History of a Cultural Extinction vacationbookreview.com online Review of Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier [Scroll down to find online review, reprinted below.]
Slatta brings the Argentine gaucho alive in all his splendor and squalor. One gains an appreciation for the extraordinary lives of this equestrian people who almost literally lived in the saddle. The author depicts life on the pampa in sometimes searing realism: a hard, state-of-nature life, but one the gaucho himself would not have changed (and did not change at the few junctures where he had the chance).
Slatta presents a structuralist history of one of the W. Hemisphere's most colorful and renowned peoples. In other hands this approach might minimize the role of personality and personal choice, as though the gaucho bobbed helplessly on the rough seas of impersonal historical force acting thru the medium of latin culture.
Not so here. The author dispassionately shows that the gaucho's fierce independence and tribalism contributed directly to the demise of his culture in its collision with mainstream Argentine society on the pampa. It could not be otherwise. Modernity was simply incomprehensible to the gaucho. One could not be gaucho and latino at the same time, and civilization destroyed the gaucho way of life.
Slatta explores obvious parallels with other horse cultures such as that of the Mongols, the American Indian and the American cowboy. He demonstrates subject mastery in a wealth of detail concerning equipment, words, and convergent ways of handling similar challenges. The inherent drama of the gaucho story had echoes of "Monte Walsh" sounding in my mind as I finished the work.
This thoroughly readable book is enjoyable both as history and as entertainment.
Review by Jane M. Rausch, historian at the Univ. of Massachusetts, in Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, 1994, Vol. 13.
Although one hundred years have passed since Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his Chicago address on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," scholarly interest in the study of frontiers throughout the Western Hemisphere has shown no sign of abating. Turner's conception of the North American frontier as a region lying at the hither edge of free land and his assertion that United States history was conditioned by a series of ever-expanding frontier zones enjoyed phenomenal public acceptance in his day, and while so-called "New Western Historians" now reject his model with its emphasis on the frontier as a key to North American virtues and exceptionalism, the "frontier" remains a compelling heuristic device utilized even by Turner's detractors.
Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier by Richard W. Slatta is a paperback edition of a monograph originally published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1983. With the exception of a six-page "Introduction to the 1992 Edition," the book is exactly the same as the earlier hardcover version.
Slatta's detailed survey of the "gaucho's rise, fall and odyssey from history to myth" has withstood the test of time. The new format will make it a more viable choice for undergraduate courses in Argentine or Latin American history.
In order to describe the lives of the gaucho horsemen of the Argentine pampas and analyze the socio-economic forces that caused their decline by the beginning of the twentieth century, Slatta mined the voluminous correspondence of Juan Manuel de Rosas, dictator (1829-1852) as well as a leading rancher, and other documents buried in national, provincial, and municipal archives. In nine concise chapters, he defines and characterizes the gauchos of the early nineteenth century and goes on to discuss family life, the role of women, changes in material culture over the decades, efforts by the ranching elites and compliant governments to tame the gauchos, and, finally, how massive immigration and technological modernization brought an end to their traditional way of life.
When it first appeared, Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier supported the then somewhat novel theory propounded by E. Bradford Burns in The Poverty of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) that during the nineteenth century "Europeanized elites" progressed at the expense of rural "folk" who unwillingly paid the high cost of uneven "modernization." One of Slatta's most interesting discoveries was that with regard to the gaucho there was no sharp break in the policies and attitudes of the dictatorial Rosas and the liberal administrations of Bartolome Mitre, Domingo Sarmiento, Nicolas Avellaneda, and Julio Roca who followed him. Regardless of ideology, all these regimes adopted programs that supported rancher political power, latifundia, and social control of the rural masses--programs which marginalized the gaucho and eventually brought about his disappearance as a recognizable frontier type.
Slatta's research also shows that gauchos, like other rural horsemen in Latin America, resisted oppression by becoming bandits, fleeing to the Indian frontier and deserting from the military. Yet unlike the Venezuelan llaneros or the Brazilian cangaceiros, who remained outcasts in the twentieth century, once the gaucho no longer presented a threat to its control, the elite enshrined him in national mythology as the symbol of national virtue. "Vanquished in reality, the gaucho still rides a romanticized frontier pampas as an idealized myth and political system. His qualities, real and imagined, represent an essential ingredient in the continuous quest by Argentines to define the essence of their national character."
Cowboys and cattle frontiers appeared in many regions of the Western Hemisphere, and in terms of frontier studies, Slatta's principal contribution lies in providing an in-depth analysis of one cowboy group on the basis of which other similar groups can be contrasted and compared. Since 1983 Slatta himself has sought to place his work in broader comparative context. His edited volume, Bandidos: The Varieties of Latin American Banditry (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987) presents eight case studies of outlaw groups in seven Latin American countries with the aim of testing Eric J. Hobsbawm's theories on social banditry. In Cowboys of the Americas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) Slatta compares North American cowboys with gauchos, Mexican vaqueros, Venezuelan llaneros, and Chilean huasos and concludes that despite cultural differences, cowboys everywhere shared key values and characteristics and that the broad outlines of their history followed similar patterns. Still there is much work left to do. Since research on huasos, llaneros and vaqueros is in its infancy, an intriguing question remains: Why have not these groups gained the same mythical symbolic status within their own national cultures as the cowboys and gauchos?
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