This chapter conciliates two different demands. On the one hand, it presents Martín Fierro as the apex of the gauchesca genre, as an intervention in political and cultural conflicts regarding the consolidation of the nation-state, the conservative order, rural capitalism, and the relationship between urban elites and rural populations, taking into consideration the two very different contexts in which both parts of the poem were written and initially read. On the other, it presents what seems to be the most impactful and widespread legacy of the poem: how, through the trope of the gaucho outlaw, the poem establishes a mode of conceiving the relationship between lettered elite and subaltern bodies and voices, when articulated to diverse (even contrasting) cultural/political projects. This articulation entails a constant redefinition of what “subaltern” may mean but always seems to assume unique uses of gaucho bodies and voices. One example would be the notion of the gaucho sociolect as the true national language and not a frontier sociolect, something unique to Latin America. How this came to be, and why, and with what consequences, are guiding questions.

The chapter examines how diverse forms of rural insurgency (i.e. banditry, caudillismo, millenarianism, revolutionary uprisings) were depicted in literature from the tapering off of the civil wars to the Mexican Revolution. Rural insurgency was a paramount preoccupation for letrados of the period, not only because of the material challenges that it posed to the imposition of agrarian capitalism and the sovereignty of the nation-state, but also because rural insurgency tapped into the cultural capital of rural societies (e.g. kinship, networks of patronage), forms of leadership (e.g. caudillismo), heterodox versions of Catholicism to articulate dreams of social justice (e.g. millenarianism). Hence, rural insurgency was considered, by its mere existence, an existential challenge to the very notion of a modern capitalist nation-state. However, the chapter examines how, at the same time that literature served as a sort of “prose of counterinsurgency” (Ranajit Guha), it was also a site of reflection on the dilemmas attending the constitution of a modern polity and culture.

Introduction

It is not easy (and it is perhaps quite reductive) to assign a single unequivocal meaning to the word liberalism. It was an ideology and a political identity linked to party and factional struggles throughout the nineteenth century. Liberalism certainly did not mean the same thing for Manuel Payno (1810–1894), Luis Inclán (1816–1875), Guillermo Prieto (1818–1897), Vicente Riva Palacio (1832–1896), and Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (1834–1893). However, allow me to present a number of general points that can serve to roughly identify some of liberalism's defining problems (a broadly defined liberal “vision”) throughout the nineteenth century, especially from mid- to late nineteenth century, when the aforementioned authors were most active and produced their most important works.

Liberals were intent on creating a viable and modern nation-state. This was to mean a state that would exert continuous and homogenous territorial sovereignty and enjoy an uncontested monopoly on legal violence. Control of the territory would be coupled with the imposition of the nation as a cultural synthesis serving as the primary locus of affiliation, where inhabitants of a given territory would be, first and foremost, fellow citizens (in cultural if not always legal terms). Citizenship would serve as the primary identity marker; ideally, there would be equality before the law and a single legal system (based on a constitution), with no room for significant corporate privileges or differentiated legal status (such as those granted during the colonial era to the church, the military, and the Indians and Indian communities). This assault on corporate privileges would entail, of course, the separation of church and state, the nationalization of the vast church holdings not related to specific religious uses (these holdings were huge: it was reported that the church was both the largest landowner in rural Mexico and the largest holder of urban property in the major cities, as well as a powerful financial institution), and the comprehensive secularization of society. In order to achieve this, the state would erect an institutional infrastructure to carry out what was formerly performed by the church.