Romanticism in El Matadero

Esteban Echeverria, who spent five years in Paris before returning to Buenos Aires in 1830 when he became a political agitator against the tyrant Juan Manuel de Rosas, is credit with bringing romanticism to Spanish America. As a poet, he is remember for his narrative ballad La cautiva, the story of a white girls escape from enslavemente by nomadic Indians. Echeverria inaugurated the theme of the pampas as an archetypal landscape a place of barbarity but also the crucible of national identicalness for Argentina.He also wrote El matadero (The Slaughterhouse, 1838), a short satirical prose piece in which a slaughterhouse becomes a powerful symbol of Rosass oppression of liberals in Buenos Aires. In 1839, Echeverria helped to found the Asociacion de Mayo, a group of young anti-Rosas activists, many of whom were to become principal(prenominal) writers and future liberal leaders of Argentina. The gauchesque genre had its origins during the wars of independency in the River Plate area. It was influenced by the Spanish usance of the cuadro de costumbres.Gaucho costumbrismo appealed to the romantics because it seemed to reflect a truly American musical mode of life. By transforming the gaucho into an ambivalent national symbol, Echeverria crystallized the hassle of national identity which all the Latin American republics would experience. Echeverrias renown as a writer rests mostly on his powerful short story El matadero (The Slaughterhouse, written in 1839 but not promulgated until 1871), a landmark in the history of Latin American literature.It is mostly significant because it displays the perceived wreck between civilization and barbarism, that is, between the European and the primitive and violent American ways. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, another striking Argentine writer and thinker, saw this clash as the core of Latin American culture. Read in this light, The Slaughterhouse is a political allegory. Its more peculiar(prenominal) intention was to accuse Rosas of protecting the kind of thugs who polish off the cultivated young protagonist at the Buenos Aires slaughterhouse. Rosas and his henchmen corroborate for barbarism, the slain young man for civilization.