations, as if my journey were a point of departure towards somethingdefinite. Things shall inscribe themselves upon me according to my ownidiosyncrasy’ (p. 269).16 In terms of the narrator’s act of (re)discovery and(re)conquest, Güiraldes allows his narrator to define himself here in a

Ricardo Güiraldes’s Américas15

counterdiscursive inversion of the traditional Eurocentric Spanishconquistador role. Thus, the narrator sees himself not as an explorer oradventure-seeker mundanely interested in the mere accumulation of wealthor power, but as a ‘minor discoverer of my own impressions’ (p. 269) whoseonly moral baggage is his ‘great curiosity’ (p. 269). Beyond ‘a quantitysufficient to travel for five months’ (p. 269), his only belongings are hissuitcases and his travel documents. Thus, Güiraldes characterises his narrator– in essence a self-portrait or his own envisioning of the Latin Americanartist – as a hypersensitive aesthete in search of ancient cultural roots andmodern vital experiences; that is, a sort of non-materially oriented, subjectivetabula rasa. The author appears to suggest that the Latin American aesthete’sis a journey of discovery in the hinterlands of Latin American (pre)historyand culture, not a quest for material riches. In addition, the fact that he haslittle additional baggage, either real or figurative, to tie him down, is arelevant point since this open posture allows for a naked, non-preconceivedrapprochement to his own continent and its cultures.

As the train crosses the vast pampas on its way to Mendoza and across theAndes to Chile, Galván’s initial impressions refer to the countryside that liesbefore his eyes. Using Switzerland as a point of a comparison – an elementso common to the European writers of discovery and conquest who wrote onthe Americas as to become a cliché – the narrator perceives that the Argentinelandscape pales in comparison with its European counterpart.17 After twohours traversing the flatlands that make up the province of Buenos Aires,with only brief bursts of vegetation, Galván exclaims ‘This is too flat. OhSwitzerland!’ (p. 270). While the comparison with Europe appears initiallyproblematic, Güiraldes’s text progressively displays the narrator’s passagetowards the recognition of the heightened aesthetic beauty of his surroundings.Although his reaction is mediated at the beginning of his journey by theextreme summer heat of the southern hemisphere, Galván slowly awakesfrom the heat-induced lethargy and begins slowly to respond to the terrainbefore his eyes. In an entry that prefigures his later maternal characterisationof the Argentine grasslands/Earth in Don Segundo Sombra, Güiraldes’s narratorbegins to rediscover his origins while also finding an aesthetic impulse:‘Further out, beyond suspicion, the world continues; world means pampa.Pampa Mother, creator in me of a drop of sap that yearns to become a song’(p. 270). The narrator’s act of (re)discovery, which allows the reader todismiss his initial Eurocentric comparisons, continues as the train arrives inMendoza. In a prefiguration of the elevated experience he will have as he

J.P. Spicer-Escalante16

passes through the Andes, he transforms the diminutive Trasandino traininto a ‘sheath from which the marvellous shall burst forth’ (p. 271). As thetrain departs towards the Andes, he witnesses the surrounding mountainouslandscape and captures his impressions of the terrain in a series of staccato-like images: ‘the broad bed of an almost dry torrential river; the tortuousdwarf-like vegetation that grows amongst the rude, rocky cliffs that borderthe mountains; the tense colours of some flowers that serve as theornamentation of a well-kept garden’ (p. 272). The progression of imagesthat Güiraldes uses here, a metaphor in itself of the narrator’s anaemicmovement towards a positive sense, progresses from the dry and almoststerile, to the aesthetically pleasing and ornamental.

In an example reminiscent of the European texts of discovery in theAmericas, Güiraldes also appeals to the baroque belief in the impossibilityof mere words to characterise the concrete reality, so charged with admiratio,that the narrator experiences. As the trip continues, Galván perceives thathe has become limited by the folly of believing that his words are capable ofcharacterising the beauty which surrounds him: ‘To speak of the cordillera inthese notes would be like trying to fit the sun in my suitcase’ (p. 272).Although he demonstrates an apparent humility by stating that he is dwarfedby the scope of the experience – ‘that which is primary bypasses me due toits magnitude’ (p. 272) – Galván does, however, continue to characterise thescenery around him, not unlike his earlier European counterparts. As thetrain climbs further up into the mountains, Güiraldes’s narrator, in aforeshadowing of this author’s later El sendero with respect to the cosmicqualities of the earthly experience, appeals to a punctuated accumulatio in hisattempt to describe the landscape that surrounds him. This scenery, whichslowly approaches the infinite sky, takes on ultra-earthly qualities:

A snow-crested peak, pure in its whiteness as if it were sculpted in acrystal made of time. A massif of metallic mountains separated from thecordillera by a layer of clouds, and which appears as if it were the remnantsof another planet … but composed of more precious materials ... Slopes,on whose edges the imagination slips as if in a nightmarish vertigo. Faraway, the azure translucence of a sky more subtle than that of the plains.(p. 272)18

The overall effect of this aesthetic experience transports Galván to a cosmicplane that is indirectly juxtaposed to the mundane and pedestrian descriptionsof the early Spanish explorers. The feeling he experiences is likened to an‘incredible planetary insanity’, which is enhanced by the thin mountain air

Ricardo Güiraldes’s Américas17

which produces in the narrator a ‘mystical dizziness’ (p. 272). This descriptionof the mountains, linked to this quasi-extraplanetary experience, is almosthyperbolic: ‘the multi-chromatic ribbons of stone, once raised and torn byan unknown force, give the idea that we are to pass through the closeintersection of the vertiginous influence of the stars in rotation’ (p. 272).After a border check and safe passage to the Chilean side of the Andes,Galván, in an appropriation of the Columbus-like discourse of bounty, findshimself in idyllic awe of the fertile valleys on the Chilean side of the border.He portrays the Chilean lands in terms of their abundance: ‘tall and rarewheat, alfalfa green to the point of saturation, and alamo trees, many alamotrees’ (p. 273). Thus, although Güiraldes reverts to the image of, and theimages created by, European explorers in the Americas, he offers an invertedportrait of the conquistador in Galván by appropriating the subtleties of theconquistador’s discourses and inverting the equation of discovery so as totransform it into an act of appropriative (re)discovery.

The narrator’s process of geographic reappropriation proceeds as thethree travellers slowly progress towards the Chilean coast. There, they arereceived by what Galván describes as ‘the livid clarity of the dawn’ over theocean which greets them as they arrive in Valparaíso, whose ‘colony oflights’ appear as if they were ‘a vague million phosphorescent lights at thebottom of the sea’ (p. 280). The reappropriative process thus continues onthe Aysen, the ship which carries them on towards Panama, especially inrelation to the agricultural plenty that Galván’s comments upon arriving inChile foreshadow. While in port in Coquimbo, Chile for a brief stay, Galvánfirst witnesses the ‘green, earthly fertility of the valley’ (p. 281) near the portcity. The bounty of these fertile lands then appears on the deck of the ship,which has been ‘invaded by flowers, fruits and cheeses, in fine baskets’ (p.281), as the local vendors offer a cornucopia of products to the ship’spassengers. Once again, Galván returns to the accumulatio to describe thescope of the abundance of their products: ‘figs, papayas, cherries, plums,peaches, apricots, cucumbers, carnations’ (p. 281).

On a similar visit in the bay at Taltal, Chile, however, Galván’s tonechanges, denoting a change in mood. Both the narrator and Peñalba feelsuffocated by the ‘hostile rise of the sterile slopes’ (p. 283) that surround thesmall port city whose arid land ‘exists only to maintain its [inhabitants’]bodies on its surface’ (p. 283). This characterisation, however, points out atextual nexus between Galván’s landscape descriptions and his emotionalstate. That is, the limited number of negative impressions of Latin American

J.P. Spicer-Escalante18

scenery which he experiences are textually linked to the vicissitudes that heexperiences in his relationship with his paramour, Clara Ordóñez. In Taltal,he experiences an ‘anguished separation’ (p. 282) from her and is affected byher emotional distance from him. On an extratextual level, however, thesechanges in mood are relevant, since they describe the often tortuousrelationship between the Latin American home continent and the LatinAmerican cultural elite in general that existed at this period.19

Yet, Güiraldes offers an important counterpoint to the previous landscapedescription via the recounting of a brief visit to a carefully protected gardenof la Quinta Casela, a ‘laborious conjunction of earthly greens’ (p. 285) in thenorthern city of Antofagasta. The experience provokes the following responsein the hypersensitive narrator which re-establishes the sense of wondermentthat he previously experienced in the Andes: ‘For an hour, we venturedthrough the only gardens to be found in the place, admiring the colorfulflowers as if drugged by their toxins, the voluminous legumes, or the treeswhich are found to be on a satisfactory path of development’ (p. 285).20 Lateron during the journey, in a consciously reappropriative moment while in ahotel in the city of Colón, Panamá, Galván perceives a fantastic view of theCaribbean, which he describes as an ‘immense blue happiness, under a clear-blue sky’ (p. 309). In an important intertextual scene, Güiraldes once againrepeats the notion of his narrator as a sort of reappropriative Latin Americanconquistador. As Galván sits in the window of his hotel, he evokes bothchildhood literary memories of fantastic literature and the novels of chivalrywhich accompanied the conquistadors to the Americas and shaped their viewof the newly discovered lands of the New World: ‘I prop myself up in thewindow so as to seize an impression upon arrival, and delve into the mostdesirable theme of contemplation. I am faced with one of those images fromfantastic works, that left my admiration perplexed as a child’ (p. 309). Hisenthusiasm carries over to their visit to the ‘extraordinarily verdant’ Jamaica(p .315), the trio’s final destination. Once again, a sensation linking theaesthetic to the telluric is felt by Galván in the heart of a Jamaican valley.In another Columbus-like, although more poetic, moment, the travellersfind themselves ‘suddenly dwarfed by the silent solitude of the valley, oursenses concentrated in the experiencing of its millions of trees, plants andmosses’ (p. 317). Thus, Galván appeals anew to the sensory effect of thescenery and the experience which captivates the travellers’ sensations. InGalván’s own words, ‘The Earth drugs us with a broad surge of perfume’ (p.317). The fact that Jamaica is curiously the scene of both Galván’s final

Ricardo Güiraldes’s Américas19

experience and Columbus’s final venture in the Americas is not a point thatshould be ignored here. On the contrary, Galván’s reconquest of the earthlynature of the island, without ulterior motives related to material gain, isanother example of how Güiraldes subverts the conquistador attitude ofcolonising Europeans, both in the early colonial period and during theperiod in which he wrote, as well as the viaje consumidor of Latin Americanelites from the mid-nineteenth century through the author’s own timeperiod.

Thus, Güiraldes, through his narrator cum Latin American (re)conquist-ador, rediscovers and reconquers Latin America, and manifests this actthrough a process of textual reappropriation. In other words, Latin America,not Europe, enters into the realm of the aesthetic as a source of artisticinspiration, not material gain. This textual reconquest is not carried out bya European conquistador, but by a Latin American writer who rediscoversthat which makes up his world: his home continent, Latin America.

Galván’s travels also describe, however, the intricate process of thereacculturation of the Latin American elite as the narrator ventures fromone locale to another, reacculturating himself through contact with elementswhich compose a common set of Latin American cultural baggage. In short,Galván participates in a process of rapprochement with respect toautochthonous Latin American culture. This geocultural reapproximation,however, takes on increasingly dialectical proportions when inserted intothe anti-imperialist discourse, vis-à-vis both Britain and the United States.

Although contact with specific Latin American people and culturalelements is limited up to the stay of the trio of Galván, Ordóñez, and Peñalbain Chile, an unexpected automobile breakdown between Santiago andValparaíso leads to a fortuitous rediscovery of the simple pleasures of localculture, a fact which distances them from the European culture thatcharacterises the cosmopolitan Buenos Aires in which they live. In theprovincial town of Curacaví, the three travellers, who are awaiting thearrival of replacement vehicles for their trip to the coast, journey out into thenight air after dinner. They find themselves immersed in a place from anothertime that exhales ‘the subtle aroma of an unreal, centenary remembrance’(p. 278). The travellers are captivated by the sounds of distant music thatcomes from a voice ‘which sings out a simple and measured air, that venturesout from a window like an uncontainable, tender word’ (p. 278). They arethus provoked, by an intimate impulse, to seek out the music’s source for theywant to see the cueca that they have heard and savoured be danced. However,

J.P. Spicer-Escalante20

as they take up a voyeuristic stance to peer into the home from which themusic emanates and spy a ‘presumptuous young man, with a … young girl’(p. 278) who are dancing the cueca, the sound of their ‘Buenos Aires shoes’,a clear reference to the travellers’ cosmopolitan nature, startles the musicianand dancers into silence. Their continued march through the streets isinterrupted, however, by the narrator’s description of a group of musicianswho, arriving for a musical celebration in a local family home, envelop thethree urban travellers in ‘laughter and exclamations’ (p. 279). As the singersand dancers of the caravan say goodbye, Galván brings to a close this culturalscene from yesteryear with yet another cosmic reference: ‘The musicalmurmurs die off in the distance with the benevolence of a celestial shower.The night returns to cloak the simple locale with its vast calm, and thehomes allow lunar rays to once again penetrate their walls withphosphorescent passiveness’ (p. 280). The narrator’s depiction of belovedlocal customs thus serves as a textual record of a simpler, purer era that is(re)discovered by Galván, Ordóñez, and Peñalba via their journey.

Galván’s process of cultural reawakening proceeds as the excursioncontinues on the Aysen. However, the events that the narrator describesbegin to reveal a burgeoning and conspicuous anti-imperialist discourse inXaimaca, written not long after the inauguration of the Panama Canal andduring the First World War.21 In fact, the position that Güiraldes takes inthis novel with respect to the extension of imperialist control in the Americasby Great Britain and the United States, rampant at that chronologicaljuncture, points to the growing abyss that opened between what was later tobe called the First World and the Third World in the post-World War I era.As the Aysen journeys towards Panama, the three passengers witness analtercation which breaks out between an English seaman and an indigenousPeruvian woman on board to sell her wares during a brief stopover in port.In Galván’s words, which carry a great amount of ironic weight as theydescribe the sailor’s actions and reflect the author’s characterisation of hisperceived attitude, the sailor pushes the Indian woman ‘with all the rudenessthat the superiority of his race permits him’ (p. 298).22 Galván’s ironic stancewith regards to the sailor’s perceived thoughts of supposed superiority takesthe form of a manifestation of the civilisation/barbarism dichotomy soprevalent in Latin American letters. For Galván, in the mind of the Englishseaman ‘Only the rejects … come late to civilisation and it is good to dictateauthority with a big stick’ (p. 298), an obvious reference to TheodoreRoosevelt’s famous dictum on international diplomacy.23 Güiraldes’s

Ricardo Güiraldes’s Américas21

ideological position on the Englishman’s actions is seen in the followingstatement from the old woman in the use of an anti-imperialist ethnicepithet: ‘disgusting gringos’ (298). However, the incident also prompts theauthor to reflect in more depth upon Europe, the United States and imperialistideology via his narrator, which locates him with respect to his own culturaland ethnic identity and ideology. In a reference to Incan and Spanishcolonial history, Galván writes: ‘Atahualpa must have thought the samewhen faced with the greed that made gold out of his gods’ (p. 298). Incontinuation, he – not unlike Güiraldes who identified greatly with thetelluric forces of his native Argentine culture even in the light of his frequenttravels to Europe – sees that he shares ‘some common roots’ (p. 299) with theIncan ruler. In a diachronic moment, he relates the abuses of the Spaniardsduring the conquest to the underlying reasons that lead to the First WorldWar: ‘my current sentiments lead me to think of the utilitarian culture thatis making Europe abort itself in blood, with hatred’ (p. 298–9). Therefore,in the author’s mind, there is a common element in both the Spanishconquest and the ‘war to end all wars’: they are a testament to utilitariangreed with dire cultural consequences.

A similar observation that binds indigenous culture to Güiraldes’s anti-imperialist thought appears when the ship traverses the Panama CanalZone, seen as the principal representation of U.S. imperialism in LatinAmerica. Here Galván inverts the execution of Atahualpa at the hands ofthe Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1533 – death by dismembermentof the corporal extremities – by inverting the operative dialectical terms thatare the symbol of imperialism: the docking Aysen, and the executed Incanruler. Turning the English ship into an object at the will of the slain indigenousleader, Galván writes: ‘The ship is held subject on all four sides, as if it wereto place itself at Atahualpa’s mercy’ (p. 305). As an extension of this theme,Güiraldes portrays the Canal Zone as a sign of the destructive imperialistprocess. Its construction makes the Panamanian countryside become a barrenwasteland, a ‘strange landscape of sadness’, where ‘Through the vast floodedregions, a forest of barren trees extends: an army of standing skeletons, whoselast bones rot in the humidity’ (p. 306). The construction of the continentalpassage has created a ‘Botanical Necropolis that extends for kilometres’(p. 306). Galván’s response to the strident nature of the locus he surveys, thebusy Canal Zone which represents utilitarian modernisation, is the urgencyof flight: ‘Given that it was impossible for us to remain enslaved by thebrutality of the iron and gears, which chew at the prevailing silence with a

J.P. Spicer-Escalante22

strident nature, we fled in search of greater calm’ (p. 307). The main symbolof U.S. imperialism, the Canal Zone, is therefore reduced by Güiraldes’shighly sensorial narrator to the role of an agent of destruction, imposed uponLatin America by foreign interests in the name of global capitalist expansion.

Their tour of Kingston, Jamaica, extends this anti-imperialist discourseby linking it to the temporal reality that is the First World War. The Europeanhostilities require the immediate embarkation of Afro-Jamaican soldiers, apoint that neither the narrator nor Güiraldes misses. In a violentcharacterisation that foreshadows and places blame for the contingent’sultimate demise, Galván states that ‘From the Port of Kingston, where thepalm trees are decapitated by the wind, the Fifth Jamaican Contingentdeparts for the European war’ (p. 322). For the Jamaican soldiers who haveonly played war games as part of their basic training, ‘The game of “ToySoldier” has concluded in an anguish-laden reality’ (p. 322). In a curioustextual ex-abrupto, Galván points out that the war, the product of capitalistarms makers from apparently civilised metropolitan nations, will lead onlyto destruction: ‘Destiny already points to the brutal combat of the civilisednations, avid as merchants of power and riches. There will the fields, ploughedby the iron forged for death, be laid barren’ (pp. 322–3). In addition, Galván,replete with irony, points out an important dialectical distinction betweenthe metropolis and the periphery. This war will radically affect the lives ofthe peripheral colonials who will be forced to fight and die in a metropolitanbattle that is not of their making. Their destiny, death, is almost sure as‘projectiles will make red liquid of the mass of black muscles’ (p. 333) thatmake up the Jamaican bodies. In like manner, the calm that will remain afterthe war is over will be at the expense of the Jamaican soldiers’ extinguishedlives: ‘The silence that surrounds them will be the eternal silence of theJamaican contingent’ (pp. 332–3). In other words, Güiraldes points out thatthe supposedly ‘barbaric’ Jamaican soldiers are nothing more than cannonfodder for ‘civilised’ European warlords who are thirsty for material progress,even at the expense of numerous innocent lives.

Therefore, as in the case of the hitherto studied textual reappropriationwhich Güiraldes carries out in Xaimaca, one can also perceive the existenceof the notion of reacculturation in this work. However, as the previousexamples demonstrate, this process goes well beyond a simple reacquaintancewith colourful local customs in quaint and remote provincial hamlets. It alsoextends to the work’s ideological plane where the anti-imperialist discourseoperates to convert the text into an ideological foreboding vis-à-vis the

Ricardo Güiraldes’s Américas23

relevance and survival of autochthonous culture. Thus, through Galván’stravel diary, Güiraldes not only shows an appreciation for the traditionalculture of Latin America, but also acts as a voice that clarifies and warns ofthe dangers of an ever present threat from imperial powers which will radicallychange the nature of Latin American and Latin American culture if giventhe chance.

In his early 1970s reflections on Argentina in the essay ‘The Return ofEva Perón’, the Nobel Laureate and post-colonial writer from Trinidad,V.S. Naipaul, comments that: ‘To be Argentine was not to be SouthAmerican. It was to be European; and many Argentines became European,of Europe. The land that was the source of their wealth became no more thantheir base … Between the wars there was a stable Argentine community of100,000 in Paris; the peso was the peso then.’24 Notwithstanding the truththat is found in this statement, a clarification in the case of Ricardo Güiraldes,frequently a member of that same Argentine expatriate community in Paris,must be made since he was most definitely an ardent Latin American anddefender of all things Latin American.25

As seen through this particular reading of Xaimaca, Güiraldes uses thetravel genre not to condone or support the traditional bourgeois LatinAmerican journey of acculturation to Europe so common in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and so recognised in Naipaul’sdeclaration. On the contrary, here he demonstrates, via the words, reactions,and emotions of his narrator, his own process of continental reappropriationand reacculturation, a fact that was recognised by his readership and his ownconvictions.26 In other words, through his text, he shows other members ofthe Latin American elite the validity of the process of reappropriation andreacculturation vis-à-vis the autochthonous. This underlying discursiveproject results in an invitation to discover – or to rediscover – the local, thenational, the continental, not just necessarily the metropolitan which operatesin such hegemonic form. Güiraldes, therefore, demystifies the fin-de-sièclejourney of cultural consumption to Europe, suggesting an important revisitingof both Latin America and Latin American culture through a process ofreappropriation and reacculturation in the wake of the First World War.

This revisiting of the autochthonous in Güiraldes’s novel can also beseen as another important step towards his own personal avant-garde aesthetic,his Cencerro de cristal being the first.27 In the aftermath of the First WorldWar, which horrified the author, as seen in his ‘Notas sobre la GuerraEuropea’,28 Güiraldes sought ever more to promote an autochthonous vision

J.P. Spicer-Escalante24

of an autochthonous América in his work. Nowhere is this more noticeablethan in his Don Segundo Sombra, where the development of his own aestheticcan be seen while highlighting the domestic – and rural – cultural contexts,not the borrowed European culture seen in Buenos Aires. In fact, as he statesin an essay published in Proa, ‘We are, I have heard, a nation of swallows; wewait for everything to be said and done abroad because we have money to buyit. Many who differ with regards to this criterion exist and would like todignify our America making it give whatever it can as a continent, as anation, and as individuals’ (p. 679). Güiraldes most definitely sought todignify the Américas in his cultural production and as editor of one of theperiod’s most influential literary magazines. Likewise, as this analysis hasproven, his Xaimaca is more than just the narration of a simple journey. Itis also a fitting message to the Latin American cultural elite in terms of theimportant task of fomenting a necessary cultural repositioning as a whole inLatin America, of a broader de-centring of Latin American cultural productionin particular, and of the creation of a new continental aesthetic in the vast‘contact zone’ that the Américas continue to be.

Notes

1 Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1962), pp. 627 and 605, respectively. Alltranslations of Güiraldes’s and other authors’ work are my own unless otherwise stated.2 A prime example of this fact are the scant, if not wholly parenthetical, references madeto travel writing in the most traditional of all Hispanic American literary histories:Enrique Anderson Imbert’s Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana (México: Fondo deCultura Económica, 1970). Although he recognises its existence, he accords it very littlespecial significance at the level of genre.3 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York:Routledge, 1992), p. 4. Although Pratt utilises this term initially in reference to theindigenous Peruvian writer Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s writings, it must be statedthat her intentions are to interrogate the ‘imperial meaning-making’ apparatus that istravel writing, as part of ‘both a study of genre and a critique of ideology’ (p. 4) in general.Given the ubiquitous nature of travel writing in the colonial/imperial world, and thecommon ideological platform which colonialist/imperialist designs tend to display, it isquite logical, as Pratt’s analysis demonstrates, that this term be malleable enough to grantit applicability in virtually every colonialist or imperialist context, even though specifictendencies may differ in the application of colonialist/imperialist ideology. AlthoughBritish colonialism/imperialism differs from its Spanish counterpart, common ideologicalstrands of cultural domination can be found in examples of travel literature from both of

Ricardo Güiraldes’s Américas25

these national backgrounds, as well as a common contestatory ‘grappling’ with the textsof the hegemonic centre by creole subjects.4 Traditional distinctions between fiction and non-fiction seem to melt away in LatinAmerican travel literature. This is due to the existence of a common thread that fictiveand non-fictive works share in relation to the envisioning of a changing Latin America,even though they might be of different genres – the novel and the essay, for example –and ultimately have very different ideological platforms and readers in mind.5 Bond Head’s Rough Notes of Some Journeys across the Pampas and in the Andes (London:J. Murray, 1826) and Andrews’s The Journey from Buenos Aires to … Santiago de Chili andCoquimbo in the Years 1825–26 (London: J. Murray, 1827), are part of the body of writingfrom those whom Mary Louise Pratt calls the ‘capitalist vanguard’ (Imperial Eyes, p. 148)in terms of European economic investment in South America in the immediate post-Independence period. For a more thorough discussion of this form of travel writing, seePratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 144–71.6 Viñas offers a broad terminology to characterise the longitudinally differing and requisite‘trips’ to Europe by Latin American elites. The ‘consumer’s trip’, the viaje consumidorcharacterises the common perception of Latin American travellers that Europe was alocus of material and increasingly aesthetic consumption. Viñas’s ‘ceremonial trip’, theviaje ceremonial, is the institutionalisation and sacralisation of the concept of the elite’stravel to Europe for travel-sake alone. Literatura argentina y realidad política (Buenos Aires:EUDEBA, 1972), pp. 149–184.7 The phrase ‘creole self-fashioning’ is from Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 172, 189.8 As Hugo Verani has recognised, this redressing helped give birth to the plethora of ismsthat characterise the avant garde movements in post-First World War Latin America:‘The second decade of the twentieth century is a key, necessary period to understand thecurrent development of Latin American letters. It is the decade in which the sumptuousand preciosista rhetoric of modernismo is discarded and the bases for an absolute schism vis-à-vis the immediate artistic past are set; after this rupture, the dominant literary modalitiesrecognise a common root. Those are the years of manifestos, proclamations and violentpolemics, of an intense search for originality, of an insurgency of expression and form,which explodes in works that radically transform the course of continental letters.’ Lasvanguardias literarias en Hispanoamérica, 3rd edn (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica,1995), pp. 9 and 10.9 (San Antonio de Areco, Argentina: Editorial Proa, 1926.) The subgenre of the gauchonovel is the logical culmination during the early twentieth century of the nineteenth-century romantic and nationalistic tendency of Argentine writers Hilario Ascasubi,Estanislao del Campo and José Hernández. These writers sought to rehabilitate the imageof the archetypal inhabitant of the Argentine pampas, the gaucho, so maligned byDomingo Faustino Sarmiento in his 1845 treatise, Facundo.10 ‘Güiraldes … knew from first-hand experience the life of the gaucho. He was themember of a wealthy family who knew Paris perfectly, as well as all of Europe, and eventhe Far East. During the course of his life he travelled greatly and was the friend of manyEuropean writers, especially Valéry Larbaud.’ Jean Franco, Historia de la literaturahispanoamericana a partir de la independencia, trans. Carlos Pujol (Barcelona: Seix Barral,

J.P. Spicer-Escalante26

1980), p. 243. Güiraldes cultivated poetry, the novel, and the essay, and was the firsteditor of the Argentine literary magazine Proa.11 This experience served as the beginning of an affection for continental culture and forEuropean languages and literatures in general. In his memoirs, Güiraldes states ‘Myparents went to Europe when I was one and spent four years there. I returned speakingFrench and German’ (p. 27).12 From his Cencerro de cristal (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de José Tragant, 1915) throughDon Segundo Sombra and his posthumous publication El sendero (Mästricht: A.A.M.Stols, 1932) Güiraldes refers constantly to the notion of travel. Initially, this motif relatesto covering large expanses of the Argentine Pampas, or to the search for identity thatcharacterises Fabio Cáceres’s travels in Don Segundo Sombra. In the poetry from El sendero(The Journey) the notion of travel has more of a cosmic relevance within the context ofan evolutionary spiritual view of the future. For an analysis of the search for ‘otherness’in Don Segundo Sombra, see Juan Pablo Spicer, ‘Don Segundo Sombra: en busca del otro’,Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 38, 2 (1993), 361–73.13 (San Antonio de Areco, Argentina: Establecimientos Gráficos Colón, 1923). Allquotations are from the version of this novel which is found in Güiraldes’s Obras completas.Franco considers Xaimaca a ‘lyrical novel’ (Historia, p. 243), whereas John Blackwoodconsiders it a ‘poetic narrative’, La novela hispanoamericana del siglo XX: una vista panorámica,trans. Raymond Williams (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984), p. 56. Bothcritics thus recognise the poetic nature of this work, an extension of Güiraldes’srevolutionary poetics in his Cencerro de cristal.14 In the words of Franco, Güiraldes ‘was far from being a simple primitivista; he was, onthe contrary, a writer who was enormously conscious of his art’ (p. 243). Likewise,Francine Masiello regards Güiraldes as an important member of the avant-garde movementin Argentina. She sees Jorge Luis Borges, Oliverio Girondo, and Ricardo Güiraldes as ‘themasters who organized the Argentine avant-garde of the 1920s and structured theirinnovations as a filial rebellion against their literary fathers’. Between Civilization andBarbarism: Women, Nation and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina (Lincoln, Nebraska:University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 147.15 Although I offer a translation of the cited passages, I include the original paginationin the text for reference-sake. As Evelyn Picon Garfield and Ivan A. Schulman point out,Galván’s type of search dovetails with Güiraldes’s own search for a centre in the post-warera. Alluding to a metaphorical ‘seed’ that is the initial essence of the creative process,they state that: ‘The primitive force of the seed, is, in the case of Güiraldes, his spiritualidentification with gaucho culture; and it is, in terms of the dialectic of modernity, themanifestation of a search for an origin and the reconquest of an inheritance.’ Las entrañasdel vacío: ensayos sobre la modernidad hispanoamericana (México: Ediciones CuadernosAmericanos, 1984), p. 112. Here, Galván’s search for the remains of the pre-Incancivilisation is tantamount to Güiraldes’s own search for cultural identity on the Argentinepampas.16 Curiously, the ‘as if’ qualification of the initial statement problematises the narrator’squest since it relies on the hypothetical, not on the concrete. Güiraldes’s point hereappears to be that this journey of reappropriation and reacculturation has no definite

Ricardo Güiraldes’s Américas27

ending point, a notion which I explore in my previously mentioned analysis of DonSegundo Sombra.17 The constant comparisons of the Americas vis-à-vis European referents during the ageof the ‘encounter’ with the Americas were rampant, as seen, for example, in Columbus’slogs and Cortés’s letters. Oddly enough, it is only after the Peruvian mestizo Inca Garcilasode la Vega’s writings in the early seventeenth century that the geographic referentchanges, since his works describe the Americas, but now from the vantage point of theLatin American in European residence.18 ‘Un pico nevado, puro en su blancura como si fuera tallado en un cristal que se me antojahecho de tiempo. Un macizo de metálicas montañas separadas de la cordillera por unplano de nubes, y que aparece como un trozo de otro planet …, pero constituído pormaterias más preciosas … Pendientes, en cuyas laderas la imaginación resbala en vértigode pesadilla. Lejos, la diafanidad cerúlea de un cielo más sutil que el de las llanuras.’19 The use of erotic linkages in works by male authors is also important here. ClaraOrdóñez can be seen in an allegorical fashion in Xaimaca as the Latin American continentwho is romanced by the Latin American aesthete, Galván.20 ‘Una hora paseamos por el único plantío del lugar, admirando las flores de colores comoexasperados por toxinas, las legumbres voluminosas o los árboles que van en satisfactoriasvías de crecimiento.’ The narrator’s italics here denote a sense of irony, especially whennoting the extremely positivist notion that they convey.21 In this sense, I cannot agree with Ivonne Bordelois, who states: ‘Neither an imperialistmessenger nor a defender of the oppressed, Güiraldes, an indecisive liberal, prefers toventure forth into another space, that of the small discoverer of his own impressions.’Genio y figura de Ricardo Güiraldes (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1966), p. 78. Althoughsomewhat ambivalent, Güiraldes’s anti-imperialist discourse is more than evident in thistext.22 ‘con toda la grosería que le otorga la superioridad de su raza .’23 Roosevelt became famous for his belief that international diplomacy should entail‘speaking softly while carrying a big stick’.24 Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad(New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1981), p. 123.25 In a 1924 letter to Francisco Contreras, in response to a missive in which he criticisedXaimaca, Güiraldes vehemently defends his Latin American identity: ‘I possess … notonly an Hispanic American, but a Latin American spirit’ (p. 751). Likewise, he states thathe actively sought out continental integration: ‘As director of Proa I attempted to putinto practice every possible means to achieve Hispanic American unity’ (p. 751).26 Between Argentina and Spain, the novel went through five different editions from1923 to 1960, not including its incorporation into two different sets of complete works.Güiraldes himself, in fact, believed that Xaimaca was his most important literary creation,‘The best of my worst’ (p. 758), in the author’s own ironic self-evaluation.27 In the words of Hugo Verani, ‘The Avant Garde boom in Argentina occurs between1921 and 1927. The process of change begins before, but the premature freedom fromliterary conventions goes unnoticed until the next generation of writers is able to appreciate

J.P. Spicer-Escalante28

it. Two names stand out as direct ultraísta precedents during the 1920s: Ricardo Güiraldes,who anticipates ultraísta motifs – experimentation with form, rhythmic freedom, audaciousmetaphors – in El cencerro de cristal (1915), and Macedonio Fernández, a writer of adisconcerting conceptual humor and paradoxical metaphysical speculations, whose affinitywith Borges is well known’ (p. 39).28 Güiraldes described the First World War as a mixture of ‘Love, hate, interests’ and itsbeginning by referring to ‘The tumour of hate which has burst’ (p. 693). According tohim, he had foreseen the advent of the war in previous visits to Europe since he had sensed‘a feeling of putrefaction’ (p. 695) on the continent. In sum, for him the war was ‘A bloodyfact’ that soiled ‘Old Europa’ (p. 693).