Visions of Duality:

Sarmiento’s Blueprint for Argentina

Cassady Fallon Cooper

4901 S. Claiborne Ave.

New Orleans, 70125

 In 1845, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an exiled liberal elite of Argentina, wrote a book

part fiction, part history and part political screed, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. He

crafted a vision of the future where the “disease from which the Argentine Republic suffers” 1

barbarism, embodied by wild nature and federalism, would be beaten by the spreading of

education and civilization, as envisioned by property rights, from Buenos Aires and the

provincial capitals to the “barbaric” countryside. This book is a direct response to the federalism

of men like Juan Manuel de Rosas. Sarmiento illustrated that for Argentina to succeed it must

push aside “Americanism” and embrace a more European culture. A “letrado,”2 a literate liberal

elitist, who raised himself into the upper echelons of Argentine society by way of his education

and saw European-style education systems as a way to bring Argentina on par with Northern

Europe culturally and politically. This paper argues that this vision is shaped by the duality

within Argentine society post-independence. The urban educated elite and the barbaric gauchos

of the pampas set the tone for this dichotomy. To describe this fissure, the specific issues

splitting Argentine culture will be shown, what Sarmiento viewed as Argentina’s greatest threats

will be outlined and his solutions for the country moving forward will be discussed.

Independence from Spain in 1818 set the stage for the bifurcation of Argentina.3 Prior to

independence Buenos Aires, the seat of Spanish colonial power, with its location at the mouth of

the River Plate commanded the main artery for commerce in the country. After independence the

country splintered into provincial rule and by 1819 saw the formation of two vying political

1
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism: the First Complete English Transla-
tion, translated by Kathleen Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
2
Jeremy Adelman, “Between Order and Liberty: Juan Bautista Alberdi and the Intellectual Origins of Ar-
gentine Constitutionalism.” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2007), 86
3
David Rock, Argentina, 1516-1987: From Spanish colonization to Alfonsin, Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press (1987).

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parties: the Federalists and the Unitarists. In 1821, Bernardino Rivadavia, a Unitarist leader,

took the reins of the city. He instituted the types of reforms common in liberal countries after

independence: -tax reforms, public education and universal male suffrage. Rivadavia’s efforts to

implement these reforms met with resistance from provincial leadership. He resigned from his

position and a federalist, Manuel Dorrego, stepped into power. The Unitarists opposed and

finally killed him. As a direct result of Dorrego’s assassination, the leaders and strongmen of the

provinces, known as caudillos, led by Juan Manuel de Rosas, stepped into power and maintained

it for over twenty years.

Born in 1811 to a poor family in San Juan, He benefited from the national education

systems and excelled in his studies beginning an upwardly mobile life that would bring him to

the presidency of Argentina. Sarmiento moved to Buenos Aires where he became part of the

Generation of 1837. This group of writers and liberals had moved away from the radical

liberalism of Rivadavia, who believed all men deserved equality and instead they fostered views

closer to the authoritarianism of Rosas who they purportedly despised.4 They feared that

European cultural influence in Argentina was threatened by socialism and wanted to vet who

would be a citizen in this new country.5 This fear of universal male suffrage empowering the

uneducated masses of Argentina to lead the country to ruin led to the emergence of a philosophy

that would call for liberal dictatorships.

Sarmiento began to formulate ideas of Argentina’s future as a response to the civil wars

between Federalists and Unitarists he had grown up during. He saw no possibility to unite the

country without purging it of its central flaw, “America as presented by Rosas, barbarous like

Asia, despotic and bloody like Turkey, persecuting and disdaining intelligence like

4
Mark D. Szuchman, "Childhood Education and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Argentina: The Case of
Buenos Aires," The Hispanic American Historical Review 70, no. 1 (1990): 109-38, 124.
5
Adelman, “Between Order and Liberty,” 99.

2
Mohammedism.”6 His dualities of Argentina embodied Civilization versus Barbarism, European

versus American and City versus Province. Sarmiento defined civilization as a combination of

education, urbanity and European culture. Civilized people understood property rights and could

therefore partake in them. The city where he had been educated in the universities had given

Sarmiento his place in the world and with them he envisioned “Buenos Aires is destined one day

to be the most gigantic city of both Americas.”7 Northern Europeans, Penisulars, and the

descendants of both these groups peopled the city.

He viewed the countryside less idyllically. He viewed the lack of established (European-

style) culture, Argentina’s “own expanse,”8 and the indigenous people as American and

something to be overcome. In the 1840’s much of Argentina encompassed roaming gauchos,

small farms, and ranchers who thought little of the culture of the cities as “all that is civilized in

the city is blockaded, banished outside of it.”9 Argentina, outside of its cities, mystified

Sarmiento as something opposed to his understanding of society, much as the “Old West” of the

United States of America, the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and much of sub-Saharan Africa

mystified Europeans. To Europeans these lands were “other,” populated by cultures that didn’t

maintain the same boundaries and delineations as found in Europe. The division and sale of

property without set guidelines, and without these protocols Sarmiento saw a people unprepared

to exercise the proper use of power. There were, people who could have “no progress without

permanent ownership of land, without the city.”10

What Sarmiento and his Generation of ’37 concluded was that the majority of Argentines

due to lack of education, provincialism, non-western ideas of property ownership were

6
Sarmiento, Facundo, 233.
7
Ibid., 47.
8
Ibid., 45.
9
Ibid., 53.
10
Ibid., 54.

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unprepared for citizenship. They felt Argentines must be evolved through structured government

supplying public education to the poor and uneducated until they are ready for full participatory

citizenship. The rise of the powerful provincial caudillos during the time of Rosas leadership

reinforced Sarmiento’s idea that Argentines were not ready to take part in citizenship. In the

meantime, a strong leadership of the elite and educated would lead the country for the good of

all. A yearning existed for the old foundations of European society to “civilize” the barbarism

they found defining “American.” He saw the educated and European-influenced urbanites of the

country as those that should naturally lead the solitary gauchos of the countryside. He believed

the character of the gauchos, though suited to the war against Spain, could not govern in a

modern way and would prevent the growth of Argentina. Sarmiento had a utopian vision that by

bringing Europeans and European forms of education to Argentina the populace would naturally

break the chains of barbarism. They did not want all Europeans, Sarmiento waxed poetically

about the “German and Scottish colonies to the south of Buenos Aires,”11 and, most importantly,

they should be educated to continue the transformation of society. Another prominent member of

the Generation of ’37, Juan Bautista Alberdi, also promoted European immigration, but after the

Crisis of 1890 he promoted shifting the emphasis to the “right” immigration, what they viewed

as properly educated Europeans.

''To govern is to populate . . . but with hardworking, honest, intelligent, and civilized

immigrants—that is to say, educated ones. But to populate is to plague, corrupt, stultify,

and impoverish the richest, most salubrious soil when it is settled with immigrants of the

most backward and corrupt Europe.”12

11
Ibid., 51.
12
Juan Bautista Alberdi, as quoted in Diana Sorensen Goodrich, Facundo and the Construction of Argen-
tine Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

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 Sarmiento came from a lower tier of his period’s society and through his “penchant for

using ‘a pen as a sword’”13 created a different life for himself. He actively shaped the Argentina

he envisioned through the implementation of public schooling and policy development.

Sarmiento wrote of the future he wanted and, to an extent, that future was created as he was

elected as the seventh president of Argentina and furthered the promotion of education in the

country.

13
Jeremy Adelman, “Between Order and Liberty,” 106.