The Gauchesco Canon: From Hidalgo's Origins to Hernández's Masterpiece

Far from being a naive folkloric expression, poesía gauchesca stands as one of the most sophisticated political and aesthetic inventions of nineteenth-century Latin American literature: the strategic appropriation of rural oral culture by lettered authors to debate sovereignty, war, and the limits of the modern state. Tracing this tradition from its revolutionary beginnings to its twentieth-century critical canonization offers students an extraordinary lens through which to examine how the marginalized voice of the paisano was forged into the foundational myth of the River Plate.

This four-volume collection provides a complete pedagogical arc for upper-level undergraduate and graduate seminars. It moves chronologically from Bartolomé Hidalgo’s foundational patriotic cielitos and dialogues (presented in a landmark critical edition by Olga Fernández Latour de Botas), through Hilario Ascasubi’s monumental consolidation of the payador myth in Santos Vega, to José Hernández’s Martín Fierro—accompanied by 535 exhaustive lexicographical and historical notes exposing how the venality of frontier authorities betrayed the constitutional Rule of Law. Finally, Leopoldo Lugones’s El payador completes the syllabus by allowing students to analyze the ideological operation that elevated Fierro to the status of a Homeric national epic during the Argentine Centennial.