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The maid as political spy in Argentine literature and historiography: the Rosas-Perón nexus (1846-1964)

2013; eScholarship Publishing, University of California; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5070/t431020832

2154-1353

Inés Dunstan,

Argentine historical studies

In Argentina's literature, the maid has been relentlessly represented as a political informer on her benevolent employers to persecutionary political forces.This study offers a critical history of this representation, beginning with the works Facundo (1846) and Amalia (1852) and concluding with the novel El incendio y las vísperas (The Fire and the Nights Before It, 1964). 2 The latter is regarded by many critics as the Amalia of the twentieth century.Close attention is paid to the interplay and mutual borrowings between the realms of fiction and historiography.In its focus on the maid, this study elaborates on a figure largely missing from Argentine cultural history.The view underlying this study is that these works were ultimately about national identity and social order.The study leaps from the base provided by writer and philosopher José Pablo Feinmann, who referred in passing to the theme of the maid as political spy, but did not explore it. 3 The writings of the so-called Generation of 37 are formative in the history of the representation of the maid as political spy in Argentina's literature.The Generation of 37 was the first post-independence Argentinean intellectual cohort; its members had an interest in constructing Argentina as a white nation of European culture, and they used their fictions to write this nation into being.Most members of this group were born in the period of the wars of independence (1810-1818), and had reached adulthood with the rise of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the leader of the Buenos Aires Federalists whom they opposed on the basis of his Hispanic traditionalism, his religiosity, his authoritarianism and his courting of the rural and urban poor in the province of Buenos Aires.Heir to the old-guard Unitarians, 4 the Generation of 37 espoused a strand of liberalism that stressed civil liberties, but the group was in no sense egalitarian (Shumway 144).Although in theory most members of the group supported the partial abolition of slavery, they did not consider black people their equals and felt discomfort at the practical changes that resulted from the gradual liberation of slaves. 5Rosas, on the other hand, made a point of courting and gaining the respect of the black community, and abolished the slave traffic in 1839.While Rosas's actions may have spoken more of political interest than political ideology, the Afro-Argentine community perceived Rosas as its liberator (Reid Andrews 250; Salvatore 65).