To me, the most poignant segment of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism so far was the beginning of the chapter on "Argentine Originality".  Sarmiento suggests here that the very landscape of one’s origin determines ones character.  The people of Argentina, he says, are poets because they live in a world impossible to understand without poetry.  The vast and incomprehensible Pampas confuse the observer so much that they cannot see where the land ends and the sky begins, nor just where the horizon does lie.

    The mercurial climate of Argentina evokes a necessarily artistic response; its fantastic blend of colours and fearsome lighting storms are to Sarmiento the origin of Argentine power and poetry.  Despite Sarmiento’s insistence of the superstition and ignorance of the gauchos, I feel this passage is all in all an admiring one. While I have never been to Argentina I have spent some time in alpine areas and I can relate to this admiration.  Of course, I can also sympathize with nearly any reaction to, or explanation of, the more frightening of natural occurrences.  I once spent roughly 24 hours trapped in a tent in the mountains with only flashes of lightning, peg-uprooting winds, claps of thunder, rumbling rockfalls, and (I’m not kidding here) the not-too-distant howling of wolves as my only campanions.  Quite frankly I would have preferred to blame it all on God, as the more "civilized" reality of it all was scaring the Trail Mix out of me. 

    Sarmiento references the common turning points in the development of human peoples and claims that there are some obstacles to progress for which the same universal solutions present themselves.  He believes that nature conditions these responses - the means of fording a river, the invention of bow and arrow, etc., each the precise rejoinder to a challenge issued by the natural world itself. Perhaps then, his later reference to Facundo as "the Tiger of the Plains" is a reference to his theory of geographic determinism.  Facundo was a tiger, a fierce and powerful leader, because one was needed.  Just as the bow and arrow occurred throughout the world to solve the problem of prey with pointy claws and generally unpleasant demeanour, so too did men like Facundo arise to fill a void in their countries.  The cruel authority of the boardinghouse masters served as a catalyst for Facundo’s rebellious behaviour and helped to shape his character. 
   

I’ve never produced a blog before, largely because even Facebook scares me a little bit and I didn’t want to push my luck.  I consider myself comparitively tech-savvy, but I find large scale public participation initiatives like YouTube, Wikipedia, and blogging to be a little daunting in their potential both for good and for harm.  That having been said, as a component to a Latin American Literature course this blog has a fairly limited scope, and should be about as controversial as a bowl of plain yogurt. 

So, to my reader(s), whomever you may be, I say "keep your fingers crossed" and I’ll try to pull something worthwhile out of this tired undergraduate brain of mine.  Also, I’m still working on uploading a background picture of some kind.  Did I say I was tech-savvy?

-Gareth