Lines of Geography in Latin America

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies
Lines of
Geography in
Latin American
Narrative
National Territory,
National Literature
Aarti Smith Madan

Series editor
Robert T. Tally Jr.
Texas State University
San Marcos, TX, USA
‘In Lines of Geography in Latin American Narrative, Aarti Smith Madan explores
the cartographic impulse propelling nineteenth-century criollos in their efforts to
appropriate their newly independent national territories as their own. A new geo-
graphical discourse emerges that surveys the land through text and map. Madan’s
exquisite readings of classics like Sarmiento and da Cunha features the aesthetic
qualities of their writings as integral to a fin-de-siècle geographical imagination
and hence to Latin America’s entry into modernity.’
— Adriana Méndez Rodenas, author of Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-
Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims, Professor of Spanish and
Director of Afro-Romance Institute, University of Missouri, USA
‘Madan’s monograph is a fascinating and well-executed study of two major

figures of Argentine narrative and one Brazilian figure of the latter half of the
19th century whose work is fundamental to the project of nation building in
Argentina and Brazil and the forging of national cultural imaginaries. Yet despite
their significantly different political history, the two countries are brought into
parallel focus by the importance of geographical studies. Geography cuts an
interdisciplinary swath here. Yet no one has analyzed in detail all of the scientific
principles of geography present in their work in the way in which Madan has
done.’
— David William Foster, Regents’ Professor of Spanish and Women
and Gender Studies, Arizona State University, USA
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turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion
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cism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising develop-
ments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary
geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more gen-
erally, geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the represen-
tation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones
where fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs
and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history,
often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse
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space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world.
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Aarti Smith Madan
Lines of Geography
in Latin American
Narrative
National Territory, National Literature
Aarti Smith Madan
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Worcester, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-55139-5 ISBN 978-3-319-55140-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55140-1
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Acknowledgements
I wrote these lines of geography in many places, from cafés and libraries
and apartments across the USA and Latin America, in Chattanooga and
Pittsburgh and Worcester, but also in Los Angeles, where I composed
these last gratifying words, and Buenos Aires, where the first seeds were
planted. Each setting has sparked my creativity and energy in myriad
ways, whether the city or the plains, the mountains or the sea. Along the
way, I have crossed paths with many people who have inspired, assisted,
or imbibed with me. It gives me great joy to acknowledge them.
To begin, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Koichi Hagimoto and
David William Foster for their kindness, reassurance, and support at the
moment I most needed it. Their suggestions proved crucial to carry this
book to publication. I am grateful to former acquisitions editor Ryan
Jenkins for seeking me out at the Latin American Studies Association’s
2015 meeting, to literature editors Tomas René and Camille Davies for
their patience and responsiveness, and to series editor Robert T. Tally, Jr.
for his enthusiasm to expand Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies
into Latin America. I offer a note of thanks to Ryan McGinnis for being
a proofreader and indexer extraordinaire; all translations, and their short-
comings, are mine unless otherwise noted.
A number of colleagues have taken the time to read significant por-
tions of this book, to aid and abet even when I slashed and replaced full
chapters, to provide advice or general support. My heartfelt thanks to
those who have remained anonymous and to those who have not, in
particular Carlos Abreu Mendoza, Adriana Méndez Rodenas, Fermín
v
vi Acknowledgements
Rodríguez, Carla Giaudrone, Javier Uriarte, Sarah Ohmer, Christian

Fernandez-Palacios, Juan Carlos Garzón, and Juan Ramos, who have all
been models of collegiality and intellectual generosity. I am indebted,
too, to the scholars who opened up a different vision of Brazil for me
as I explored tangential projects while completing this book; my grati-
tude to Rex Nielson, Malcolm McNee, Odile Cisneros, and Vidya
Sarveswaran for organizing talks, panels, and collections that invigorated
and expanded my thinking.
A version of Chap. 3 was published in Modern Language Notes 126.2
(2011) as “Sarmiento the Geographer: Unearthing the Literary in
Facundo,” and a portion of Chap. 5 first appeared in print in Romance
Notes 52.2 (2012) as “Provincializing World Geography: Land and
Letters in Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões.” I am grateful to these publica-
tions for their permission to reprint. My research has been generously
supported by the US Department of Education’s Foreign Language
and Area Studies Program; University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Latin
American Studies, Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, Department of
Hispanic Languages and Literatures, and the Andrew Mellon Fellowship;
and, finally, WPI’s Department of Humanities and Arts, which has pro-
vided the space, time, and funding necessary to write and to present my
work-in-progress at conferences, in particular those of the MLA, LASA,
ACLA, and BRASA. My gratitude to the librarians and ILLiad staff at
both Hillman and Gordon Libraries who worked tirelessly to acquire
essential documents, as well as to the staff at the Museo Histórico
Sarmiento, the Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina, the
Instituto Geográfico Nacional de la República Argentina, the Instituto
Histórico Geográfico Brasileiro, and the Biblioteca Euclides da Cunha.
At WPI I’m grateful to teach bright students who, over the years,
have asked the pointed questions that keep me learning. I particularly
appreciate Kristin Poti and Keirstan Field for taking on countless tasks
with gusto and care, be they book or baby related. As a member of a
robust interdisciplinary department, I’ve been lucky to collaborate and
converse with colleagues with mutual interests in cultural geogra-
phy, including Jim Cocola, Thomas Robertson, Peter H. Hansen, and
David Spanagel. David graciously provided his insight on several chap-
ters, as did the most Zen-like senior colleagues out there, Ángel Rivera
and Ruth Smith, who have offered institutional knowledge and come-
dic relief ever since they and David Dollenmayer brought me to WPI in
2010. In different ways, I must extend a special thanks to them and to
Acknowledgements vii
Kris Boudreau, John Sanbonmatsu, Roger Gottleib, Jennifer McWeeny,

Wesley T. Mott, Jeanine Skorinko, Creighton Peet, Lisa Stoddard, Helen
Shuster, and Rick Vaz. My eternal gratitude to Anne Ogilvie, whose
friendship, laughter, and wisdom are inimitable.
Massachusetts has become home in no small part due to the friends
who have become family. I am thankful to Pooji Mahtani, Raj Nandwani,
Adrienne Hall-Phillips, Anthony Phillips, Echo Lahey, and Phil Lahey for
helping celebrate in good times and offering a hand in the bad.
The first draft of this project took shape at the University of
Pittsburgh, where it was advised by Joshua Lund, Juan Duchesne
Winter, Bobby Chamberlain, and Susan Andrade. I am thankful to
them, as well as to Hermann Herlinghaus, John Beverley, and Gonzalo
Lamana, for enriching and complicating the ways I think about culture.
I want to extend a particular note of gratitude to Josh for the rigor of his
mentorship and the warmth of his friendship. For over a decade now I
have happily benefited from his healthy cynicism, incisive feedback, and
long phone calls; I hope he takes some measure of pride in what I have
finally produced. At Pitt I was also fortunate enough to take a course
with Gayle Rogers, who has been an indispensable source of Southern
smarts and generosity ever since. I have great saudade for the solidar-
ity with my cohort in Hispanic Languages and Literatures, in particu-
lar Alejandra Canedo, Luz Elena Rodríguez, Becky May Klink, Emily
Metz-Cherné, and Debbie Bensadon, as well as folks from across cam-
pus and the city, in particular Julie Draskoczy Zigoris, Joanna Collins,
Christopher “Gomez” Gloria, Aubrey Hirsch, Devan Goldstein, Sarah
and Clint Bergeson, Kyle Stevens, James Pearson, Jake Pollock, and
Hannah Gerrard. I thank Robin Ennis, Rita Cain, Cortney Rockhill,
Heather Johnson, Heather Austin, Jamie Hill, Marian King, and Ferne
McDowell for their visits, snail mail, and care packages.
Some of my earliest thinking about space and creative process
occurred during my undergraduate studies at Birmingham-Southern
College, where I first learned that a whole canon existed beyond the
Great Books and that the intersection between literature and poli-
tics bore out in special—and spatial—ways in Latin America. I’d like to
thank Sandra Sprayberry, Barbara Domcekova, Janie Spencer, Vincent
Gawronski, and Jane Archer for shaping my intellectual trajectory
through course work and January terms, starting with four weeks on the
novels of William Faulkner my freshman year, another living and study-
ing with BorderLinks in the sister cities of Nogales, Mexico and Nogales,
viii Acknowledgements
Arizona, and yet another making meaning out of Jewish emigration from
Argentina to Israel. These experiences awakened my political conscious-
ness and built upon the humanistic foundation I received at The Baylor
School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Jim Stover taught me the
value of close reading and Judy Millener opened my eyes to the world of
Spanish-language literature.
Chattanooga, for me, is more than a hometown. It is why I am who
I am. I thank my parents, Shashi and Narendra Madan, for taking the
serendipitous leap to raise us there, for being models of hard work,
good humor, and unconditional love. Without their respect for educa-
tion and their belief in the power of language, none of this would be
possible. I must thank Alok Madan for being a big brother second to
none; I could approximate his brilliance only by writing a book with my
name in the byline. My thanks to Natasha, Zindagi, and Zaia Madan for
being the family that I would have chosen. Two sages of our family have
passed since I began this journey, and I wish that they—Vinod Bagai and
Tilak Raj Madan—could have seen this book. I think they’d be proud.
My gratitude to the extended Madan, Bagai, and Pomerenk families for
their love, and to Piggy Smalls and Lola for their licks. And to the best
in-laws a gal could ask for, Nancy and Roger Smith, I offer a note of
appreciation for having taught me to listen, to be curious, to have grace
and integrity. These are the traits that they fostered in my husband, Ryan
Smith Madan, the one person who has stood, and sat, by my side in all
those cities, all those cafés, all those apartments, and who has patiently
read every line I’ve written in the past decade. He has been the per-
fect birth partner in more ways than one. To Ryan, and our daughter
Sulakshmi Rani Smith Madan, I dedicate this book.
Contents
1 Heretofore: Delineation 1
2 Geographical Discourse and Alexander Von Humboldt 29
3 Sarmiento the Geographer: Unearthing the Literary

in Facundo 77
4 Estanislao Severos Zeballos and the Transatlantic Science

of Statecraft 127
5 Euclides da Cunha’s Literary Map, or Including

Os Sertões 187
6 Hereafter: Off the Grid 249
Bibliography 261
Index 281
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 4.1 Untitled caricature by Ramón Columba (1916)

in “Siluetas políticas: Estanislao S. Zeballos” in La Nota 128
Fig. 4.2 Estanislao Zeballos’s Map of Argentina, presented
at the “Conferencia inaugural de la Liga Patriótica Nacional”
in the Politeama Argentino de Buenos Aires
on December 19, 1901 and published in Revista de Derecho,
Historia y Letras 4.11 (1902): 413–456 170
xi
CHAPTER 1
Heretofore: Delineation
Mas los sublimes montes, cuya frente

a la región etérea se levanta,
que ven las tempestades a su planta
brillar, rugir, romperse, disiparse,
los Andes, las enormes, estupendas
moles sentadas sobre bases de oro,
la tierra con su peso equilibrado,
jamás se moverán. Ellos, burlando
de ajena envidia y del protervo tiempo
la furia y el poder, serán eternos
de libertad y de victoria heraldos.
—José Joaquín Olmedo, “La victoria de Junín” (1824)1
On the heels of leading Peru to liberation from Spain in 1824, Simón

Bolívar sought to memorialize the war’s decisive battle in Junín. The
honor fell to the Ecuadorean patriot, poet, and one-time President José
Joaquín Olmedo, who cast the Latin American independence fighters
as the legitimate heirs of the Incas and of the Andes in his 960-stanza
epic poem “La victoria de Junín.” The Creoles emerge as the mountains,
their power coming from the land’s immutability and permanence, its
troves of underground wealth. Like the massive Andes, enormous, stu-
pendous, upon a land replete with riches, the fighters do not budge:
“Scorning the fury and the strength of foreign envy and peevish time,
they will be the eternal heralds of freedom and victory” (trans. in Bauer
456). In Olmedo and onward in Latin American letters, the national
subject becomes inseparable from the land, its resources, and its original
inhabitants.
© The Author(s) 2017 1

A.S. Madan, Lines of Geography in Latin American Narrative,
Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55140-1_1
2 A.S. MADAN
In his South American volume of L’Homme et la terra (The Earth and

Its Inhabitants 1878), the French geographer and anarchist Elisée Reclus
also describes the Junín plain. He explains that it was made famous by
the Creoles’ resounding victory against the Peninsulares, of course, but
also by its projected role as the central station of the Andes railway sys-
tem, the junction of two lines, one through Junín and the other cutting
southeast through the Jauja river. Reclus’s observation reminds us that
while the power of Olmedo’s poetic lines comes from their connected-
ness to the earth, the physical lines of the railroad cut right through the
space of nature. Olmedo’s words draw from the land; the railroad carves
into it. Reclus’s 19-volume magnum opus—a Universal Geography
examining the global relations between human subject and land—also
makes clear that, like railroad lines, lines of geography reflect the imag-
inations of their creators. They are placed with purpose. “Geography,”
Reclus tells us, “is not an immutable thing” (Volume 5, 335).2 Yet
Reclus’s fascination with the Andes is due to their very immutabil-
ity and continuity. Unlike similar mountain ranges in Africa, Asia, and
North America, the Andes “display such an unbroken line of uplands”
(Volume 10, 1). This reference appears on the narrative’s first page, but
it forms something of a corporeal leitmotiv; he later explains that South
America’s characteristic feature is “the remarkable regularity of the oro-
graphic system which forms its backbone” (Volume 10, 19). The geog-
rapher appreciates that the land’s existence does not change, even if its
representation does: “geography is made, it is remade everyday; at each
instant, it is modified by men’s actions” (Volume 5, 335).3
For all his awareness of the geographer’s discursive remaking of the
earth, Reclus still speaks in absolutes as though his representation is defin-
itive, indeed a “reality.” To legitimize his findings, he looks to the first
European to delineate the Americas—the German naturalist Alexander
von Humboldt. The Spanish Crown commissioned Humboldt to explore,
chart, and describe its understudied and even neglected Latin American
colonial possessions over the course of a 5-year voyage (1799–1804).
Like Reclus, Humboldt sat back in awe-filled admiration of the Andes
and, based on his study of the cordillera, defied conventional understand-
ings about the earth’s origins. Arguing even against his much-esteemed
mentor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Humboldt abided by the theory
that volcanic eruptions and earthquakes had formed the earth by way of
chain reactions. This Vulcanist—rather than Neptunist—stance buttressed
Humboldt’s belief in a planetary connectedness: everything and everyone
1 HERETOFORE: DELINEATION 3
is connected within a global force (Wulf 197). If for Reclus the Andes’
magnificence is due to their aboveground continental coherence, for
Humboldt this attribute is magnified by their subterranean linkages. Both
thinkers find intrigue in the physiognomy of the land.
Yet if Humboldt serves as Reclus’s source of legitimacy, he also func-
tions as a worthy interlocutor for Reclus to expand upon and even cor-
rect. “The mean altitude of South America,” Reclus recounts, “was
estimated by Humboldt at 1,150 feet” (Volume 10, 1). “But according
to later and more accurate researches,” the continental altitude increases,
in Reclus, to 1312 ft (my emphasis, 1). Herein the first exemplification
of the ways in which one geographer can raise an entire continent some
162 ft in less than a century. Humboldt comes up again a few pages later
as Reclus discusses the South American hydrographic system. He indi-
cates that, for Humboldt, the sedimentary matter carried toward fluvial
estuaries originated in ancient red sandstone. “But in reality,” Reclus
insists, “the deposits are comparatively recent quaternary clays and
sands” (my emphasis, Volume 10, 6). Accuracy and reality form the core
of Reclus’s observations, this despite having internalized (and even artic-
ulated) the futility of such concerns. He notes, after all, that Humboldt
had revised Charles Frederick Martins’s attribution of the sediment
“to triassic formations,” while Martins himself had built upon Louis
Agassiz’s insistence on the estuaries’ glacial origins (Volume 10, 6).
In what follows, I do not tackle whether Reclus or Humboldt or
Martins or Agassiz—or any number of Europeans invested in nineteenth-
century Latin American geography—is most accurate, be it about conti-
nental altitude or about sedimentary matter or even about the latitude
or longitude that coordinate the lines of geography. Rather, I begin
with Reclus’s revision of Humboldt’s revision of Agassiz to emphasize
the very discursivity of the discipline, to illuminate the lines of letters
that can take a range of permutations to represent the same geographi-
cal image. While latitude and longitude are imaginary by definition, tex-
tual representations of land also rely on fantasy. Since Cristobal Colón
and Hernán Cortés’s first letters from the New World, such aestheticized
notions of the real and the simulacrum have governed the making and
unmaking of geography in Latin America, a region that has long con-
nected the story of the people with that of the land, as we see so viv-
idly in Olmedo’s poem. These representations are, as William Vollman
reminds us in Imperial (2009), “equal parts imagination, measurement,
memory, authority and jurisdiction!” (44). They are about the creation
4 A.S. MADAN
and confirmation of hegemonic power: “Delineation is the merest,

absurdist fiction, yet delineation engenders control” (Vollman 44).
Delineation is nothing if not political.
Vollman underscores a view that has become commonplace: we must
consider the earth’s charting not as objective truth, but as mediated by
a political project, by figures imbued with “authority and jurisdiction”
(44). Yet what is overlooked is that the mediation often occurs in the
realm of the literary. In this book, I take Vollman’s observation about
the “fiction” of delineation quite literally by enacting a close reading
of “foundational fictions”—to borrow from Doris Sommer (1991)—
through which both the Latin American states and the space they occu-
pied were consolidated and rendered natural and controllable. This study
aims to understand the aesthetic underpinnings of textual delineations—
of lines of geography—which appear en masse in Latin America’s post-
independence literature. If Bolívar led the continent to liberation, his
successors were left to unify the ill-defined territories and their autoch-
thonous peoples into modern nation-states. This task overwhelmingly
occurred through literature, something Benedict Anderson (1983) long
ago observed with his notion of “imagined communities” built around
print capitalism. I propose that we bring geography into this conversa-
tion. The essential goal of this book, then, is to merge Latin America’s
fin-de-siècle geographical and literary projects into a geocritical reading.
Knowledge and Conquest
As Laura Benton (2009), Matthew Edney (2009), Felix Driver (2000),

and others have shown, geographical practices served empire well.
Edney goes so far as to declare that “‘Empire’ is a cartographic construc-
tion; modern cartography is the construction of modern imperialism”
(Edney 45). Even prior to its professionalization as a discipline, geogra-
phy created spaces of exception through its modus operandi of discover,
divide, document, and dispossess. A prime example is the 1494 Treaty of
Tordesillas, which, upon splitting the earth into Spanish and Portuguese
territories, marks the moment that lines of latitude and longitude both
permitted and prompted imperial claims to large swaths of land. The
peace treaty relied on a series of discursive acts to undergird declarations
of possession and to demarcate allegedly “empty” lands.
Taking the relations between geography and empire as its base, Lines
of Geography maintains that the pivotal role of geographical practices
and practitioners in Latin America’s nation-building processes must

be rethought. After all, a scant four centuries following Tordesillas, the
Spanish Crown overlooks precisely what allowed for its expansion in the
first place: geography and empire run parallel to one another. By examin-
ing Humboldt’s critiques of his imperial sponsor, articles from the Boletín
de la Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid, as well as the writings of nineteenth-
century Spanish geographer Joaquín Costa, I show that a lack of terri-
torial knowledge contributes to the setting of the sun on imperial Spain,
which loses its last colonies in 1898. The empire, on the contrary, maps
back. Creole statesmen charter cartographic expeditions and write lengthy
and literary manuscripts describing every hill, plain, and crevasse of their
nascent republics. Most importantly, they make of Latin American geog-
raphy a discipline.
Taking a historical point of entry from the South, I demonstrate that
Latin America’s writer-statesmen point to and instantiate geography’s
political relevance by means of literature. The warning that underwrites
their writings is the unequivocal correlation between knowledge and con-
quest; if to know the land is to conquer it, then to write the earth is to
write the nation. This study is thus a literary-critical history of a promi-
nent current in Latin Americanist thought, the ways in which literature
advanced nation-state consolidation in the long nineteenth century. Yet
it approaches this subject from new angles to elucidate the ways in which
geography propelled both aesthetics and politics across the continent. To
triangulate the intersection between literature and geography and con-
textualize its specific period of global crisis, I establish a transatlantic his-
tory that begins with Alexander von Humboldt.
Many Latin American writers looked to Humboldt’s original repre-
sentations of the continent as emancipatory in their exalted descriptions
of a territory distinct from Europe. Herein we might locate the origins
of a genre I call geographical discourse, the aestheticized practice of writ-
ing the earth—the etymological definition of geography—traceable to
Humboldt’s volumes on Latin America and continued in the Eurocentric
treatises of Reclus himself, for instance, but also Henry Thomas Buckle,
Henry Harisse, and Agustín Codazzi. I contend that Latin America’s
most canonical writers reproduce geographical discourse to define the
parameters of both a national territory and a national literature. Yet
while Latin Americanists have explored the Humboldtian influence upon
letters (e.g., González Echevarría 1989; Pratt 1992; Ramírez 2004;
Marcone 2013; Millán 2014), they have done so outside the specific
6 A.S. MADAN
parameters of geography as a discipline, practice, and institution. Like

literature, geography too emerged in an effort to make sense of the

newly independent states, a process whereby earthcraft became tanta-
mount to statecraft.
The cornerstone of this project is a fresh perspective on a pairing
of canonical Latin American literary narratives—Domingo Faustino
Sarmiento’s Facundo (Argentina 1845) and Euclides da Cunha’s Os
sertões (Brazil 1902)—by reading them in relation to the discipline of
geography and, more radically, as instantiations of geographical dis-
course.4 Composed by writer-statesmen and emerging from moments of
intense political division, these works are emblematic of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century cultural production in service of nation-state consoli-
dation. Scholars have thus retrospectively cast them as foundational texts
governed by a mutual grappling with civilization and barbarism, the dis-
tinction most famously posed by Sarmiento and subsequently enacted
by Estanislao Zeballos, the lesser-studied architect behind the Argentine
genocide known as the Conquista del Desierto.5 Zeballos is the third
figure in this genealogy of Latin American geography. The object of
Sarmiento’s praise and da Cunha’s disdain, he hinges the Argentine
and Brazilian geographical projects in tangible ways, while providing
new insight into the pivotal role played by writer-statesmen in Latin
America’s long nineteenth century.
I contend that Sarmiento, Zeballos, and da Cunha engage with and
even reproduce geographical discourse in order to define the parame-
ters of both a national territory and a national literature. I demonstrate
that these figures reincarnate key Humboldtian tropes—for example,
the vantage point of a hypothetical traveler, the discourse of emptiness,
the metaphor of land as water. Yet mere duplication quickly transforms
into a productive dialogue of reclamation. This intertextual conversa-
tion also extends to those scientists and naturalists who were, in some
way or another, responding to Humboldt’s studies, including but not
limited to Henry Thomas Buckle, Henry Harisse, Agustín Codazzi, and
Hermann Burmeister. This study thus unpacks a dialogue between Old
World and New World writing, its political consequences, and its cul-
tural significance. I examine the specific dynamics of these geographi-
cal exchanges to illustrate two key points. First, by exposing the ways in
which previous Eurocentric works are fitted to the Latin American con-
text, I point to the creation of a transculturated geographical discourse
in which the textual form gives shape to a unified geographical space.
Second, my analysis of the form–content relationship at work in these

writings shows change over time, which, in lieu of exact replication, favors
Sarmiento’s revision, Zeballos’s review, and Euclides’s rectification of pre-
vious geographical treatises. From this aesthetic task emerges a political
project: national consolidation as imagined through a national literature.
My analysis depends on three primary moves. First, I mine down to
the aesthetic and political bedrock of Humboldt’s corpus and situate its
origins in both Occidental and indigenous knowledges. Caught between
the avarice of an imperial sponsor and his personal coda of harmonious
coexistence with the space of nature, Humboldt writes from a locus of
aestheticized contradiction that we see reproduced in generations of
Latin American writers.6 I focus on the three authors who best show-
case the immediate political potential of this conversation, which heark-
ens back to thinkers like Strabo and Vico with its constant emphasis on
the language of geography, on earth-writing as a way to teach populaces
about themselves and others, on uniting word and world.
Second, I read the notorious yet understudied formal qualities of
Facundo and Os sertões in relation to their geographical content, thereby
exposing a conversation with non-Latin American works. I do something
similar with Zeballos’s multigenre corpus—including his infamous exter-
mination manual La conquista de quince mil leguas (1878), his territorial
description La rejión del trigo (1883), as well as an annotated bibliogra-
phy he published serially in the Boletín del Instituto Geográfico Argentino
(1897)—to illustrate the pervasiveness of international interlocutors
within this genre of aestheticized earth-writing. Along with unearthing
the fissures of geographical discourse, I demonstrate that Latin American
statesmen repurpose Enlightenment geography, aesthetically transform-
ing the discipline to override the relationship between knowledge and
conquest ratified by the Treaty of Tordesillas.
Third, I illustrate the alignment between the literary representation of
land and the emerging discipline of geography, a relationship that reflects
and even enables a broader political movement. Land and letters merge
into one just as geographical institutes sprout across both the New and
Old Worlds. At the heart of this book’s critical vision is its genealogy of
Sarmiento, Zeballos, and da Cunha, who, I show, gain literary fame—
or infamy, as it may be—in tandem with their participation in Latin
America’s first geographical institutions. I identify Sarmiento, Zeballos,
and da Cunha as key players in those very institutes, which coalesce in
an effort to articulate and to secure the emergent nation-state. These
8 A.S. MADAN
writer-statesmen help institutionalize the discipline at the very moment

that the new republics begin the nation-building process. Between 1833
and 1910, over 50 geographical societies are inaugurated across the
Americas, first in Mexico and later in Argentina and Brazil. National
consolidation drives the political agenda of these scientific and human-
istic groups known as institutos geográficos, whose members were equally
committed to demarcating and poeticizing the land. I thus argue that
the simultaneity between text-writing, map-making, and institution-
building signals a productive but overlooked relationship between litera-
ture, geography, and politics. Drawing on insight gleaned from a fresh
pairing of textual analysis and institutional history, this book therefore
illuminates a powerful political project wherein lines of geography ani-
mate the continent’s literal and literary consolidation.
To carry out this analysis, I assemble a unique and extensive archive
of essays, reviews, and correspondence by Sarmiento, Zeballos, and da
Cunha, but also by other writer-statesmen (e.g., Simón Bolívar, Baron
Rio Branco, Vicente Pérez Rosales, and Marcos Arredondo) who unani-
mously recognize a frightening prospect: without promoting explicit
domination of space through geographical knowledge and institution-
alization, the newly free republics risk becoming yet another iteration in
the cycle of territorial acquisition and loss. They aim, as such, to con-
solidate and thereby secure the emergent nation-state not only from
each territory’s respective baqueano—the indigenous trackers capable of
charting and therefore dominating the land—but also from antagonis-
tic neighbors and lingering colonial powers; the discipline thus provides
protection from not only internal forces but also external ones. Herein
another variant of the very conundrum at the core of Latin American
identity politics: whether to mimetically harness the “barbaric” power of
the land’s autochthonous peoples, or to efface those plural subjectivities
in a model of homogeneity grounded on everydayness.
In short, this study shows that Latin American literary writers depart
from dominant geographical knowledges and construct the first local
geographies, thereby disciplining the nation both didactically and insti-
tutionally. My reorientation of the critical axes of geographical dis-
course toward the South allows the opportunity to retrace, as David
Harvey (2006) and Matthew Sparke (2007) have urged, the heteroge-
neous human geographies that have emerged despite, and in response
to, Occidental geographies grounded on the dictum of divide and dis-
possess. Yet this study also questions the limits of geographical discourse
by emphasizing that like Humboldt—the primordial Eurocentric man—

Sarmiento, Zeballos, and da Cunha view America as materia prima;
indeed, as space to be ordered in the service of modernity. In the end, I
try to account for the ways in which these writer-statesmen cannot main-
tain a project of unification by dominating, through poetics alone, the
plural subjectivities within their national territories.
Geographical Discourse and Geocriticism

Much has been said about regionalismo or the novela de la tierra, of rela-
tionships between nature and nation (e.g., Montaldo 1994; Nouzeilles
2000; French 2005; Wylie 2009; Rogers 2012), and especially about
the pervasiveness of contradictions in Latin American literature (Alonso
1998). Yet to date there exists no sustained critical examination of the
relationship between literature and geography in Latin America’s long
nineteenth century.7 Though my study is indebted to Roberto González
Echevarría—who locates the source of authorization for Latin America’s
foundational narratives in the hegemonic discourse of science—it
expands upon and complicates his groundbreaking Myth and Archive
(Cambridge UP 1990 and 2006; Duke UP 1998) by proposing a new
model for nation-building, one in which Latin America’s lands and let-
ters consolidate at the specific site of geography. I reveal the political
potential of reviving discussions not of science writ large, but rather of
the narrower category of geography as it relates, specifically, to aesthetic
concerns.
In recent years, this burgeoning interest in spatial studies has been
validated with a name: geocriticism.8 Signaling the marriage of literary
studies and geographical practices, the term was coined and defined by
French theorist Bertrand Westphal and American literary critic Robert
Tally in distinct but equally productive ways. Within contemporary spa-
tial studies of literature we see many currents, chief among them a car-
tographic push to map fictional coordinates onto real-life referent points
within what has been deemed, depending on the theorist, “actuality,”
“geospace,” or, most abstractly, the “zero-world.” The impulse behind
this mapping is to illuminate the ways in which literature can expand
upon, rectify, or even replace our perceptions of the actual geohistori-
cal world. Such mapping graphically imagines what would otherwise
be a hypothetical projection deduced through the reader’s interpreta-
tion of the author’s descriptions. As Derek Schilling (2014) observes,
10 A.S. MADAN
the outcome of this “objective” entry into space is that fiction becomes
“more or less ‘mappable,’ this last adjective being less a value judgment
than a way of attesting to the messy ontology of literary communication”
(216). Cartographic reason thus cleans up—indeed, rationalizes and
reduces—the subjectivity of literary analysis.
Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (1994) leads
the pack in the critical practice of literary geography. Schilling describes
it as both “the commanding work” and “a touchstone” for what appears
in subsequent decades (216; 219). Focused on early nineteenth-century
naturalist and realist narratives that, despite audacious plots, remain com-
mitted to geographical and topographic actuality, Moretti offers what crit-
ics intermittently call “maps,” “diagrams,” or “geographic renderings” to
empirically support relationships between the novel and the nation-state.
Yet he dispenses disproportionate attention to plot over and above lan-
guage, all the while eliding cartography’s subjective bias and ideological
underpinnings. He thus invites criticism from the likes of Schilling him-
self, from Sally Bushell (2012), and most fervently from Denis Donaghue
(1999), who deems the text’s reduction to numeric coordinates a whole-
sale loss for the very essence of literature: “His access to a novel begins
and ends with its plots. He has nothing to say about structure, style,
rhythm, diction, or any of the other considerations that make a particular
novel what it is or may be, which is a work of literature” (36).
Aligned with Donaghue’s commitment to the essential formal
qualities of literature, I seek precisely the opposite of Moretti with my
geocritical approach. I contend that it is in the formal qualities of writ-
ing—the structure, style, rhythm, diction, and so forth—that we can
locate geography’s politics. To be sure, the objects of my study are
not novels; they are not even fiction. Yet as participants in a genre that
we now comfortably call “creative non-fiction,” both Facundo and
Os sertões march forward replete with plot, protagonists, antagonists,
and—most emphatically—setting. And while Zeballos’s oeuvre includes
(underwhelming) novelistic forays that I account for, he attends to space
in ways that define, but do not put into practice, the tenets of geographi-
cal discourse. Following Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maz
Azaryahu in their Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative (2016), I
propose that we consider space—whether the sandy pampa or the bar-
ren sertão—as the central focus of attention because it contributes to the
symbolic formation of both state and subject in Latin America’s long
nineteenth century. If statecraft strategically and necessarily organizes
around spatial concerns—consolidating vast expanses and overcoming

geographical obstacles like mountains and deserts—then subject forma-
tion relates to space on a more affective, organic level, as “an object of
emotional investment” (Ryan et al. 8). In short, the human subject can
only be thought of in relation to and as emerging from the land, as per
traditional definitions of cultural geography.
Alexander von Humboldt long ago pointed to these mutually inform-
ative concerns wherein land becomes a space of affect. In a passage from
Cosmos, he explains that
thought and language have ever been most intimately allied. If language,
by its originality of structure and its native richness, can, in its delineations,
interpret thought with grace and clearness, and if, by its happy flexibility, it
can paint with vivid truthfulness the objects of the external world, it reacts
at the same time upon thought, and animates it, as it were, with the breath
of life. It is this mutual reaction which makes words more than mere signs
and forms of thought; and the beneficent influence of a language is most
strikingly manifested on its native soil, where it has sprung spontaneously
from the minds of the people, whose character it embodies. (Humboldt,
Cosmos 56)
In Humboldt’s formulation, language is most effectively wielded from

a specific spatial referent—the “native soil”—that inspires an intimate
(intimately) and corporeal (embodies) response, which emerges as words.
This spatially inflected emotion prompts diction to be something “more
than mere signs and forms of thought” (56). By delineating this pro-
cess wherein language takes upon new life, Humboldt points to the
very way in which narration becomes nation. Extending Homi Bhabha’s
exploration of how authors use narrative strategies to construct an image
of their nation-states, Lines of Geography argues that literature mimeti-
cally etches out the national terrain, becoming both an outgrowth and
a byproduct of the land. This process outlines what is to come, all the
while confirming what is already there, this both literarily and geographi-
cally.
The marriage of letters and land—of narration and spatialization—
has arrangements that extend beyond and before the spatiotempo-
ral parameters of Latin America’s long nineteenth century. Sten Pultz
Moslund (2011), for instance, offers the theory that language brings
place before our senses in a way that allows us to move from detached
contemplation of setting to a “cultural and sensuous experience” (31).
12 A.S. MADAN
Moslund considers “topopoetics” as both a way to langscape literature

and as a way to read the landguage and thereby understand the
“natural and cultural symptomologies of its setting, endowed with sen-
sory energies that are intricately evocative of things like the topography,
flora, fauna, and climate of the place,” which prompts place “to have a
form-giving influence on the work” (30–31). Moslund lingers on this
“form-giving influence” of place as a way of making sense of the rela-
tions between letters and land. Exemplifying “topopoetic appreciation”
through postcolonial authors like Derek Walcott and J.M. Coetzee, he
corroborates Westphal’s contention that geocritical analyses are particu-
larly suited to minor discourses because “all homogenizing understand-
ings of space exclude the particularity of minority perceptions, which are
inscribed within a discourse of power” (Geocriticism 65). If we super-
impose this observation onto the Latin American context, we see that
geocriticism might be doubly suited to transculturated geographical dis-
course. After all, nineteenth-century Latin America consisted of at least
two immediate tiers of otherness. First, we see the nation-building liber-
als attempting to embody otherness by freeing themselves from the dis-
course of Iberian power; they delineate both land and letters to form a
singular national identity. Yet even as they try to create this continental
DNA through the double helix of geography and literature, the liberals
seek a genetic code erased of all traces of autochthony. Herein we have
the second tier of otherness: exclusion and even elimination of the inter-
nal other—the barbarian—vis-à-vis warcraft, which amounts to statecraft.
Parting from Henri Lefebvre’s axiom that war is the condition of pos-
sibility for the production of capitalist space, Lines of Geography exposes
the other side of this axiom: geography is the condition of possibility for
war. Geography systematizes territory in ways that instantiate the dialec-
tic between knowledge and conquest. In what follows, I offer new insight
into the transatlantic impulse to systematize, which we see happening in
several ways during the long nineteenth century. On the first and most
explicit level, we see the creation of geographical institutes commit-
ted to canvassing, charting, and indexing territory. Secondly, these insti-
tutes commission studies depicted as graphs and numbers and, especially
in Latin America, as pages upon pages of text that taxonomically order
the land and its inhabitants. Thirdly, these unfurled pages of geographi-
cal discourse serve to organize past and future knowledges and the prac-
tices that follow upon them. Even if the archive itself is in chaos or flux,
as Vollman explains, past knowledge becomes an anchor point for future
understanding: “[w]ithout a past, no matter how controvertible, the

present cannot be anything other than a tumble through darkness towards
the darkness which neither past nor present can illuminate” (42).
Cartography’s rational white space was always—at least until Brian
Harley’s astute observations (1988)—interpreted as truth.9 So too were
the canonical and non-canonical texts examined here. However, the car-
tographic and the geographical do not march in lockstep. Cartography
hides behind the clean veil of a compass pointing to a true North. It
forms part of an empirical approach to geography that relies on data.
The emphasis is on accuracy, which is assumed. As I illustrate in Chap. 4,
imperial Spain places its faith in this model as a means by which to tally
up its colonial possessions and their money-making natural resources.
Under the leadership of figures like Joaquín Costa and his Sociedad de
Geografía Comercial, the Crown reduces its subjects and lands to lists
and maps. Herein we have the origins of the global capitalist economy
in which extractivism becomes the norm. What we see in Latin America
is quite the opposite, for geography’s entrenchment in literature—its
very discursivity—allows it to transcend and even overcome cartographic
reductionism, if only by way of contradictions. The heterogeneous geog-
raphies I examine ultimately replicate imperial processes in a sort of neo-
colonial conquest that sublimates the land’s autochthonous peoples,
creating an internal definition that is prescriptive rather than descrip-
tive. By coalescing form and content in a way that recalls Giambattista
Vico’s barbarians—who can only speak through the simplicity of meta-
phor—their prescription appeals to the land’s primitivism to differentiate,
and thereby authenticate, Latin America vis-à-vis Europe. Yet the dos-
age eventually becomes fatal. All three figures of this study intermittently
recognize this disjuncture in their writings. These contradictions—which
begin with Humboldt—become valuable as they signal the making and
unmaking of geography. And it is thus that philosophical speculation in
the form of aestheticized earth-writing becomes the hallmark of Latin
American geography.
My analysis anchors on the sort of geocriticism espoused by Westphal,
for whom the ontological messiness to which Schilling refers is not to be
surmounted, but rather embraced as a multifaceted and plural rendition
of a place. Deeply invested in the tropological play of representations—
indeed, on layers and lapses and transatlantic exchanges—I extract mean-
ing out of ambiguity. I account for the human costs of statecraft by never
losing sight of the double fact of a first-order external imperialism and
14 A.S. MADAN
a second-order internal Creole complicity. Within this “geocentered”

approach to cultural studies we see that the human, the spatial, and the
literary interweave in meaningful ways, because we can interrogate the
discrepancies and divergences between who is doing such arranging and
to what end. Whether cartographic or literary, the representation cannot
but be ideological.
(Past)iche, or Intertextuality and History
This book is not a history of Latin American literary geography, nor

of literary cartography.10 It is rather a study of the ways in which the
region’s writer-statesmen write alongside and against the institutionaliza-
tion of Latin American geography, ultimately producing transculturated
geographical discourse to liberate land and letters. Yet this liberation is
limited to the Creole elite. The land’s plural subjectivities are left by the
wayside—indeed, off the grid—in their pastiche, which revisits a number
of Eurocentric geographers and naturalists from Humboldt onward. In
their imitation we can find ways to critically reflect upon the indispensa-
bility of geography to both the projects of Latin American conquest and
Latin American independence, while also unearthing its literary roots as
discipline and discourse.
Such is the task of Chaps. 2 and 4, whose purview is transatlan-
tic and transhistoric. The other chapters deal with the long nineteenth
century (1811–1902) and two specific national contexts, narratives,
and authors in which the intersection between literature and geog-
raphy most explicitly bears on consolidation: Sarmiento’s Facundo
(Argentina) and Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões (Brazil). The conclud-
ing chapter carries the consequences of geographical discourse into
the twenty-first century, a moment of global ecological crisis and the
resultant recapturing of post-Eurocentric thought. While I abide by a
chronological logic to tell this tale in ways both sweeping and granular,
I have chosen the protagonists that best conjugate geography, litera-
ture, and politics. This book is thus suggestive rather than exhaustive.
To be exhaustive would be to speak of America as a whole: after all,
writer-statesmen across both North and South America looked to lit-
erature to discipline and define their nations practically and geographi-
cally. Boasting names both household and obscure, this list includes a
range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers ranging from
Henry David Thoreau to my fellow Worcesterite George Bancroft
(poet, philosopher, and first president of the American Geographical

Society), on to Rómulo Gallegos (Venezuela), Horacio Quiroga
(Uruguay), José Eustacio Rivera, and José María Samper (both of
Colombia)—all spatially focused writers who, in many cases, even partici-
pated in official delineation expeditions.
The overwhelming presence of literati within American geograph-
ical institutions merits further study, and my hope is that this book is
only a precursor to revealing a significant trend in hemispheric cultural
studies. I note again: it all begins with Humboldt. Humboldtian stud-
ies have gained new traction with respect to his shaping of America
(Dassow Walls 2009) and American environmentalism (Sachs 2007), yet
these examinations do not extend their scope southward. In Chap. 2,
“Geographical Discourse and Alexander von Humboldt,” I establish
the groundwork for understanding the relations between literature and
geography in the context of Latin American nation-state consolidation.
Drawing on Humboldt’s prominent and lesser-studied writings, this
chapter shows both the limits and the possibilities of his influence on
Latin America’s writer-statesmen. Although my historical approach relies
more on Laura Dassow Walls than Mary Louise Pratt, I complicate both
examinations by locating Humboldt in specific relation to geographi-
cal discourse, thereby accounting for a model of aestheticized earth-
writing. Yet the style is inescapably political, as we see with Humboldt’s
prescient underscoring of the knowledge–conquest relations in Political
Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811). I situate his discursive prac-
tice in a centuries-long trend that begins with Strabo’s Geographica
(c. 17–23 AD), arguably the earliest surviving example of a universal
geography, to demonstrate that the discipline of geography inheres in
any political venture. Drawing on Vico’s notion of poetic logic as well
as on Strabonic thought, which links geography to an immediately aes-
thetic project, I argue that geography’s politics of control aligns with
a poetics of domination, in particular in the Latin American context. I
show that the wars of independence cannot be considered independently
of their relations to geography. By drawing on articles from the Boletín
de la Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid, I account for the asymmetrical and
often tense relations between Spain and Portugal; their peninsular strife,
which Humboldt repeatedly underscores, will find its colonial counter-
part in Argentina and Brazil, a matter to which I return in Chap. 4.11
Finally, following Raymond Craib, I detail the ways in which statistics
and geography were sciences of statecraft designed to project progress,
16 A.S. MADAN
thereby tying Latin America’s emergent geographical institutions to the

discipline’s original political tenets.
If in Chap. 2, I account for the intertwining of geography, literature,
and politics in Latin America, in the next chapters I detail the weav-
ing of this latticework; more importantly, I trace its changing shape
over time. In Chap. 3, “Sarmiento the Geographer: Unearthing the
Literary in Facundo,” I read Facundo alongside and against the forma-
tion of Argentina’s geographical institutions. I argue that Sarmiento
seeks authority, and with it civilization, in the texts of the Old World,
particularly those of Alexander von Humboldt. My contention is that
Sarmiento revises Humboldtian geographical discourse and thereby
channels the political power already imbued in the German naturalist’s
works. Sarmiento’s replica is not exact, however. Ever aware of audience,
he fashions his narrative as a brochure for two distinct but interrelated
groups. Foremost, he composes a didactic geography directed toward the
citizens of Argentina. In what becomes a rallying cry, he explains that
knowing the Argentine land—its rivers in particular—is tantamount to
securing the nation. Yet because Sarmiento deems these lands empty and
in need of settling by immigrant populations, he also writes for a second
audience: potential European and North American immigrants. He con-
structs his text as a marketable geography designed to convince foreign
readers—namely Germans—to populate the lush Argentine terrain. With
this analysis, I demonstrate that Sarmiento revises Humboldt’s rendition
of Latin American terrain by appealing to the unification of form and
content—to the language of Vico’s primitive man—in order to simulate
consolidation.
In this systematic analysis of Facundo’s formal heterogeneity, I
introduce readers to a little- examined figure who comes to play a piv-
otal role in Argentine–Brazilian relations and who brings the question
of national security to the fore: the writer-diplomat Estanislao Severo
Zeballos, who serves as Foreign Minister under Sarmiento and founds
the Instituto Geográfico Argentino. I dedicate Chap. 4 to breathing new
life into Zeballos’s capacious corpus, which has largely received nega-
tive critical attention. Yet by examining his early writings and especially
his heretofore unstudied annotated bibliography “Apuntaciones para
una bibliografía argentina,” which appears serially in the Boletín del
Instituto Geográfico Argentino between 1897 and 1898, I uncover the
ways in which Zeballos reviews fin-de-siècle geographical discourse from
both sides of the Atlantic in an effort to theorize the essential qualities
of its local incarnation, even if he fails to put them into practice. Using
Zeballos as an entry point, I reconstruct a dialogue between an array of
individuals committed to representing land, including Sarmiento but
also Zeballos’s Argentine contemporary Marcos Arredondo; da Cunha
and his Brazilian contemporary Rio Branco; and Spanish geographer and
founder of the Sociedad de Geografía Comercial, Joaquín Costa. By cre-
ating a transatlantic linkage between Costa and Zeballos—two figures
essential to their respective nations’ geographical projects—I illustrate
that the practice of geography bookends four centuries of imperial rule,
beginning with the Treaty of Tordesillas and ending, or at least fading,
with the Spanish–American War. Zeballos materializes in my study as an
essential figure across Latin American geography, one who fuels border
disputes across the region—with Bolivia and Peru, with Uruguay, and
most notoriously with Brazil. I center on his involvement in the melo-
dramatic 1908 “O Caso do Telegrama Número Nove” (The Case of
Telegram No. 9), an astounding and rarely discussed anecdote that not
only tangibly connects Sarmiento and da Cunha, but also illuminates
Latin American writer-statesmen’s pivotal roles in constructing a dis-
course of nationalism while attempting to protect sovereign interests.
With Zeballos as something of an intermezzo, I transition to da Cunha’s
rectification of non-Brazilian land treatises in Chap. 5, “Euclides da
Cunha’s Literary Map: Including Os Sertões.” I situate da Cunha in rela-
tion to Brazil’s geographical institutes, which, unlike Argentina’s unifying
groups, are committed less to the barren backlands (sertão) and more to
the productive seaboard. I argue that da Cunha composes Os Sertões as a
cartographic narrative—a literary map, as it were—that creates the illusion
of national integrity by including the formerly excluded Brazilian sertão.
His stylized correctives supplant the divisive strategies implanted during
colonial rule and continued during the neocolonial Republican years. I
show that by correcting the Eurocentric, and error-laden, representations
and nomenclatures of foreigners—especially Humboldt, but also Henry
Thomas Buckle, Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege, Orville Derby, and Carl
Friedrich Philip von Martius—da Cunha reclaims Brazilian land and letters
while submitting a softer rendition of the national man and land to world
geography; indeed, to universal history.
I am intrigued by the prospects of geographical discourse within the
universal and the planetary—the cosmic, in Humboldt’s terms. As the
aforementioned hemispheric writers (Thoreau, Brancroft, Rivera, and so
forth) bear witness, the alignment between geography, aesthetics, and
18 A.S. MADAN
politics is not limited to the spatial and temporal parameters defining

the scope of this book. Rather, the relations draw parallels before and
beyond the nineteenth century. Westphal (2011) reminds us that the
ancient Greeks did not even have a word for “literature.” It was not nec-
essary, he notes: “The Homeric Odyssey was literature, geography, his-
tory, theology, anthropology, and something more: a book, a biblion, a
universal topic” (“Foreword” xiii).12 This universalizing capacity comes
from the literary and, as Westphal observes, must be revived in the new
millennium to tackle our most pressing concerns; culture and literature
“have assumed a renewed responsibility,” he insists (“Foreword” xiii).
One such revival relevant to my argument is William Vollman’s
Imperial. In 2009, after a decade’s worth of research, Vollman pub-
lished his 1306-page mega-tome of creative non-fiction that explores the
geography, history, and socioeconomics of Imperial, the poorest county
of Southern California. I vividly remember my first time sifting through
the heavy book as I prepared to guest lecture in a colleague’s class on
Literature and the Environment. It felt strangely familiar. Despite its his-
torical and spatial separation, Imperial reminded me of Facundo and Os
sertões with its desert setting, its enormity, its scope, its formal experi-
mentation, with its all-over-the-place diatribe organized around a loose
throughline; even its attempts to historicize delineation recalled lengthy
passages from Zeballos’s Conquista de quince mil leguas. Yet what struck
me most were not the similarities, but rather an immediate and explicit
difference: Vollman underscores failure—his own and others’—from the
outset. Unlike Latin America’s fin-de-siècle writer-statesmen and their
eternal optimism (or gradual disenchantment, in the case of da Cunha),
he is cognizant of the theoretical, practical, and discursive limitations of
delineation. Vollman’s wandering epic, in his words, “essentially recounts
failure,” in particular that of the USA: the failure to foster a healthy bor-
der in that “continuum between Mexico and America,” to make a barren
desert into productive farmland with redirected water, to make a sustain-
able life for marginalized peoples banished to a wasteland (50). Taking
up the ways in which delineation makes land into fruitful territory for
one socioeconomic and racial stratum, Vollman sheds light on how con-
tingency transforms into inevitability, how a social condition never seems
to emerge as a technical byproduct—though that is, precisely, what it
always already is.13
Most significantly, Vollman points to his own failure to delineate: he
contends that peculiar and enigmatic spaces—in his case, the southeast
corner of California—are somehow beyond the scope of representation.

Vollman warns readers that his is only an attempt: “Let the reader
beware. At least the following attempts at delineation may entertain you
by proving how badly I draw squares” (42). He necessarily begins the
task swimming upstream, though this does not stop him. For he insists
that if we must describe such spaces, we are obliged “to record ‘pure’
perceptions, for instance by means of a camera alone; or, failing that,
by reliance upon word-pictures” (Vollman 41). What we see here is an
insistence upon purity and truth, qualities only attainable with an image,
be it a painting, a photograph, or a word-picture.
Let us pause for a moment on this latter notion of a “word-picture.”
Humboldt, too, subscribed to the notion that language “can paint with
vivid truthfulness the objects of the external world” (Cosmos Vol. 1, 56).
Geographical discourse might thus be synthesized, at least for its aes-
thetic underpinnings, as Vollman’s “word-pictures,” wherein the land is
an outgrowth of language. Imperial arguably takes this understanding of
delineation to the next level, as something akin to concrete poetry over
the course of some 1000 pages: one-sentence chapters, bolding, repeti-
tions, italics, metaphors and similes, font changes, alliteration, and audi-
tory imagery so powerful that the landscape becomes aural in Vollman’s
word-pictures, making the narrative almost filmic at moments. In
Humboldtian terms, his language “animates” thought “with the breath
of life” (56). It becomes a moving word-picture.
Yet Vollman himself must have found his attempt to “draw squares”
an inevitable failure. As such, he published a companion volume of “pure
perceptions”—his documentary photographs from ten years research-
ing on the border—alongside the literary text. Measuring some 11 by
13 in. and consisting of nearly 200 black-and-white and duotone images,
this gorgeous coffee-table book provides a visual identity to the people
of Imperial County. It revives the human subject of cultural geography.
“My feeling was always that these photographs should not be about me,
(although my shadow or reflection does sometimes appear in them),” he
says, “nor even about themselves, but about the people and landscapes
within them” (powerHouse Imperial 216).
That Vollman opts to publish a companion volume of photographs
heralds a new era of accountability that looks to cameras, both still and
moving, to illuminate the dark patches of geography’s imperial history.
When word-pictures do not suffice to delineate, Vollman looks to pho-
toscapes to subdelineate. His photographic flash renders visible subjects
20 A.S. MADAN
otherwise in the shadows, spotlighting their histories and offering them

an afterlife. This hereafter is not about creator or text or even about
spectator or reader—that figure most important for Humboldtian geo-
graphical discourse onward. It is about subaltern peoples.
Over the course of Lines of Geography, I trace a current wherein aes-
theticized earth-writing forms part of a larger didactic mission to make
geography palatable to the masses. The discursive practice also goes
hand in hand with ensuring the writer’s own accessibility and longevity;
or the opposite, as might be the case—Zeballos, after all, never found
entry into the canons of Latin American literature. No matter, because
whether literarily successful or not, the subjects of the land become sub-
sumed under aesthetics in all the projects I tackle, for they are discursive.
Like Reclus, with whom I began, Vollman blames the very mutability
of words for this sublimation. “This two-volume work about Imperial
uses words from time to time, that I admit,” he wryly poses (212).
Continuing with fitting verbosity, he writes,
But words are as slippery as the black muck of the New River; they begin
to say one thing, sometimes an accurately specific thing […], but by virtue
of their native arbitrary abstraction, they can scarcely be prevented from
forming themselves into variously colored entities as changeable as one of
Moholy-Nagy’s light-shows. Therefore, I’d better take photographs, rely-
ing on the human infidelity of the lens […] to fix each object as it is, no
more. (powerHouse Imperial 212)
Yet Vollman insists, following Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1927), that the

highest order of photographic process is film, for “a kinetic image is
superior to an immobile one because it’s more complex, more finely
articulated” (powerHouse Imperial 211).
And so it is that the most resonant—and commercially accessible—
representations of the earth’s contours appear, of late, in global cinema,
which captures landscape, yes, but which all the while exposes how ter-
rible we humans are to the earth and to each other. Lisandro Alonso’s
Jauja (Argentina 2014) depicts the singular challenge of consolidating
a newly independent state in the ruthless reality of the nineteenth-cen-
tury Patagonian desert. Even with Olmedo’s poetic accolades, Bolívar’s
victory on the Junín plain would be rendered meaningless without
unifying the vast expanses and divided peoples through telegraphs and
trains—to the real coal-rich Peruvian city of Jauja referenced by Reclus
at the start of this chapter, for instance—but also by delineating land into
territory. The film, whose title alludes to the paradisiacal, Dorado-esque
city of Jauja, features Viggo Mortenson in the role of a Danish captain,
Ginnar Dinesen, charged with the task of civilizing the Argentine desert
by leading two disparate tasks: delineating the land and exterminating
its indigenous populations. While Alonso’s filmic strategies capture tab-
leaus of landscape paintings—in no small part because of shooting on
35 mm film in 4 × 3 aspect ratio, complete with rounded frame edges—
he also emphasizes the textual as indicative of civilization: twice in the
film’s first 10 min we encounter both the Captain and his daughter with
notebooks on their laps. Writing, here, is tantamount to civilization, as is
the compass that appears throughout the film. Yet like the misplaced—
foira do lugar, in Roberto Schwarz’s coinage—dance to be hosted by the
Minister of War and the characters’ tightly drawn formal clothing, such
props are entirely out of place and only testify to the very absurdity of
civilization’s attempts to complete the Conquista del Desierto.
The bloody irrationality of the nineteenth century also appears in
Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant (Mexico–
USA 2016), a brutal tale of exploration and westward colonial enterprise
into the “unsettled” territories of the US Wild West.14 Ciro Guerra’s
Embrace of the Serpent (Colombia 2015), a dizzying journey through the
Amazon, similarly centers its narrative on land and its haphazard acquisi-
tion. And Salt of the Earth (2015), Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro
Salgado’s merging of photography and documentary film, centers on
Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado’s exquisite renderings of light
and space as land and subject coalesce in an empathetic tale of the earth’s
changes over time. Speaking about his 1981–1983 project in newly
democratic Brazil, Salgado describes the barren Nordeste in ways that
hearken back to the fundamental roots of the rebellion in Canudos—a
region, he says, where life and death engage in an intimate dance because
of the struggle for land. His images write and rewrite these struggles
with light and shadows.
How do we make sense of the curious reemergence of nineteenth-
century figures and events in post-1990s Latin American society and
culture? How and why has the liberal nineteenth century reappeared in
the neoliberal, post-1990s Latin America?15 Maybe it is because the fail-
ures and limitations of geography have prompted a planetary ecological
crisis that has most detrimentally affected those sublimated indigenous
groups that once populated the pampas and the sertão, the selva and the
22 A.S. MADAN
frontier.16 Or, to put it differently, maybe it is, as Vollman repeats time

and again, because “that gringo is such a big stupid idiot” (216–227).
To offer a more in-depth examination of these contemporary concerns,
I conclude Lines of Geography with a final chapter that considers the
limits and the possibilities revealed by the intersection of aesthetics and
geography in Latin America. Keeping the focus on cinematic reflections,
I center on Argentine director Andrés Di Tella’s award-winning docu-
mentary El país del diablo (2007), which complicates Estanislao Zeballos
and his participation in the Conquista del Desierto. Di Tella’s camera
portrays the land not through the Humboldtian metaphor of water nor
as codified landscape, but rather as the site of genocide, thereby reviv-
ing the subjects who populated the pampas. By considering geographi-
cal discourse as regulated practice and countering it with contemporary
reformulations of the figures I study, I attempt to reveal its contingency
and problematize its inevitability. In so doing, I account for the ways in
which the figures of my study could not sustain a project of consolida-
tion by controlling, through aesthetics, the plural subjectivities within
their national territories. My literary history of the formative, mutual
influences of literature and geography in Latin America ends with the
shadow cast by modern technologies over the making of modernity, and
with contemporary attempts to relight the dark patches of this history.
Notes
1. “The sublime mountains, however, their faces raised in the ethereal
regions, watching the storms flare up, roar, shatter, and vanish at their
feet, the huge and marvelous blocks on foundations of gold that balance
the earth with their weight, the Andes will never move. Scorning the fury
and the strength of foreign envy and peevish time, they will be the eter-
nal heralds of freedom and victory” (trans. in Bauer 456). Original pas-
sage from Antología de poetas hispanoamericanos publicada por la Real
Academia Española (273).
2. This translation of Reclus comes from Kristin Ross, The Emergence of
Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Minneapolis: U of
Minesota P (1988: 91). The Volume 10 passages come from the official
English translation.
3. Ibid.
4. While critics have read Facundo and Os Sertões comparatively (Costa Lima
1988; González Echevarría 1990; Gárate 2001; Zilly 2001; Holanda
2008; de Faria Fernandes 2013), I am less interested in a side-by-side
comparison and more in an illustration of change over time. This book,

in the end, seeks to situate Latin America’s most esteemed writer-states-
men within the debates regarding national consolidation and the emer-
gence of national sciences, in the years prior to and after the publication
of their foundational works.
5. The Conquista del Desierto is precisely the ethnocide that Sarmiento pro-
motes in the less-literary rewrite of Facundo, titled Conflicto y armonías
de las razas en América (1883).
6. I hope to avoid the pitfall that Carlos Alonso so well describes in The Burden
of Modernity (Oxford UP 1998) of restating “the hackneyed assertion that
Spanish American discourse is inherently marked by inconsistency and
contradiction” because, as he makes clear, “such a diagnosis would only
confirm the long-held and unproductive view that regards the peripheral
writer as an imperfect wielder of metropolitan discourses” (5). His pro-
posal, rather, is that “such intrinsic discordances and disjunctions, which are
characteristic of all writing, become more salient in the Spanish American
text given the particular nature of the rhetorical situation in which it is
inscribed” (5). By tracing the contradictory impulse to Humboldt—an indi-
vidual who I deem a forefather to the figures in this study—my goal is to
find meaning in the many discordances and disjunctions, to point to con-
tinuities and moments of rupture, and to keep in mind historical and social
processes of both Spanish and Portuguese America.
7. The spatial turn in Latin America has found its strongest foothold in
studies of the Amazon rainforest. See, for instance, Jennifer French’s
Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers
(Dartmouth UP 2005), Charlotte Rogers’s Jungle Fever: Exploring
Madness and Medicine in Twentieth Century Tropical Fiction (Vanderbilt
UP 2012), Leslie Wylie’s Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks:
Rewriting the Tropics in the Novela de la selva (Liverpool UP 2009) and
her more recent Colombia’s Forgotten Frontier: A Literary Geography of
the Putumayo (Liverpool UP 2013) and edited collection, Surveying the
American Tropics: Literary Geographies from New York to Rio (Liverpool
UP 2013). In general, these analyses are concerned with the represen-
tation of the tropics in relation to issues like medicine (Rogers), the
rubber boom (Rodriguez), and colonialism (French and Wylie). Wylie
in particular attends to statecraft and the construction of frontiers,
though her focus is on the role of private and non-governmental enti-
ties in such projects. Bringing race into the Latin American spatial con-
versation, Anna Brickhouse argues for revision as not only a temporal
but also a spatial project in “Manzano, Madden, ‘El Negro Mártir, and
the Revisionist Geographies of Abolitionism” (2007), thereby refram-
ing transnational understandings of abolitionism within a geographical
24 A.S. MADAN
context. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century geocritical scholarship,

Radost Rangelova has made a compelling intervention with her Gendered
Geographies in Puerto Rican Culture: Spaces, Sexualities, Solidarities
(UNC Press, 2016), which applies theories from feminist geographers to
better understand the construction of gendered spaces in Puerto Rican
literature and film.
8. Though the concrete relations between literary writing and geography as
discipline, discourse, and practice have been largely overlooked in Latin
American literary and cultural studies, this is not the case outside of our
field. The possibilities of geographical thought in literary criticism have
been examined through recent titles in American Studies, for example
Hsuan L. Hsu’s Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-
Century American Literature (Cambridge UP 2010), Laura Dassow
Walls’s The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping
of America (U of Chicago P 2009), and Jim Cocola’s Places in the
Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry (U of Iowa P 2016).
9. We should note that Harley and other renowned historians of cartogra-
phy were indebted to Erwin Panofsky’s pioneering Studies in Iconology
(1939).
10. In “On Geocriticism,” Robert T. Tally, Jr. situates “geocriticism” as the
critic’s act, different from the writer’s creation of “literary cartography,”
which maps social spaces.
11. See Tamar Herzog’s Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe
and the Americas (Harvard UP 2015) for a bold upending of the “moth-
erland–offspring paradigm” (11), which only accounts for the ways in
which Europe influenced the Americas rather than the reverse. By delving
deep into papal bulls, treaties, and other legal discourse, Herzog sheds
light on the interior movements of territorial claims, showing the ways in
which Iberian imperial decisions in the Americas affected their transatlan-
tic claims and conflicts.
12. The Homeric reference hearkens back to Strabo. In the 1857 Preface to
The Geography of Strabo, W. Falconer explains that Strabo idolizes Homer
to a fault: “It is a lively, well-written book, intended to be read, and
forms a striking contrast to the geography of Ptolemy. His language is
simple, appropriate to the matter, without affectation, and most clear and
intelligible, except in those passages where the text has been corrupted.
Like many other Greeks, Strabo looked upon Homer as the depository of
all knowledge, but he frequently labours to interpret the poet’s meaning
in a manner highly uncritical. What Homer only partially knew or conjec-
tured, Strabo has made the basis of his description, when he might have
given an independent description, founded on the actual knowledge of
his time: the observations apply especially to his books on Greece” (ix).
13. In Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2011), Wesphal signals that
“[u]ltimately the map and the territory, the body and minority discourse,
constitute an inseparable ensemble that defines the crossroads at which
macroscopic and heterotopic representations of space come together”
(68). In this third space—a term coined by Bhabha, but whose essence,
for Wesphal, comes from Serres—we see a “deterritorialization in action,
but one that loiters, awaiting the moment of its reterritorialization”
(69). If Serres offers the essence of third space, he postulates, then Gloria
Anzaldúa gives it content: the borderlands between the USA and Mexico.
Vollman, in my estimation, continues unpacking this content in his mon-
umental attempt to keep making sense of the border.
14. For an excellent analysis of literary attention to spatiality in the US West,
see Susan Naramore Maher’s Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of
the Great Plains (U of Nebraska P, 2014).
15. See Verónica Garibotto’s Crisis y reemergencia: el siglo XIX en la ficción
contemporánea de Argentina, Chile y Uruguay (Purdue University Press
2015) for a comprehensive entry into these questions.
16. There is another body of critical study quite relevant to the arc of this
study, that of ecocriticism, which in recent years has established a
solid foothold in Latin American literary and cultural studies. Mark
Anderson’s Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin
America (U of Virginia P, 2011) and Laura Barbas Rhoden’s Ecological
Imaginations in Latin American Fiction (UP of Florida, 2011) are par-
ticularly comprehensive studies, as is Beatriz Rivera-Barnes and Jerry
Hoeg’s Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), which examines the dialogue between literature and
ecology in the region’s artistic and testimonial texts. My study draws on
the critical impulse of these analyses to carry forward an argument about
geography’s complicity in ecological crisis.
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CHAPTER 2
Geographical Discourse and Alexander

Von Humboldt
In his Translator’s Preface to Westphal’s Geocriticism: Real and Fictional

Spaces (2011), Robert Tally confirms that geocriticism has no defini-
tive definition. Westphal’s essay, says Tally, “surveys a territory, specu-
lates about others, suggests possible paths to take, and argues in favor
of certain practices and against others, all while peregrinating around
multiple discourses of space, place, and literature” (xi). Such a riverine
approach is quite amenable to the comparative literary analysis I under-
take in this book, which covers multiple centuries, nation-states, and lan-
guages, all while pointing to a common denominator: Baron Alexander
von Humboldt. The German geographer, naturalist, and quintessential
Renaissance man is the pivot point of this study and the subject of this
chapter.
Ottmar Ette (2002)—editor and translator of numerous new German
and English editions of Humboldt’s works—has shown that Humboldt’s
observations on fluvial networks point to a new paradigm for moder-
nity, wherein river structures anchor theories of science and taxonomy,
of organizing disciplinary knowledge in ways that prefigure Deleuze
and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome and non-hierarchical networks
(Weltbewußtsein. Alexander von Humboldt und das unvollendete Projekt
einer anderen Moderne by Ottmar Ette). In something of a meta-act
prompted by the immediate similarities between the geocritical impulse
and Humboldt’s all-encompassing, holistic entry into knowledge produc-
tion, I would like to repurpose this organizational method for my analy-
sis of Humboldt, which functions better as a non-linear narrative with

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55140-1_2
30 A.S. Madan
tributaries that feed into this chapter’s primary goal: to identify the key
Humboldtian literary and geographical underpinnings that reappear
again and again in Latin America’s national narratives. I focus on how
Humboldt’s understanding of geography is informed by a more human-
istic, yet decidedly political, variant of the discipline that hearkens back to
late antiquity, to Strabo and the Greeks. To account for the a mbiguities
inherent in any palimpsestic knowledge formation that relies on layers of
information updated with new technologies and epistemologies—as are
the geographical sciences, in particular cartography—Humboldt looks to
aesthetics, and especially to Goethe and the Romantics. Despite his most
vehement belief in empirical data, Humboldt’s corpus reveals a sort of
philosophical speculation that nourishes the alignment between geogra-
phy, literature, and politics; this marriage finds expression in what I call
geographical discourse, the aestheticized practice of writing the earth that
appears on both sides of the Atlantic.
Drawing on Strabo, Humboldt maintains throughout his writings that
narrating the earth’s contours cannot but be a political act. After all, only
through a series of discursive acts in service of discovery, division, and
dispossession does empire create spaces of exception. Cogently capturing
the ways in which geography and empire coalesce as Portugal and Spain
vie for negligible bits and pieces of New World territory, Humboldt
sheds light on the ripple effect of their strife. Bureaucratic infighting for
all parties (peninsulares, criollos, and their indigenous subjects alike) is,
of course, one consequence, but their rivalry reflects—and, simultane-
ously, shapes—increased investment in geographical practices. History
and geography thus blend in his works, tying together a conceptual space
with a narrated place that makes Latin America materialize out of the
land and into universal history. Yet what leads Humboldt to such an
imaginary, to a methodology where, borrowing from Westphal, “[s]pace
and the world in which it unfolds are the fruits of a symbolic system,
of a speculative movement, which is also a glimmer of the beyond, and
(let us venture the word) of the imaginary” (1)? “This imaginary,”
Westphal continues, “is not entirely cut off from reality” (1).
In this chapter, I unpack Alexander von Humboldt’s symbolic system
to better understand the ways in which it signals “a glimmer of [Latin
America’s] beyond,” to expose how his geographical imaginary forecasts
and shapes a singular reality of land, letters, and politics. To tackle this
task, I have divided this chapter into four central sections that have their
own tributaries and tangents, never linear and always cosmic.
2 GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOURSE AND ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT 31
In Part I, “Connections,” I consider Humboldt’s bridging of art and

science, of letters and land, and attribute these dyads to his philosophy
of interconnectedness in Cosmos; they feed into both his interdisciplinar-
ity as well as his unfaltering belief in a spiritual—nearly karmic—and, at
the same time, Newtonian ripple effect. All actions, he believes, have an
equal and opposite reaction. Part II, “Contradictions,” anchors on the
premise that all discourse is, at the end, contradictory (Alonso 1998),
but focuses on the ways in which Humboldt’s aesthetics normalizes an
inherently contradictory discursive practice for Latin America. I read
Humboldt’s geographical discourse both alongside and against envi-
ronmentalism and imperialism, two arenas in which he has been both
regaled and indicted, as a way of understanding his writings’ relation-
ship with Latin American modernity and, more specifically, capitalism.
Rather than defend Humboldt, I complicate his complicity in Part III,
“Consolidations,” which examines his prescient forecasting of geog-
raphy’s value as a political tool at all points of the colonial spectrum
(inter-imperial, anti-imperial, and intra-imperial). This analysis allows
me to triangulate Humboldt’s alignment between literature, geogra-
phy, and politics back to Strabo and the ancient Greeks. Finally, Part
IV, “Conclusions,” lays the groundwork for the ways in which Latin
America’s writer-statesmen appropriate and amplify Humboldt’s appeal
to primitivity by coalescing form and content in what I call a transcultur-
ated geographical discourse. When read through Giambattista Vico’s the-
ory of primitive necessity—wherein poetry was the first operation of the
barbarian mind and, accordingly, the central condition for philosophy
and civilization—the language of these statesmen contradictorily elevates
the premodern and the barbaric. I propose that herein we have a fresh
entry into Latin America’s most famous dialectic.
Connections
If we trace back to the origins of Humboldt’s bridging of science
and art—his merging of geography and poetry—we discover that in
Aspects of Nature (1849) he firsts demands a new kind of artistic writ-
ing to depict the nuances, complexities, and connections of the natural
world, which in his works emerges as nearly synonymous with land and
place. Yet as Vera Kutzinski (2012) contends, not until the turn of the
twenty-first century did critics begin seriously and systematically to
examine the literary dimension at work in Humboldt’s writing, “in the
32 A.S. Madan
process addressing the at times vexed relationship between the natural

sciences and Romanticism” (“Introduction” 5).1 Of late, Humboldt’s
aesthetic impact is felt even in more traditionally empirical spheres, for
example Brian J. Hudson’s recent article in the Journal of Cultural
Geography (2013), which argues that Humboldt was on to something
quite novel with his contention that waterfalls ought to be under-
stood for both their scientific and aesthetic properties. Within Latin
American studies in the wake of Mary Louise Pratt’s canonical analysis,
Humboldtian analyses have encountered newfound traction that rereads
Humboldt’s notion of Naturgemälde—“poetry of nature”—as emanci-
patory (e.g., Castillo 2009; Millán 2014).
Humboldt’s poetic impulse evolves over the many years of his literal
and literary adventure, taking twists and turns but always flowing back
to aesthetics as a way to account for ambiguities, to undergird a didactic
mission, or to promise longevity. Whereas Personal Narrative (Relation
historique aux regions équinoxiales du nouveau continent) appeared
between 1814 and 1825, his capstone and culminating study Cosmos
appeared in the twilight of his life, between 1845 and 1862. It proposes
what amounts to a new science, one whose name, as Laura Dassow Walls
(2009) notes, consumes Humboldt to no end: what to name it? Natural
history of the world? Theory of the earth? Physical geography? Physical
Description of the Earth? The Book of Nature? Physical Geography?
Gaia (217)? Humboldt resists pigeonholing his work into any one dis-
cipline. Anne Godlewka (1999) explains that while Cosmos “captures the
nature of all universal geographies: historical, descriptive, integrative, and
fundamentally spatial” (121), Humboldt insisted upon a sharp distinc-
tion between geography and the new science he proposed in Cosmos, that
of physical geography. If the former focused on naming and enumerating
physical features in a deliberate empiricism, then he wanted the latter to
do that and more: to connect, to compare, to interrelate in what we now
call, thanks to Carl Ritter, cultural geography, a comparative approach
focused on understanding the relationship between human conceptual-
izations of nature and nature itself (123).
The name of the discipline ultimately matters less than the content it
organizes and the common threads tying together its approach.2 One
thread that stands out in Cosmos is Humboldt’s attention to the mat-
ter of accuracy and error within the scientific enterprise. If Humboldt’s
younger self admonishes scientific inaccuracies as nothing more than
farce, by 1858 when he at last completes the final volume of the series
on his 89th birthday, he defends errors as a stop along the path of

knowledge creation, an unavoidable but necessary consequence of a task
that relies on iterations to build upon, one that evolves and becomes
outdated and shelved because of improved instruments and technologi-
cal advances. Appended as a disclaimer, his contention is that incremen-
tal—if erroneous and contradictory—“delineating of nature” provides
the scaffolding for knowledge to come. Though he matter-of-factly
acknowledges that his findings will soon be obsolete, Humboldt longs
for his work to transcend time and space. He dreams to “not be wholly
disregarded in a future age” (Cosmos Vol. I, xii).
Humboldt’s dream has come true. He is making a sesquicentennial
comeback in the USA, what with the University of Chicago’s Humboldt
in Translation Series, which is sure to increase general English-language
readership of his writings. This second coming is after what Laura
Dassow Walls calls his “cult status” in the 1850s USA, “the decade of
Humboldt,” as Cosmos, Ansichten, Personal Narrative, and Island of
Cuba began to appear in numerous translations and reviews, together
with a handful of new biographies (215). In Latin America and Europe
his legacy has consistently withstood the test of time. Scholarships,
institutes of higher education, towns, children—his name has been
bequeathed to all. In Andrea Wulf’s Invention of Nature: Alexander von
Humboldt’s New World (2015)—hailed as one of the most exciting intel-
lectual biographies of contemporary times—we in fact learn that “[m]ore
places are named after Humboldt than anyone else” (xx).
Why does Humboldt endure? Why do we continue to be drawn
to his multifaceted contemplations? Why did Alfred A. Knopf pub-
lish Wulf’s hagiography of Humboldt in 2015, ostensibly signaling his
reentry into non-academic English-speaking audiences?3 Despite “‘high
authority’” attempts to posthumously strip Humboldt’s science of “all its
human connections” and, with that, its social and aesthetic dimensions
(Dassow Walls 215), Humboldt has survived because of his aesthetics.
He endures because of the literary force driving his narratives from mere
geographical observation to poetic description.
In the chapters that follow I bring Humboldt’s Latin American heirs
into this lucrative conversation, for their projects found more than
just legitimacy in Humboldt: they found a philosophy and a call from
Humboldt himself to make his approach their own, to transculturate and
naturalize a form of aestheticized earth-writing that he refined over the
course of half a century. To understand their reproduction, we must first
34 A.S. Madan
make sense of Humboldt’s philosophy within the specific trifecta of land,

language, and nation.
For Humboldt, the land demands unfettered language to liberate it. It
demands lengthy and grandiose description to account for its greatness:
Undue conciseness often checks the flow of expression, while diffuseness

is alike detrimental to a clear and precise exposition of our ideas. Nature is
a free domain, and the profound conceptions and enjoyments she awakes
within us can only be vividly delineated by thought clothed in exalted
forms of speech, worthy of bearing witness to the majesty and greatness of
the creation. (Cosmos Vol. 1, 23)
Whereas Humboldt concedes to the possibility of multiple answers in

most realms of inquiry, here he stands firm: nature “can only be viv-
idly delineated by thought clothed in exalted forms of speech,” and
any other approach will “check[] the flow of expression” and be “det-
rimental” to clarity and precision (emphasis added, Cosmos Vol. 1, 23).
By juxtaposing “purely literary products of intellectual activity [that are]
interwoven with the creative force of imagination” with their oppo-
site—“works treating of empirical knowledge”—Humboldt bemoans
that empirical works necessarily require updates based on the newest
research; preliminary editions thus become antiquated and “consigned
to oblivion as unreadable” (Cosmos Vol. 1, xii). The only way to ensure
geography’s sustained readability and longevity is to undergird the
empirical with the literary. He closes the Preface to Cosmos with a sen-
tence that reveals his ultimate faith in attaining intellectual immortality
through the literary, the single avenue by which he can “hope that an
attempt to delineate nature in all its vivid animation and exalted gran-
deur, and to trace the stable amid the vacillating, ever-recurring alterna-
tion of physical metamorphoses, will not be wholly disregarded even at a
future age” (Cosmos Vol. 1, xii).
In the geographical battle between the humanistic and the statistic,
between philosophical speculation and empirical data, Humboldt’s writ-
ings reveal esteem for the original, Strabonic tenets of geography. The
geographical sciences amount to more than an avenue to administra-
tive practices, to rationalizing and gridding territories to be controlled.
Rather, geography is a means of making sense of the human subject’s
minuteness within and connectivity throughout the vast, holistic rela-
tionship of the Cosmos. And this relationship has ebbs and flows, contra-
dictions and evolutions.
Humboldt’s admitted commitment to aesthetics on behalf of posterity

must be understood even more primarily as the preoccupation of a writer
who must “delineate the present condition of knowledge and opin-
ions,” all the while aware of “fundamental changes in pre-existing views”
(Cosmos Vol. 1, xii). In other words, aesthetics accounts for the ambiguity
of such an evolution. When done right—“when based upon science”—
then the philosophical “doubts because it seeks to investigate, distin-
guishes between that which is certain and that which is merely probable,
and strives incessantly to perfect theory by extending the circle of obser-
vation” (38). For Humboldt, there exists a way to achieve balance, to
overcome the either/or dichotomy of modernity and return to the both/
and of primitivism, and thereby to embrace a geographical political phi-
losophy that goes beyond statistics, all the while grounding its meaning-
making in science. His measured approach acknowledges the errors that
abound from “vicious empiricism” as well as from “imperfect inductions”
that feed into and are nourished by “popular prejudices” (Cosmos Vol.
1, 38). To rely exclusively on empiricism—a “melancholy heritage trans-
mitted to us from former times”—is to find hubristic (and false) truth in
“the arrogance of a narrow-minded spirit” (Cosmos Vol. 1, 38).
Humboldt presents a spatially inflected way of interpreting two modes
of knowledge, one as archaic as it is “narrow” and rigid, a straight line
that leads from question to answer, a linear vestige of an empirical past.
The other spirals in its investigative path; it seeks truth in a holistic
description of the physical world that is all-encompassing and even tan-
gential, a “circle of observation” (38). By integrating numerous spokes
of knowledge onto one wheel, we see a complete vision within the spirit
of the Cosmos, an infinitely connected universe in which each element
precariously ties to and relies on the next; indeed, the opposite of a linear
series.
For Humboldt there is no right or wrong in any course of study, only
an attempt to synthesize numerous experiences into an approximation,
rather than a realization, of truth. Aesthetics leads to this approximate
truth vis-à-vis a dialectical relationship between the empirical and the
philosophical, the one relying on the other to produce an aesthetically
pleasing but always already utilitarian description. His aesthetics signal
an underlying appreciation for the fact that the natural world cannot
be dominated solely by mastering its laws. No stranger to the historical
trajectory of what we might anachronistically call his interdisciplinary
work, Humboldt clarifies that “the Philosophy of Nature” had origi-
nally been cast in “vague and poetic garb” that “she” cast away in favor
36 A.S. Madan
of a “severer aspect,” which requires weighing the “value of observations,

and substitutes induction and reasoning for conjecture and assumption”
(Cosmos Vol. 1, 2). He notes that he is “devoid of the profoundness of a
purely speculative philosophy,” that he is committed to a rational empiri-
cism based “upon the results of the fact registered by science, and tested
by the operations of the intellect” (Cosmos Vol. 1, 30).
For Humboldt, the truest value lies in knowledge production that is
neither vague nor severe, neither vapid speculations nor dry numbers:
it lies in a pleasant and instructive contemplation of nature that is both
philosophical and empirical, that appeals to and warms the senses with its
literary inflections while tying together disparate ideas. “The mere accu-
mulation of unconnected observations of details, devoid of generaliza-
tions of ideas,” he conjectures, “may doubtlessly have tended to create
and foster the deeply-rooted prejudice, that the study of the exact sci-
ences must necessarily chill the feelings, and diminish the nobler enjoy-
ments attendant upon a contemplation of nature” (Cosmos Vol. 1, 20).
Humboldt’s task is to surmount this “deeply-rooted prejudice” by cre-
ating a narrative that is replete with the “nobler enjoyments” and that
warms the soul, thereby ensuring legibility, digestibility, and longevity in
both his times and ours. And this geography must be, above all, didactic.
Contradictions
Teaching was at the core of Humboldt’s mission. In fact, Andrea Wulf
explains that Humboldt, despite having no political role in the inner
court circle of Friedrich Wilhelm III, was determined to use his clout
and position to infuse Berlin with a will to learn and develop the intel-
lect, this by making his works and higher education accessible to all walks
of life, be they women or impoverished souls otherwise excluded from
the ivory towers. To this end he charged no entry fee for his popular
Berlin lectures. In Wulf’s words, “Humboldt democratized science”
(193).
Beyond eliminating extraneous details—the first step of democratic
inclusivity—how might the writer convert the “physical history of the
globe into the physical history of the universe” (Cosmos, Vol. 1, 55)?
Humboldt contends that to achieve such a monumental task with such a
high “point of view,” where partial facts are “considered only in relation
to the whole,” then “the greater is the necessity for a systematic mode
of treating the subject in language at once animated and picturesque”
(emphasis added, 56). This language, according to Humboldt, appears in

concrete relation to the land from which it emerges, where local thought
is animated by local language (Cosmos, Vol. 1, 56). At its heart, then,
Humboldt’s philological theory is that of a language that imbues life
into thought, language that gives form to content, animating it in ways
most palpable when emerging from both native tongue and native soil.
This sort of language is, he explains, an outgrowth of the land and, in
turn, of the people. Yet Humboldt contradicts himself, for his language
has painted the objects not of his native German soil, but rather of lands
across the seas. To a degree his contradiction is defensible, for he does
not believe himself to be writing exclusively of one solitary, demarcated
territory. Instead, he finds in “his native language” a way to “give a lucid
exposition of the great phenomena of the universe,” delighting in “the
advantages he has enjoyed in being permitted to express his thoughts” in
German (Cosmos, Vol. 1, 56).
The contradictory impulse in Humboldt’s theory supports the central
thesis of the present study. If we mine deep into the theories presented
over the 78-page span of the Introduction to Cosmos, Humboldt reveals
a two-pronged approach to the “spirit of the method in which the expo-
sition of the physical description of the universe should be conducted”:
firstly, that terrestrial description relies on layers, sometimes inaccurate,
sometimes not, but always offering another strata to the earth-writing
to follow; and, secondly, that geographical discourse emerges best from
the local language. For the Latin American context, Humboldt proposes
his work as the first (but absolutely not the last) layer, a framework to
be built upon and altered by future generations. Such is geographical
knowledge creation, he affirms: iterations and reiterations, accuracies and
inaccuracies.4
This belief buttresses even Humboldt’s earliest work. In the
Introduction to Alexander von Humboldt’s Transatlantic Personae, Vera
M. Kutzinski signals that, for Humboldt, innovation “is fundamentally
a function of intellectual exchange and collaboration, and […] of fer-
reting out errors in productive ways” (7). Humboldt’s biggest self-pro-
claimed error—his botched summit of Chimborazo, that magnificent
volcano representative of the maximum sublime—serves as a metaphor
for his scientific mindset, for “rather than filtering out his failed attempt
at getting to the top of the word, he explores its scientific and aesthetic
potential for generating future knowledge” (8). “He turns a crisis of
knowledge,” Kutzinski continues, “into a welcome occasion for updating
38 A.S. Madan
and correcting the results of his earlier field work while […] creating an
often sensual narrative that consists of as many layers as the high plateaus
stacked up against the imposing peak” (8). The failed climb is thus a key
episode of error, illustrative of an approach that becomes standardized
across the canonical writings of Latin American statesmen.
Humboldt doubles down on his method to physically describe the
universe, secondly, by positioning the native tongue as the most apt for
this merging of language and thought, since “the beneficent influence
of a language is most strikingly manifested on its native soil, where it has
sprung spontaneously from the minds of the people, whose character it
embodies” (56). In his formulation, land and language must merge with
human subject for the most striking representation. Humboldt proves
cognizant that subsequent physical descriptions of Latin America will
necessarily reflect the land’s character in ways that he cannot because of
his limited skills in Spanish and Portuguese.5 In short, he signals that his
geographical work informs that to come, which will be more authentic,
more spontaneous, springing from the soil and character of local people.
If we meld these two Humboldtian elements of writing the earth—
(1) layers and justifiable errors, and (2) native tongue as superior—then
Humboldt foretells and even demands future narratives that revise,
review, and rectify his geographical discourse. He hands the reins to the
next generation of local writers and naturalists. He expects not to depict
any final truth, but rather to put forth one more stratum of geographi-
cal discourse into Universal History, a Geist-like iteration on the path of
knowledge that is ever in the process of becoming. We might argue that
such an epistemological stance inoculates Humboldt against any lapses or
incongruences; conversely, we might argue that his is an innocuous and
even realistic view of what might be at stake when writing the nation of
a sovereign state. Whether benign or not, in the end Humboldt’s aes-
thetic approach accounts for any contradictions and ambiguities within
his writing.
The two ambiguities that have prompted most polemic in
Humboldtian studies regard his complicity in imperialism and, as its
corollary, in ecological devastation of the Americas. Having become
something of a hot button in recent environmentalist conversa-
tions, Humboldt is the topic of Alice Jenkins’s article “Alexander von
Humboldt’s Cosmos and the Beginnings of Ecocriticism” (2007), Aaron
Sach’s The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the
Roots of American Environmentalism (2007), and two chapters of Sabine
Wilke’s German Culture and the Modern Environmental Imagination:

Narrating and Depicting Nature (2015), to name just a few.
In his 2013 essay on Humboldt and environmental humanities, Jorge
Marcone takes a stance that embraces the Humboldtian both/and logic
by defying scholarly controversies indicting (Pratt 1992) or acquit-
ting (Dassow Walls 2011; Sachs 2007) Humboldt for his involvement
in European capitalist expansion. Marcone refuses to pigeonhole the
Baron in the either/or dichotomy, asking instead, “[c]ould he have been
both an ecological thinker and a facilitator of ecological imperialism?”
(78). Given that Cosmos—Humboldt’s seminal end-of-life, capstone
work—self-consciously embodies this contradiction, in what follows
I focus on the ecological posture in its “Introduction” to argue in line
with Marcone, whose essay focuses on two texts from the earlier 1808
Views of Nature. My sense is that the Latin American geographical pro-
ject has long been fraught with contradictions on how best to negotiate
and leverage a discipline essential to development, but equally complicit
in destruction. The development/destruction dyad begins in Humboldt
and appears in Sarmiento, Zeballos, and da Cunha, finding its pinnacle
in millennial aesthetic production that recaptures Latin America’s volatile
nineteenth century and exposes its consequences.
Humboldt does not deny “the influence exercised by physical discov-
eries,” which, beyond the “enlargement of the sphere of intellect,” can
“be made conducive to national prosperity” (Cosmos Vol. 1, 52). Within
this delicate framing of the knowledge/conquest dialectic, he cements
the alignment between extractivism and wealth, signaling that “the mate-
rial wealth and the growing prosperity of nations are principally based
upon a more enlightened employment of the products and forces of
nature” (Cosmos Vol. 1, 53).6 Humboldt synthesizes and exemplifies the
notion of creative destruction insofar as nature’s use-value determines
national wealth and, in turn, success. He has thus been accused of eco-
logical devastation vis-à-vis geographical practices—and even his own
words seem to support such an accusation.
Yet, we might wonder, is Humboldt speaking about modern notions
of extractivism, wherein the difference between colonized and colonizer
is, as posed by Alberto Acosta, that “[t]he former export Nature, the lat-
ter import it” (62)? If we read on, we see that his assertion specifically
addresses Europe: the states that are struggling the most “shrink with
slothful indifference from the great struggle of rival nations in the career
of the industrial arts” (Cosmos Vol. 1, 53). Referencing his muse again,
40 A.S. Madan
Humboldt affirms, “it is with nations as with nature, which, according to

a happy expression of Göethe, ‘knows no pause in progress and develop-
ment, and attaches her curse on all inaction’” (Cosmos Vol. 1, xx). The
didactic message—act now or perish—prefigures Foucault: “Bacon has
said that, in human societies, knowledge is power. Both must rise and
sink together” (Cosmos Vol. 1, 53). From Humboldt’s vantage point,
“the general industrial movement”—writ large and inclusive of geo-
graphical practices—commands the next stage of nation-state develop-
ment; the kinetic energy drives all movement forward with “activity” for
the countries that desire wealth (53). Those who do not know their land
“will infallibly see their prosperity diminish in proportion as neighboring
countries become strengthened and invigorated under the genial influ-
ence of arts and sciences” (53).
Given that he is nourished by the Occidental epistemologies espoused
by Goethe and Bacon, his preeminent contemporaries, it is easy to
indict Humboldt as the primordial Eurocentric, he who put forth a geo-
graphical theory and practice to best employ “the products and forces
of nature” and thereby grow national economies on both sides of the
Atlantic (Cosmos Vol. 1, 53). Knowing more about the land, in this equa-
tion, means the ability to take more from it.
Yet what if we consider Humboldt’s intellectual formation as expe-
riential and as emerging from his on-the-ground interactions in South
America? We would then have to think of him less as an extractivist and
more as an experientialist. In an essay that refutes Eurocentric analyses
arguing for Humboldt’s indebtedness to Occidental epistemology, histo-
rian of science Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (2006) argues that Humboldt
learned a great deal from local intellectuals in South America (e.g.,
Francisco José de Caldas, José Celestino Mutis, Hipólito Unanué),
figures who ultimately nourish his ecological mindset. In an earlier work,
Cañizares-Esguerra (2001) further expands on the derivative nature of
Humboldt’s writings, particularly his reliance on indigenous sources.
“In seeking to write a philosophical history of America,” Humboldt, he
demonstrates, “used Amerindian sources to shed light on the natural
history of the human mind through a conjectural history of writing not
much different from those of Vico, Fréret, and Warburton” (127).
Using Cañizares-Esguerra’s observations as a springboard, I propose
that we consider Humboldt’s ecological thinking as grounded in, and
drawing from, Amerindian epistemologies. For Humboldt, the essence
of Cosmos is spiritual and even omniscient, that “all-powerful unity
of natural forces” in which everything is connected and, as previously

mentioned, based on a “circle of observation,” as opposed to a linear
trajectory of knowledge formation. Couched in the argot of his times
wherein indigenous and savage are synonymous, he notes:
We find even among the most savage nations […] a certain vague, terror-
stricken sense of the all-powerful unity of natural forces, and of the exist-
ence of an invisible, spiritual essence manifested in these forces, whether in
unfolding the flower and maturing the fruit of the nutrient tree, in upheav-
ing the soil of the forest, or in rending the clouds with the might of the
storm. (Cosmos Vol. 1, 37)
Humboldt’s appeal to a circular, holistic philosophy resonates more

strongly with indigenous rather than Occidental epistemologies, and
perhaps even foretells ecofeminist indigenous scholarship such as Paula
Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop (1986), which suggests that the sacred—
“the spiritual essence,” if we are to use Humboldt’s words—is based on
the unitary nature of reality, in which all creatures are relatives, space is
spherical, and time is cyclical. Humboldt respects indigenous spirituality
far more than anything from Europe, where believers locked themselves
in churches instead of the cathedral of nature: “‘Your God,’ said they to
me, ‘keeps himself shut up in a house, as if he were old and infirm; ours
is in the forests, in the fields, and on the mountains of Sipapu, whence
the rains come” (Personal Narrative Vol. II, 362). In the indigenous
cosmovision, God is in everything and everyone. Destroying the forests
and the fields is tantamount to destroying Him.
Humboldt’s indigenously inflected belief in this web of intercon-
nectedness puts him into conversation with recent inquiry into the new
era of the Anthropocene, which theorizes humans as geological agents
with the power to extinguish ourselves and other species. In some ways,
he takes the Anthropocene a step forward into the realm of Jason W.
Moore’s “Capitalocene,” for he never loses sight of what Marx would
later propose as a historical notion of humanity, one internally differenti-
ated and in a constant state of becoming through internal contradictions.
Creative destruction, Humboldt understands, might destroy the all-too-
creative Homo sapiens.
As early as 1801, Humboldt underscores this peripatetic relation-
ship upon solving the mystery behind the gradually sinking Lago de
Valencia. Known as Tacarigua by Venezuela’s Amerindians, the lake had
42 A.S. Madan
once been rimmed by lush forest canopy. In an effort to clear space for
the lucrative indigo crop, however, the trees had been all but eliminated.
Until Humboldt, no one realized an essential fact: the trees’ root sys-
tems predicated the soil’s capacity to retain water. Without the forests,
flooding and erosion proved antithetical problems alongside the evapo-
rating lake. Humboldt thus blamed deforestation for the desiccated basin
and eroded landscape. Contrary to locals’ assumptions—that an under-
ground rivulet leading to the sea was to blame—the parched earth, he
darkly noted, was manmade: “By felling the trees that cover the tops and
sides of mountains, men in every climate prepare at once two calamities
for future generations; the want of fuel, and a scarcity of water” (Personal
Narrative 4:143).
Humboldt was no soothsayer. Yet his words describe precisely the
calamity depicted, and overcome, in Salt of the Earth (Wim Wenders and
Julian Ribeiro Salgado 2015). In this documentary about Brazilian pho-
tographer Sebastião Salgado’s photopoetic writing and rewriting of his-
tory, we learn that the Salgado cattle ranch in Minas Gerais had, over
the course of Sebastião’s life, become a dry, dusty swatch of land. Why?
For the very reasons Humboldt had articulated in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Renaming the ranch the Instituto Terra in the late 1990s, Salgado
and his wife Leila replanted the land with over 4 million seedlings indig-
enous to Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. The subsequent revival, according
to the Instituto Terra, benefited both the human and the non-human
inhabitants of the land: “with the return of vegetation, water again flows
from natural springs and Brazilian animal species at risk of extinction
have again found a safe refuge” (The Instituto Terra: Who are we?). The
Institute strives to prevent and undo ecological calamity for both the
human and the non-human.
This impetus is also Humboldtian. Throughout his works, Humboldt
reveals something beyond an anthropocentric commitment. Like
Salgado—who says he is as much a part of nature as a tree, a pebble, or
a turtle—Humboldt reveals an indigenously inflected social ecology that
hearkens to what Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
(1998) has most famously deemed Amerindian perspectivism—“the ideas
in Amazonian cosmologies concerning the way in which humans, ani-
mals and spirits see both themselves and one another” (469). According
to Viveiros de Castro, this worldview tilts Occidental relations between
nature and culture on their axis by positing the earth as inhabited by
only humans, for all beings are human. Such a formulation turns Homo
sapiens’ exclusivity on its head, for all creatures are perceived as sentient
and as worthy bearers of rights.
Humboldt dedicated a great deal of time to conceptualizing the kin-
dred spirit unifying the land’s sentient and non-sentient beings. David
Kenosian observes that both Alexander and his brother Wilhelm von
Humboldt perceived nature in Kantian terms, “not so much a pas-
sive object but as if it were a speaking subject” (501). By coalescing
Alexander’s notion of translation with Wilhelm’s language-based the-
ory of consciousness, Kenosian further establishes that, for Humboldt,
nature becomes absolutely capable of communicating. So convinced is
the Baron of this possibility that, despite limited zoological research in
South America, he takes upon himself an anatomical study examining
the respiratory and vocal organs of animals. In Kenosian’s estimation, he
was “trying to understand how nature literally develops a voice” (505).
Similarly, Dassow Walls notes that in Personal Narrative Humboldt “rev-
els in the voices of nature,” and she documents the occasions on which
Humboldt uses “metaphors of permeation” to unify human subject
and nature rather than place humans separate to or above, underscor-
ing words like reflected, communion, reaction, correspond, and mingle, for
example (230–231).
Ushering us outside of the anthropocentric paradigm, Humboldt
suggests that the land’s voices are multiple and multifaceted, sentient
and even sensuous, illustrative of what the ecologist and philosopher
David Abram has deemed the “more-than-human world” (1996). If we
superimpose Abram’s theory onto Neil Safier’s observation regarding
Humboldt’s differentiation between permanence and transience, then
we see a paradigm shift: while Humboldt despaired over the absence
of human culture during his 36 days navigating the Amazon’s tribu-
tary streams, he believed that the numerous non-human beings inhabit-
ing the region were indication enough that “human beings were merely
transitory inhabitants in this place, passersby in a land where nonhuman
denizens, large and small, possessed more permanent claims” (134).
I would like to pause on these dual notions of transience and per-
manence, for Safier’s reading smartly engages Humboldt in the dis-
course of enclosure: who is settled and gets to stay, and who moves on.
No amount of iconographic or instrumental signaling of a “permanent
claim” on a map changes Humboldt’s sense that human beings are
transitory in this terrain, not there to make of settlement a settling into
modernity. In fact, he assumes a position quite opposite to the traditional
44 A.S. Madan
map-maker, for whom Cartesian gridlines equal order and progress.

Humboldt the geographer reveals, instead, a need to revive orality, to
write a literary cartography in a way that is premodern, that hearkens
back to late Antiquity—in particular to Strabo (as I will show momen-
tarily) and, at the same time, to Amerindian epistemology. Drawing
on North American indigenous beliefs, the literary writings of Henry
David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, and the phenomenological works of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Abram argues that “the rejuvenation of oral cul-
ture is an ecological imperative,” for
When stories are no longer being told in the woods or along the banks
of rivers—when the land is no longer being honored, ALOUD!, as an
animate, expressive power—then the human senses lose their attunement
to the surrounding terrain. We no longer feel the particular pulse of our
place—we no longer hear, or respond to, the many-voiced eloquence of
the land. Increasingly blind and deaf, increasingly impervious to the sen-
suous world, the technological mind begins to lay waste to the earth.
(“Storytelling and Wonder”)
Within Humboldt’s melding of the human and non-human—within his

attempt to listen to “the many-voiced eloquence of the land” while also
encouraging monetary gains through its exploitation—we can situate a
contradictory social ecology that is out of place in zones not (yet) col-
onized or creatively destroyed, but that is wholly fitting for the Global
South. Caught between a twofold task that entailed charting the terri-
tory at the behest of his imperial sponsor all the while governed by an
indigenously inflected regard for the terrain, Humboldt is complicit in
ecological devastation but, at the same time, committed to using his eyes
and ears to surmount an “increasingly blind and deaf ” hegemonic power
less interested in the ways in which “the technological mind begins to
lay waste to the earth” and more in how it generates revenue from such
waste. And thus, the environmentalism that defines Europe and the sort
of extractivism that Acosta describes within the European context can-
not be superimposed upon Latin America without running into a wall of
confusion, without seeming like a misplaced idea.
Within Humboldt’s contradictory yet harmony-seeking stance we
find the origins of a geographical practice fitted to the specificities of
the Latin American context, thereby making him a forefather of Latin
American geography in more ways than one. Like his Latin American
successors, he is conflicted by “the contrast between the virtue of a sav-

age and the barbarism of civilized man” (Personal Narrative Vol. II,
346). Presaging Sarmiento’s explicit praise of the baqueano—the indig-
enous trackers who read the land—he admires the ways in which the
Amerindians can navigate terrain that has no landmarks: “The Indians,
I repeat, are excellent geographers” (Personal Narrative Vol. II, 377).
Their knowledge is irreplaceable.
In his essay questioning the local value of David Harvey’s critique of
capitalism, Eduardo Gudynas (2015) suggests that we break free of the
colonial trappings of Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession,” which
addresses processes like the commodification of land, expulsion of peas-
ants, transformation of work into a product, and financialization of econ-
omies. Attractive and applicable though these ideas may be, Gudynas
identifies four ways in which they fall short of fitting Latin America’s
reality. First, he contends, Latin Americans themselves ought to produce
a local critique of capitalism that accounts for the contradictory inter-
nal colonialism imposed upon the region’s indigenous peoples, a matter
entirely omitted from Harvey’s arguments. Second, this critique segues
to his call to acknowledge, incorporate, and dialogue with the region’s
autochthonous peoples. Essential yet dispossessed labor in Harvey’s cri-
tique, they live in a way that should be modeled—as transient stewards
of the earth within Amerindian notions of sumak kawsay, or Buen Vivir,
which demands a collective, harmonious development instead of capi-
talist modes of owning, selling, keeping, and having land and property.
Within indigenous epistemologies we humans begin life “dispossessed,”
for we do not possess the earth. We take care of it while we are here,
leading us to Gudynas’s third point: any local critique of capitalism must
necessarily incorporate an ecological dimension (Gudynas 2015). Rather
than an abstract allusion to the environment, he calls for a concrete con-
sideration of the ways in which Latin American modernity can only be
understood vis-à-vis its history of extractivism. And, fourth, Gudynas
insists that any critique must recuperate local epistemologies to illumi-
nate alternatives to development in a paradigmatic rethinking that is
post-Eurocentric.
Humboldt’s approach to geographical thinking aligns almost seam-
lessly with Gudynas’s localized critique of capitalism, for it adheres to all
four insufficiencies: it is ecological while cognizant of (and even com-
plicit in) both external and internal imperialism prompted by delinea-
tion; it is undergirded by indigenous thought in its acknowledgment
46 A.S. Madan
of human transience vis-à-vis the permanent more-than-human world;

it acknowledges the need for the local theorist—indeed, the native
tongue—to produce the next stratum of geographical discourse; and,
finally, its alternative to modernity is Cosmos, a formulation that in some
ways articulates, albeit in Eurocentric terms, the ideas behind the social
philosophy of sumak kawsay, which has branched across Latin America
from its origins in the Quechua cosmovision. Grounded in an inherent
harmony between human beings and nature, Buen Vivir decries market-
driven knowledge production while urging that the rights of individu-
als be subsumed under the rights of communities, the rights of nature.
Humboldt, similarly, holds to a didactic impulse driven by knowledge
for humanity’s sake, rather than as an investment in human capital. This
knowledge rises out of layers and lapses, not a final truth but an evolu-
tionary one, gleaned from a profound understanding of the earth and its
inhabitants. To study and to demarcate the earth’s contours is a human
task, which, like most human tasks, becomes contaminated by politics.
And therein we might situate the aesthetics of Humboldtian geographi-
cal discourse: to teach future generations of our mortality, of our tempo-
rality relative to the land we live on, land that we claim as territory but
that is ultimately outside of the realm of ownership.
Consolidations
In Volume II of his Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial
Regions of the New Continent, Humboldt laments the 300 years of
“pointless territorial disputes” that plagued the Americas as the Courts
of Madrid and Lisbon duked it out over tracts of land that had origi-
nally been established, though incompletely so, by the 1521 Treaty
of Tordesillas and “unreliable” maps (234).7 Minor rivers like the Río
Negro quickly took on great importance to Spanish authorities, since
they offered the Portuguese easy access to territories in Caracas, while
“uncultivated” lands prompted, in Humboldt’s estimation, unnecessary
and surprising “litigations over who owns a few square leagues”—uti
possidetis at its best (234). Heavier matters regarding Paraguay and pos-
session of Colonia del Sacramento further troubled waters between the
rivals, who “have generally been keener to prolong this dispute rather
than solve it” (234). Humboldt emphasizes that the conflict nonetheless
leads to a clear—if unintentional—winner: the disciplines of “nautical sci-
ence and geography” (234).
While papal authorities and astronomical points initially had the last
word in territorial feuds, the states soon looked to the discipline of geog-
raphy for conclusive answers. They sent “a few educated engineers and
some naval officers acquainted with the position of a place” to chart the
land and thereby settle the disputes once and for all (234). Humboldt
credits these “hard-working men” with gathering “the little we knew
up to the end of the last century about the geography of the interior
of the New Continent,” but he underscores that such knowledge was
more accidental than purposeful, more litigation than science—“the
sciences gained accidentally from these border commissions, often for-
gotten by the states that sent them out” (234). Geographical sciences
developed not for knowledge’s sake but rather for capital, as “abstract
social nature,” Jason Moore’s term to describe that “family of processes
through which capitalists and state-machineries map, identify, quantify,
measure, and code human and extra-human natures in service to capi-
tal accumulation’” (“The Capitalocene II” 12). Writing almost incredu-
lously about the sheer extent of Spanish–Portuguese conflicts—which in
turn complicated his passing to and from colonies—Humboldt recounts
that “[i]n these deserted jungles the only instruments ever seen had been
carried by boundary commissioners. The Portuguese Government agents
could not conceive how a sensible man could exhaust himself ‘measuring
lands that did not belong to him’” (239–240). Though he knows and
openly states that charting the land is essential to national sovereignty,
here Humboldt again safely nestles into the space of contradiction,
where the lands belong not to human nor state, being rather a space of
human transience.
I would like to delve further into this happenstance, the rise of the
discipline of geography in colonial Latin America, as illustrative of
Humboldt’s acumen for identifying causation and correlation—for see-
ing, in short, the interconnectedness of life. Ette (2012) captures well
the Humboldtian ability to unpack cause and effect, to grasp both
change and exchange of ideas, noting that “Humboldt’s pen replaced
spatial history with a history of movement whose major concern is no
longer the territorial but the relational, the dynamic and the mobile”
(trans. in Kutzinski “Introduction” 2). Vera Kutzinski describes this
movement further as “multidirectional flows of large-scale civilizational
analysis,” something we see across Humboldt’s corpus and through his
own fieldwork and vast intellectual network (“Introduction” 2).
48 A.S. Madan
Based on the above observations, what interests me about the

territorial disputes and their unintended advances for geographi-
cal knowledge is the longevity and ripple effect of such a colonial pat-
tern, which replicates itself among the colonized subjects as well as
their Creole masters: Spain and Portugal’s territorial strife becomes, as
we shall see in Chap. 4 of this study, Argentina and Brazil’s. Humboldt
notes as much in Personal Narrative, wherein “the conflict between the
Courts of Lisbon and Madrid—even in peaceful times—had heightened
the mistrust of the commanders of petty neighboring forts,” while
On the banks of the Río Negro the Indians in the neighbouring

Portuguese and Spanish villages hate each other. These poor people speak
only their Indian languages and have no idea what happens “on the other
bank of the ocean, beyond the great salt pod”, but the gowns of the mis-
sionaries are of different colours and that enrages them. (235)
From the highest courts to the ground-level commanders and on

down to the subjugated indigenous populations, each tier of the colo-
nial hierarchy feeds upon and further nourishes the Iberian rivalry begun
with the initial line drawn with the Treaty of Tordesillas. Yet while the
strife initially benefits the discipline of geography (if aggravating per-
sonal tensions), in short order we see that the benefits are not without
epistemological consequence. As Neil Safier puts it, “imperial rivalries
made for bad maps” (134). Put plainly, as Spain and Portugal acquire
more knowledge about the interior, they choose to conceal what they
know, such that the most reliable cartographic information is unwritten
and unshared or, even worse for the colonial project, contained within
indigenous minds. “The rivalry between Spain and Portugal,” Humboldt
reports, “has contributed to the poor geographical knowledge about
the tributary rivers of the Amazon. The Indians are excellent geogra-
phers and can outflank the enemy despite the limits on the maps and
the forts” (235). In an ironic twist, the maps thus prove more a hin-
drance than an asset, for the very place-names that demonstrate colo-
nial domination are based on indigenous synonyms that all translate to
some variation of “river.” Settlement and territorial knowledge, here,
amount to little more than a farce for the sake of seeming in the know.
The map thus ceases to be instrumental. “Our maps are full of arbitrary
names,” Humboldt writes matter-of-factly, for “[t]he desire to leave no
void in maps in order to give them an appearance of accuracy has caused
rivers to be created whose names are not synonymous” (236). Language

skills—or their lack thereof—also hindered Brazilian geographers:
“Ignorance of the Spanish language,” notes Humboldt, “drove geogra-
phers to locate erroneously on the famous La Crus Olmedilla map the
400-league route made by Joseph Solano to the sources of the Orinoco”
(242).
Humboldt’s relationship with error is worth unpacking, if only for the
paradoxes it conjures. According to Ette, Humboldt finds more value in
the process of mistake-making than in arriving at a neatly packaged sci-
entific product; his style, in turn, proves more rhizomatic than teleologi-
cal, for the network of knowledge created by the imagination ultimately
surpasses that of the data. “Geographic maps,” Humboldt contends in
Examen Critique (1836),
express the more or less limited views and knowledge of those who pro-
duce them, but they do not reflect the truthful state of discoveries. What
we find depicted on maps (and particularly on the maps of the fourteenth,
fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries) is usually an assembly of well-known
facts and arbitrary claims presented as facts. […] [W]e must not forget the
influence that opinions, conjectures, and desires produced by greater polit-
ical and economic interests have had on the representation of geographic
facts and general formation of continents. (trans. in Wilke 77)
The German studies scholar Sabine Wilke observes that Humboldt

enacts such imaginative strategies in his own visual representations,
an observation she buttresses by analyzing his Physical Tableau of the
Canary Islands. However, if we extend the arc of Wilke’s observation,
we see that Humboldt differentiates between the innocuous (and nec-
essary) task of what we might call cartographic conjecture and the less
benign cartographic fiction—the “arbitrary claims presented as facts” in
the service of “political and economic interests.” To be sure, Humboldt
presciently prefigures the conclusions of contemporary historians of car-
tography, chief among them J.B. Harley (2001), who observes that we
must always take into question the map-maker’s ideological commit-
ments, since the “power of a map” is an “act of control over the image
of the world” (49). Harley declares that “[s]ince the age of Columbus,
maps have helped to create some of the most pervasive stereotypes of our
world” (49).
50 A.S. Madan
I would like to pause for a moment on this curious and ideologically

motivated colonial truth-stretching, of which there are two distinct but
interrelated parts—on the one hand, the notion of completeness, and
on the other, the appearance of accuracy.8 What does the colonial pro-
ject garner by projecting a certain image of cartographic completeness
and accuracy? Humboldt points to the ways in which the colonial pro-
ject is sustained by a simulacrum of the real: by representing the terri-
tory as though it is known, the colonial authorities enact an imagistic
conquest that allows for easier appropriation and regulation—knowledge
and conquest again go hand in hand. As Neil Safier has observed, “[m]
aps produced by early modern empires were as much a product of the
dissimulation of their sources as they were a mechanism for displacing
the cultural (as opposed to physical) features of colonial geographies”
(183). We see this relation continue in the next layer of intra-colonial
geography, that of the nation-building liberals actively seeking territo-
rial knowledge so as to develop sovereign nations. As Raymond Craib
has shown in the context of Mexican independence, designating place-
names is just one element in the battle between what he deems fugitive
landscapes and state fixations. The former identifies “lands characterized
by multiple political jurisdictions and use rights, indeterminate borders
and inconsistent place-names, and highly contextualized systems of ten-
ure and property” (Craib 12); the latter is what we see in Humboldt’s
depiction, a “state fixation” committed to permanence through “the
inscription of lines, points, plots, and place-names” that “would give
space a stable signification, permitting it to be more effectively appro-
priated, transformed, and regulated” (Craib 8). For the newly emergent
nation-states, onomastic consistency preserves history by inscribing a
genealogy upon the land, preserving tradition in places where “history
has completely disappeared” (qtd. in Craib 44). What we see in the case
of colonial Latin America, however, is a place portrayed as prehistori-
cal; indeed, a continent where, to Eurocentric eyes, history has not even
begun and thus becomes invented in ways arbitrary yet always strategic.
Humboldt condemns such arbitrary strategy as but one more insertion
of the mimetic regime wherein knowing the land—however falsely—is
tantamount to having power.9 “The appearance of accuracy” to which
Humboldt refers is just that: a false image that fakes modernity until sci-
ence advances enough to reveal some sort of legitimizing truth.
If the literary element of geographical discourse accounts for ambi-
guities and contradictions, then cartography offers just the opposite by
embracing accuracy in place of aesthetic representation. By underscor-

ing “the influence that opinions, conjectures, and desires produced by
greater political and economic interests have had on the representation
of geographic facts and general formation of continents,” Humboldt
points to cartography’s ideological underpinnings well before such argu-
ments were in vogue, over a century before Harley notes, in the late
1980s, that “the map has attempted to purge itself of ambiguity and
alternative possibility. Accuracy and austerity of design are now the new
talismans of authority culminating in our own age with computer map-
ping” (“Deconstructing the Map” 13). Elsewhere, Harley neatly summa-
rizes that “an accurate outline map of a nation, such as Cassini provided
for Louis XIV, was no less a patriotic allegory than an inaccurate one”
(“Maps, Knowledge, and Power” 300).
Perhaps, then, this conundrum somewhat explains Humboldt’s
penchant for the discursive over and above the imagistic, for p ainting
a rambling, sometimes messy, but always beautiful—and even violent—
image of the land with florid lines of text rather than precise lines of
latitude. After all, the truly “accurate” representation of a hapless,
ill-defined, and colonized South America is not a neat “patriotic alle-
gory,” as it might have been in the map “Cassini provided for Louis
XIV” (Harley 300), but rather an untamed parcel of land recently and
haphazardly demarcated as territory. Rather than reaffirming a sense
of moral or ethical neutrality from viewers observing precise—and
silent—gridlines, Humboldt awakens them to the social and political
inanity taking place in this otherwise unknown region, this with his lit-
erary acumen and attention to both human subject and physical land.
In a sense, his writing gives form to chaos, to murky borders and far-
removed notions of oppression; only metaphor suffices to make sense
of colonialism’s ravages.
In her chapter on Simón Bolívar’s indebtedness to Humboldt, Andrea
Wulf notes that the order of nature also provided comfort to the Gran
Libertador, who sought liberty in the midst of extreme uncertainty.
“In untamed nature,” she writes, “he found parallels to the brutality of
humankind—and though this fact didn’t change anything about the con-
ditions of war, it could still be strangely comforting. As Bolívar fought
to free the colonies from Spanish shackles, these images, nature meta-
phors and allegories became his language of freedom” (146). Of course,
the emancipatory potential of aesthetics complements the empirical data
that gives meaning to Spain’s colonial enterprise. Bolívar sees value in
52 A.S. Madan
Humboldt’s philosophical speculation and his empirical data, both of

which allow him unfettered access into territories otherwise unknown to
him. As Wulf notes, Bolívar intently studied Humboldt’s volumes, par-
ticularly Political Essay on New Spain, which not only synthesized geo-
graphical observations with both racial and environmental consequences
of colonial rule, but also included “table upon table of data ranging from
silver production in mines to agricultural yields, as well as total amounts
of imports and exports to and from the different colonies” (152). This
melding of information made clear that imperial rule had plundered the
colonies for their materia prima and had decimated relations, both peo-
ple to people and people to environment, in the process. By incorporat-
ing statistical and demographic archival data into his first-hand accounts,
Humboldt further nourished and buttressed Bolívar’s stance: his land
and peoples needed to be freed. As Wulf put it, for Bolívar “the written
word had the power to change the world” (149).10
Ahead of contemporary emphases on big data, Humboldt’s emphasis
on indexicality belies what David Turnbull (1993) would later describe
as “various maps as having different modes of transcending indexical-
ity” (41). For Humboldt, the map does not transcend indexicality but
rather precludes it. Geographical discourse, as such, is best coupled with
numbers, which offer the empirical accuracy and precision presumed by
the unadorned map. We thus see here a clear merging of the mutually
informative relationship between the arts and the sciences.11
Humboldt goes a step further to insist that institutions house the pro-
gress brought about by the relations between arts and sciences, thereby
forecasting the rise of geographical institutions and commercial muse-
ums, both of which emerge throughout the long nineteenth century on
either sides of the Atlantic. As a necessary corollary of industrialization’s
spoils, all growth must be documented, catalogued, and tracked in order
to determine that it is, in fact, growth. In kind, all destruction must be
tracked to determine that it is, in fact, wreaking havoc upon the envi-
ronment. Institutions house such empirical data. To that end, Humboldt
notes in Cosmos that “the increased impetus imparted to commerce by
the multiplied means of contact of nations with each other, are all bril-
liant results of the intellectual progress of mankind, and of the ameliora-
tion of political institutions, in which this progress is reflected” (Vol. I,
54).
Humboldt’s insistence on the value of national institutions vis-à-
vis geographical practices proves to be prescient. Geography flourished
in nineteenth-century Latin America despite having entered a period

of stagnation (and even dormancy) in Europe until approximately the
1870s. Though military-affiliated geographical institutions came into
existence as early as 1791 (Great Britain’s Ordnance Survey), geographi-
cal societies in the private sector emerged more slowly, the tentative
model rising in 1788 (Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, which solidi-
fied in 1830), and the actual predecessor to all modern societies sprout-
ing in 1821 (Paris’s Societé de Géographie). Not until the Napoleonic
campaigns, however, was there a reawakening and renewed interest in
the latent field. With the impending threat of invasion by French forces,
European states became obliged to recognize the necessity of cartogra-
phy and specialized geographical knowledge as the requisite basis for mil-
itary planning (Godlewska 4; Risco 1).12
As an institutionalized discipline fundamentally aligned with the
prospects of nation-building, geography’s crucial thrust occurred in
the Americas. Between 1833 and 1935 approximately 50 societies were
founded, the first in Mexico (1833, Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía
y Estadística) and later ones in Brazil (1838, Instituto Histórico e
Geográfico Brasileiro) and Argentina (1854, Instituto Geográfico
Argentino). As Luz Fernanda Azuela Bernal (2003) explains in her essay
on the the role of geography for Mexico’s modernization:
the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística was founded with

the double objective of creating a Map of the Republic and establishing
national statistics. These were strategic and fundamental tasks to consoli-
date the country as an independent nation, and their difficulty required the
intervention of men of science. (153–154)
Cartographic ambition coalesced with statistics and strategy to create the

image of a consolidated, independent nation. Bernal’s conclusion thus
aligns with Raymond Craib’s contention that “[s]tatistics and geography
were sciences of statecraft” designed to project progress (22).
With designs toward nation-building, Latin America’s emer-
gent geographical institutions confirmed the discipline’s original ten-
ets as intrinsically tied to politics. If we turn to the Greek origins of
geography—Strabo’s Geographica (c. 17–23 AD), perhaps the earli-
est surviving example of a universal geography and the most complete
account of the world yet portrayed—we discover that the subject inheres
in any political venture:
54 A.S. Madan
It seems to me excellent encouragement for the project at hand to say that

geography is essentially oriented to the needs of politics. […] The greatest
captains of war are thus those who can exercise their power over earth and
sea, collecting people and cities together under a single empire, controlled
by the same political structures. In these conditions it is clear that all of
geography is oriented toward the practice of government: […] It would
be easier to take control of a country if we knew its dimensions, its relative
location, and the original particularities of its climate and its nature. (qtd.
in Godlewska 93; emphasis in Strabo’s original)13
This political agenda of power and control directly aligns with language.
For Strabo, whom Anne-Marie Godlewska describes as “fundamentally
conservative and backward-looking to the glory of the Greek empire” in
her Geography Unbound (1999), the Greek intellectual tradition far sur-
passed that of the Romans, a people he perceived to be lacking cultural
depth (92).14 But, more importantly, Strabo linked geography to the
immediately aesthetic project embraced by the Greeks. He viewed geog-
raphy as a sort of poetry among the most supreme of endeavors, an act
of the creative, subjective mind far removed from the mechanics of, say,
engineering. In fact, Strabo abided by the beliefs of the ancients, who
held an unabashed respect for poetry’s ability to teach “the social and
the political and also historical”; the genre sat in stark contrast to prose,
that form fashioned to convey philosophy and history, but one ulti-
mately weakened by its own exclusivity—isolating knowledge from the
masses, from women and children, to cater narrowly to elite men (qtd. in
Godlewska 94).
Geography, argued Strabo, stemmed from Homer, the greatest of the
poets. Those who attempted to extract poetry and fable from geography
(like Eratosthenes and Hipparchus, who pushed to include mathemat-
ics and measurements) thus endangered the absolute core of geography.
Poetry’s value and, with that, geography’s value resided in the realm of the
abstract as opposed to the concrete tangibility of, for instance, metallurgy.
This abstraction resulted from their subjective creation. Both the poetic
and the geographical relied upon the subjective tendencies and truthful
willingness of their architects, thereby suggesting room for interpretation.
Geography thus shared more in common with poetry in “spirit, purpose,
and form of thought than to ‘geometry’” (Godlewska 94–95).
What we have here is an alignment with orality and narrative:
geography in its Strabonic origins is, in the end, a story—a “fable” that
is necessarily accessible to the masses. Lest we forget, Humboldt, too,

appeals to aesthetics as a mode of increasing accessibility and, with that,
instruction: geographical discourse is a didactic geography that is politi-
cal, yes, but also instructive. Knowing the land allows conquest, but
also bequeaths the land and its denizens a history to anchor to. Dassow
Walls notes that for Humboldt, the “language of nature” was “that most
ancient of storytellers,” for ‘[t]he face of the land told its own story,” its
features connecting known and unknown, familiar and foreign, building
upon previous knowledge, wherein geography becomes history and tells
the tale of the past (227–228). “Their form is their history,” Humboldt
concludes (qtd. in Dassow Walls 228).
We are privy to Humboldt’s many contradictions throughout Cosmos,
but in the Introduction we are made to understand why: for Humboldt,
the “history of nations” and the “physical description of the world”
may be different in degree, but are of the same kind given their shared
contradictions and oscillation (Cosmos Vol. II, 42). In his formulation,
history and geography nourish one another. Telling the tale of the physi-
cal world becomes tantamount to narrating the national story. The two
narratives are one and the same in Humboldt’s formula, an alliance
that reflects his intellectual indebtedness to Strabo, as does his ebbing
approach to the polemic between empirical data and philosophical specu-
lation. As Godlewska has observed, Humboldt’s stance was “[p]erhaps in
response to the influence of the early positivists,” a response that made
him see “less opposition between description and theory than between
pure empiricism and theoretical science. It was pure empiricism that
was antithetical to the aims of his Cosmos; its unreflective and uncriti-
cal approach to nature would mislead” (123). In fact, Humboldt reit-
erates on multiple occasions throughout Cosmos his commitment to the
domain of empirical ideas and rational thought, always placing them in
juxtaposition to meandering ideas and reflection with little basis in sci-
ence. Admitting to valuing numbers above all, he insists that all study
“depend[s] upon mean numerical values, which show us the constant
amid change, and the stable amid apparent fluctuations of phenomena”
(Cosmos Vol. I, 81; emphasis in original). Humboldt, in sum, praises
numbers as necessary to modern physical science because they can be
corrected and are “the only remaining and widely-diffused characters still
in our writing” (Vol. 1, 81). However, the numbers and the letters are
not in service of a purely utilitarian political agenda, focusing also on,
as Godlewska notes, the more holistic “study of cause, the examination
56 A.S. Madan
of the unknown, and the focus on detail typical of the empirical sciences”
(125–126). Thus, in his quest for knowledge for knowledge’s sake,
Humboldt breaks from Strabo.
Nevertheless, Humboldt praises Strabo’s work for its very grounding
in letters rather than numbers. Strabo, he insists, “does not possess the
numerical accuracy of Hipparchus, or the mathematical and geographical
information of Ptolemy,” yet he became the most gifted geographer of
antiquity because of his vast knowledge and his style of writing; Strabo’s
work, Humboldt insists, “surpasses all other geographical labors of antiq-
uity by the diversity of the subjects and the grandeur of the composi-
tion” (Cosmos Vol. II, 187–188). Such “grandeur” and what we might
today call “interdisciplinarity”—something of a mélange between the
arts and the sciences—contributes to Humboldt’s regard for Strabo and,
at the same time, his reasoning for Strabo’s lack of impact upon coeval
knowledge production. Contradicting his firm declarations of support
for “fact registered by science” over and above “the profoundness of a
purely speculative philosophy,” Humboldt in fact laments that Strabo
remained “almost wholly unknown in Roman antiquity until the fifth
century,” attributing that lack of comparative fame and influence to a
lack of math and concision (Cosmos Vol. II, 49; 190). He recounts:
It was not until the close of the Middle Ages that Strabo exercised any
essential influence on the direction of ideas, and even then in a less marked
degree than that of the more mathematical and more tabularly concise
geography of Claudius Ptolemaeus, which was almost wholly wanting in
views of a truly physical character. (Cosmos Vol. II, 190)
What Humboldt wants for geography, then, is a physical, textual descrip-

tion that, in Strabo’s time, would have been more accurate since, he
explains, Ptolemy relied on itinerary measurements by land and sea
rather than astronomical results, all the while lacking a magnetic needle
and compass (Cosmos Vol. II, 191).
Humboldt emphasizes Strabo’s synthesizing capacity as well as his
dedication to the sum of the parts rather than the individual parts them-
selves. That Humboldt is drawn to such a holistic impulse does not sur-
prise given the explicit objective, and even title, of Cosmos, which strives
to make the physical description of the earth digestible to the masses and
durable for the years. Without explicitly stating as much, Humboldt sug-
gests that he emulates Strabo, whose mission maps onto such objectives:
“to direct attention to the form of the whole,” thereby achieving “a

generalization of ideas [that] did not prevent [Strabo], at the same time,
from prosecuting researches which led to the establishment of a large
number of admirable physical results,” all of which contributes to his
being “an attentive observer of the descent of nations, and of the diversi-
ties of the different races of men” (Cosmos Vol. II, 189–190).
By coalescing earth study with human observation, Strabo, Humboldt
contends, contributed revolutionary knowledge to the annals of history
and broke ground in a number of fields. Such high esteem thus explains
his incredulity that the Spanish were unaware of Strabo, this despite the
fact that Strabo had long
conjectured the existence of another continent between the west of Europe

and Asia. “It is very possible,” [Strabo] writes, “that in the same temper-
ate zone, near the parallel of Thinae or Athens, which passes through the
Atlantic Ocean, besides the world we inhabit, there may be one or more
other worlds peopled by beings different from ourselves.” (Cosmos Vol. II,
189; emphasis in original)
Thrice more (Cosmos Vol. II 152, 189, 268) Humboldt expresses utter
disbelief that the Spanish had not caught wind of such a promising decla-
ration for their conquest of the New World, remarking most conclusively
that “[i]t is astonishing that this expression did not attract the atten-
tion of Spanish writers, who, at the beginning of the sixteenth century,
believed that they every where, in classical authors, found the traces of a
knowledge of the New World” (Cosmos Vol. II, 189).
Humboldt’s incisive commentary on Strabo points us to three funda-
mental conclusions: first, that Spanish commitment to the discipline and
discourse of geography was relatively scant even (and maybe especially)
during colonial times, at least in comparison to other nations; second,
that Strabo, like Humboldt himself, tackled many topics and did so with
a florid style, leading to praise from some and dismissal from others; and
third, that Strabo focused on the whole rather than the individual parts,
and that such a general focus did not, in Humboldt’s view, diminish but
rather strengthen his work.
The merging of these three qualities leads us to the entanglement of
geography, imperialism, and, from there, independence—in other words,
to knowledge and conquest. Although the relations between knowledge
and conquest are ancient and stem back, at the very least, to a Babylonian
58 A.S. Madan
world map of 600 BC that confirms humanity’s innate propensity toward

egocentricity—we have always seen our territories and ourselves as the
center of the world and therefore superior—the purposeful use of maps
for imperial expansion did not unfold until the solidification of the mod-
ern nation-state. James R. Akerman, director of Newberry Library’s
Center for the History of Cartography, suggests that Portugal and
Spain’s exploratory chart-making “could be characterized as the first
ongoing state efforts to regulate mapping on a global imperial scale”
(2). Akerman poses the question of “whether practical and ideological
distinctions can be made between the mapping of nation-states and the
mapping of empire” (2). However, he underscores that the task of know-
ing domestic territory differed greatly from knowing foreign territories
in terms of ideology, of course, but also the more practical elements
including “skills, resources, and institutions” (2).15
Following Akerman’s logic, the sort of institute that Spain devel-
oped to master its own domain should have been different than the one
it spearheaded in the service of knowing its New World territories. If
we borrow from Laura Benton (2009), three main geographical enter-
prises scaffold the construction of imperial power: “periodic advances in
techniques of navigation and mapping, a persistent focus on geographic
boundaries as elements of treaty making between imperial rivals, and
the accumulation of geographic knowledge of conquered and colo-
nized territories by the colonizers” (10). Yet such work was not happen-
ing in Spain until Humboldt’s arrival over two centuries after the initial
encounter.
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (2001) has recounted the trials and tribula-
tions of Spanish historiography of the Indies and its numerous moments
of criticism, most of which—if we are to synthesize—are grounded
in matters of territorial knowledge. He locates the origins of the criti-
cism in the early 1600s with the work of Andrés González de Barcia,
an erudite and influential member of the Royal Council, the Royal
Treasury, and magistrate of the Council of Castile and the Council of
War, who believed that negligence and ineptitude “might […] con-
tribute to the loss of Spain’s colonies to rival European powers, some
of which had published misleading histories claiming historical prec-
edence over Spanish discoveries and assigning foreign nomenclature to
places Spaniards had first named” (158). Place-names prove a constant
leitmotiv in the narrative of imperial, inter-imperial, and intra-imperial
geography, coming to a head in the nineteenth-century taxonomical

publications that I address in Chap. 4.
Barcia documents the initial clues pointing to territorial loss and
Spanish attempts to reconcile it by reconstructing the original place-
names they had assigned in Florida—as opposed to those designated
by the Dutch, French, Swedes, English, and Danes—and by compiling
historiographical bibliographies of Europe’s colonization of the New
World. Within a century the symbolic territorial loss became a tried-and-
true reality: imperial Spain was becoming smaller, and that was a fact.
Cañizares-Esguerra explains that the fact came to the fore in 1751 with
the work of Spain’s Royal Chronicler of the Indies, the Benedictine
Martín Sarmiento. In his proposal to launch a massive geographical sur-
vey of imperial Spain, Martín Sarmiento confirmed that Spain was indeed
losing its colonial possessions and needed, therefore, to resurrect Spanish
cartography, botany, and historiography, so as to be a viable competitor
in the “international battle over naming” (159). According to Martín
Sarmiento, it was because of Spanish negligence that “the names of
places, plants, and discoverers of territories were being altered every
day by rival European powers in new maps, taxonomies, and histories”
(159). Cañizares-Esguerra suggests that Spanish ignorance of its New
World territories was common knowledge across Europe and particu-
larly in France, whose leading eighteenth-century intelligentsia mocked
Spain’s backwards decision to exploit rather than explore, to plunder
rather than pursue knowledge.
Such is the (non-)role of colonial-era geography. But what happens as
we enter the independence period?
Humboldt explicitly declared to King Charles and Queen Isabella
that sovereign power and geographical knowledge walk hand in hand
and must be taken into consideration. “I have already indicated in the
analysis of my maps,” he writes in the Political Essay on the Kingdom of
New Spain, “the advantage which might be drawn by the government
from this extraordinary aptitude in constructing a map of the country”
(218). The Spanish Empire, consequently, came to realize that objective
knowledge of the land was absolutely vital to control it or to transform
it. After all, Humboldt’s own motivation for the discursive naming and
taming of American lands emerged from the conscious belief that only
science might allow the mind to observe and to comprehend the real
world. Studying the land “brings you closer to reality,” closer to shaping
a desired reality by means of representing the image (qtd. in Wilson lxii).
60 A.S. Madan
The geographical approaches thus developed at the eighteenth century’s

end continued to serve as the paradigmatic model throughout the first
half of the nineteenth century, so that in certain territories—particularly
in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—Spain launched new surveys
and geographical reconnaissance projects intended to undergird a new
administration. Upon first realizing the necessity for science and sci-
entists in effective exploitation of the colonies and then, subsequently,
the necessity of geography in the Enlightenment program of scientific
research, Spain sought not only cartographic advances, but also regional
descriptions, geographical statistics, studies of the natural environment,
and analyses of political economy. Political reforms were invested less in
law-making and more in geographical, statistical, and political research.
By the 1870s exploration had become the norm for European imperial-
ism, and it manifested itself in the expansion of geographical knowledge
and the ideological manipulation of spatial concepts (Capel 58–64).16
Following the contemporary arguments of Edward Said, imperial-
ism amounted to an act of geographical violence whereby space was
explored, reconstructed, renamed, and controlled. However, as he
declares in Orientalism (1978), “if there is anything that radically distin-
guishes the imagination of anti-imperialism it is the primacy of the geo-
graphical” (77). The requirement for geography, accordingly, extends to
the realm of both imperialist and anti-imperialist designs.17
Latin American independence fighters were well aware of this
necessity and appropriated Humboldt’s geographical findings and

philosophical underpinnings for their revolutionary advantage; from
Bolívar onward this advantage was consistently announced from a lit-
erary locus of enunciation. As a latecomer to the geographical game,
however, Spain responded to the colonial threat with the frantic and
haphazard 1876 founding of the Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid, an
organization to which was bequeathed the responsibility of advancing
and dispersing geographical knowledge of the Spanish territory and
its overseas provinces. Spanish geographers and geographical societies
fomented public opinion and public policy while actively participat-
ing in exploratory expeditions and appropriating territory. Yet as late
as 1889 the secretary of the Sociedad Geográfica, Ricardo Bertrán y
Rózpide, continued to bemoan the consequences of Spain’s limited
engagement with geography:
The earth, we repeat, will belong to whoever knows it best. It is not pos-
sible to use the wealth that a country contains, nor to govern its inhabit-
ants in a manner keeping with the innate, historical condition of their race,
without a profound knowledge of the people and the land. If we lack this
knowledge, we will continually face economic and political questions with
false or incomplete information, we will commit errors, we will persevere
with it, and there will come a time when people will protest, the land will
be lost, and the various national groups divided. (trans. in Capel 71, from
Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica 17, 1889)
Despite this explicit and (since proved) prophetic warning, few paid heed
to the complex relationship between “the people and the land” in the
colonies, and the land was indeed lost. This loss was cemented on the
eve of colonial defeat in 1897, when Spain’s lead geographer, Rafael
Torres Campos, ruefully declared in his annual report to the Sociedad
Geográfica de Madrid that “[w]e lost the colonies because we didn’t
know any geography” (trans. in Capel 73, from Boletín de la Sociedad
Geográfica 121, 1897). Despite having, together with Portugal, the
longest colonial record of all the modern European powers, Spain fell
short with its geographical practices, which were far less systematic than
what was happening in, for example, India (Edney 1997) and Egypt
(Godlewska 1995), where bureaucratically organized topographic map-
ping played practical and symbolic roles in expanding European power
over newly acquired colonies (Akerman 3).
By detailing this brief chronology of geography’s rise to prominence,
I hope to have demonstrated that three distinct yet coeval political
branches of the discipline come to the fore following Humboldt’s deline-
ation of Latin America. There exists, foremost, the anti- or postcolonial
geography of the revolutionary liberals who appropriate his geographi-
cal advances in order to escape the yoke of colonialism. Nearly in tan-
dem is the intra-colonial geography of the nation-building liberals, who
actively seek territorial knowledge so as to legitimize their power and
eliminate any vestiges of the continent’s indigenous past while, contra-
dictorily, promoting natural conservation. And finally, in what can only
be described as a last gasp, we arrive at the colonial, and exploitative,
geography of Spain, the empire clenching its territories with whitened
knuckles, to no avail. Geographical awareness thus presents itself as a key
factor across the gamut of imperial success or failure.18
62 A.S. Madan
Conclusions
Bolívar’s praise for Humboldt lays bare an indubitable fact: though
the empire sponsored the Baron’s travels through South America, its
mission backfired. In Bolívar’s words, Humboldt changed the face
of the continent and, as such, “for the rest of América’s days, he will
appear in the hearts of his true believers as a great man, who with his
eyes has wrenched it from ignorance and with his pen has painted it as
beautiful as its own nature” (in Humboldt, Cartas Americanas, 266).
This resounding praise stems from the political and military utility of
Humboldt’s cartographic knowledge. As Ángela Pérez-Mejía (2002) has
demonstrated, the Baron’s mappings allowed Bolívar’s proposed con-
quests to become a reality, for they were the most complete vision of the
hitherto unmapped territories. Humboldt’s original documentation thus
facilitated the pro-independence armies’ successful negotiation of the ter-
rain, allowing them to defeat the colonies. Yet in an 1815 letter, Bolívar
observed that despite vast stores of theoretical and practical knowledge,
even Humboldt could not unearth all the relevant territorial, statistical,
and revolutionary intelligence: “the majority is covered in the shadow of
darkness” (Cartas del Libertador, I, 182).
Beyond the utilitarian, then, Bolívar’s respect for and emulation of
Humboldt extended beyond any sort of Cartesian order. Rather, it was
about a certain spirit of poetry prompted by the land’s authentic vistas.
“I came yesterday to the classic land of the sun, of the Incas, of fable and
history,” Bolívar writes in an 1825 letter to his friend José Joaquín de
Olmedo, one-time President of Ecuador and author of “La victoria de
Junín,” a poem in praise of the independence battles and of Bolívar’s role
in them—the poem with which I began this book, in fact (El Libertador
210). By drawing on Olmedo’s depiction as well as his own understand-
ing of the Incan capital, Bolívar locates the city’s history in its autochtho-
nous elements, in its pre-Colombian past; he grants it a history in which
the powers-that-be are Incan and the poetry is local—not “foreign,” not
“alien”:
Here the true sun is gold; the Incas are the viceroys of prefects; the fable
is Garcilaso’s history; history is the relation by Las Casas of the destruction
of the Indies. An abstraction made of pure poetry, it calls to mind noble
ideas, profound reflections; my soul is dazzled by the presence of primitive
nature, evolved on its own, forming creations from its own elements based
on the model of its intimate inspirations, without any admixture of foreign

works, or alien counsel, or the whims of the human spirit, or the contagion
of the history of crime and the absurdities of our species. (El Libertador
210).
Bolívar appeals to an indigenous past prior to any intrusion or “the con-

tagion of the history of crime and the absurdities of our species”—before
human and environmental devastation (El Libertador 210). This past is
Incan, poetic, primitive, and anchored in a premodern order of nature.
His fiery will was ignited, Bolívar insists, by Humboldt’s writings on
South America, which opened his eyes to the possibility of unification: “I
feel a kind of rapture,” he writes in his Angostura address, “as if this land
stood at the very heart of the universe, spread out from coast to coast
between oceans separated by nature and which it is our task to reunite
with long, broad canals” (El Libertador 53).
The “task to reunite” prompted by Humboldt and appreciated by
Bolívar becomes, in the texts of subsequent writer-statesmen, instanti-
ated as a sort of geographical discourse grounded in, but departing from,
Humboldt. Yet what constitutes that departure?
To begin, each incarnation varies ever so slightly from the previous.
Humboldt looks to a Strabonic form of geography because its aesthetics
appeals to the masses and promises his works longevity. Yet his discursive
practice—unlike Strabo’s—does not align with a political project from
the outset. Rather, Humboldt first seeks knowledge for knowledge’s
sake, which then becomes politicized after its creation. On the other
hand, Bolívar, wholly indebted to Humboldt, sees in “pure poetry” a
language of liberation. With his revolutionary ideas, he writes from the
perspective of an independence-seeker, a fighter “contemplating the uni-
fication of this immense region” with an “imagination reflect[ing] on the
centuries to come” (53). Consolidation is but a dream.
For Sarmiento, Zeballos, and da Cunha, consolidation is a reality,
but an incomplete one—still a rough draft. Their writings represent an
attempt to make of consolidation a national bestseller, literally and lit-
erarily manifested in canonical texts that define the parameters of both a
national territory and a national literature. They shake off the chains of
colonialism as their nation-states gel into unified capitalist havens, zones
of production and settlement that defy Eurocentric impositions at the
expense of the very marginalized populations that nourish their notions
of authenticity.
64 A.S. Madan
This paradox is one of many that signal their Humboldtian vestiges—

to honor their autochthonous populations through an appeal to the
primitive while, simultaneously, setting out to eliminate them piecemeal.
This contradiction is embodied in transculturated geographical discourse,
a style that—when read through the language theories of Strabo and
Vico—reveals a return to the premodern, to concrete expression wherein
form and content unite to give shape to the land. The national territory
thus emerges as an outgrowth of literary language. This departure is lib-
erating for the emergent nation-states in two ways.
First, to reproduce Humboldt’s discursive practice wholesale would
imply nothing more than imitating and bestowing unquestioned author-
ity upon the Old World. Borrowing from Ángel Rama (1982), who
applies Fernando Ortiz’s anthropological use of transculturation to liter-
ature, we see a discursive practice that finds legitimacy in Humboldt, but
breaks free from his European legacy. In so doing, the writer-statesmen I
study produce the first non-indigenous geographies of the continent.19
Second, their style mimetically consolidates, giving shape to a land uni-
fied in theory, not practice; through aesthetics, they represent what is to
come and prefigure a harmonious nation-state.
In preparation for the chapters to come, let us take a moment to
unpack the precise strategies that the figures of this study employ to
break free of their European predecessors, including not just Humboldt
but the Italian Agustín Codazzi, the German Hermann Burmeister,
and the Englishman Henry Thomas Buckle, each of whom follow in
Humboldt’s footsteps traversing, charting, and depicting Latin American
territories. The departure occurs in the realm of the poetic, used in
the Greek sense of poiesis as creation, production, “imaginative mak-
ing.” I use the term poetry or poetics to describe the literary language
that the figures of this study employ, for they themselves—together with
Humboldt and Bolívar—often portray their aestheticized language as
such. Whereas Humboldt’s poetry serves a didactic project and ensures
that he enters posterity, Latin America’s statesmen realize similar objec-
tives as their letters give shape to the land, consolidating it along the way.
Their “poetry” is nearly synonymous with “spontaneity” and therefore
the Jamesonian sense of style, which can be read as a socially symbolic act
(Political Unconscious 225). Within Vico’s rationalist perspective on the
evolution of language, poetry is the foundation of writing, for barbar-
ians lacked the ability to analyze and comprehend abstraction. Poetry is
thus a necessity to understand the world, a result of our most germane,
innate, archaic curiosity to learn and access our surroundings. Under the
rubric of style, we can consider Sarmiento’s, Zeballos’s, and da Cunha’s
unification of form and content—the Vichean conceptualization of
poetry—outside of the parameters of proper verse.
If geographical discourse is an aestheticized means of describing the
earth’s contours, then transculturated geographical discourse takes that
one step forward by shaping the earth with the tools of literature. By
interrogating Latin American writer-statesmen’s stylistic devices—alliter-
ation, diction, anaphora, syntax, metaphor, and so forth—I highlight the
ways in which they write the land as well as break down the component
parts of two otherwise incongruent registers. Literature and geography
align here under the umbrella of national consolidation. In thinking
them together, I strive for a better political understanding of the specific
form–content relations in these writers’ monumental texts. Following
Roberto Schwarz (2001), I put the poetic into conversation with the
political. I abide by Schwarz’s call to arms to conscientiously avoid the
“current habit of dividing the aesthetic from the social” (19). The aes-
thetic must always, according to Schwarz, dialogue with the social. He
maintains that provocative literary exploration best stems from “the
close study of spheres distant from one another, together with an intui-
tion into the totality that then emerges” (22). Through analysis of the
geographical in conjunction with the literary—in other words, “materials
and formations engendered (in the final analysis) outside of its own liter-
ary domain”—this book seeks to reveal the “substance” and “dynamism”
driving the selected national narratives (Schwarz 22).
What subtext underlies these figures’ invoking of land to literarily
write the nation? How do they unite poetry and geography in the politi-
cal act of giving form to content? To shed light on these questions, I
rigorously analyze the language, especially the uses of metaphor, in the
selected works. As is the case for Humboldt, metaphor reigns supreme
in these narratives where, for example, the Argentine pampa and the
Brazilian sertão both acquire the explicit and implicit qualities of the sea,
chief among them its limitless expanse and unreachable horizon. Land,
here, is water; Facundo Quiroga is tiger; the Republican army is bar-
barism. These metaphors suggest the recurrent unification of disparate
elements; they create alignments between the known and the unknown,
thereby demystifying and familiarizing both human subject and land.
Metaphor imbues the texts with the rhetorical authority to map the Latin
American road to progress by allowing language to mimic as well as
66 A.S. Madan
to construct the contradictions, ambiguities, and tensions rampant in

each national landscape. These figures’ writing strives to demonstrate the
parallels between human life and the natural world, and if, as Ludmilla
Jordanova (1986) indicates, “[i]deas like division of labour, progress and
hierarchy appeared to have equal explanatory power in both realms,”
then “[t]his raises the question of metaphor—was it that society and
nature were like each other, that is, linked through metaphorical lan-
guage, or was it rather that they were different aspects of the same thing
for which only one language was needed, social phenomena being merely
more complex than organic ones?” (39, emphases in original). Like
Humboldt, Latin America’s writer-statesmen might argue for the former,
for only through metaphor might we appropriate—or, should we say,
civilize—the force of the land, of the primitive, of the barbaric. These
writers strive to outline the parameters of a national literature by looking
to its land. Only through the land might readers understand the national
subject. For the figures of this study, this national subject—the Argentine
gaucho or the Brazilian jagunço—exudes barbarity at its highest form:
they and the ground they live on are monstrous. Every time that
Sarmiento speaks of “barbarians” or da Cunha of “fanatics,” they simul-
taneously speak of a land that breeds, precisely, barbarians and fanatics.
Reformulating this relationship was their task, one they completely failed
at, but in a spectacular way: emerging from this monstrous context, the
textual form itself becomes a monster. To read these narratives is to tame
the monster, and to draw on its wisdom mirrors the poetic process of
making articulate a national geography. I thus end this chapter—and
scaffold what is to come—with Vico’s notion of poetic logic to hypoth-
esize that their poetic process begins, incidentally, with metaphor.
In his essay on Vico’s New Science, Hayden White asks, “What is the
nature of the creative power of language?” (203). He contends that the
answer can be found not in Vico’s concept of poetic imagination, but
rather in his theory of metaphor, which is developed in the context of,
and as the key to, his discussion of poetic logic.
For Vico, poetic logic refers to the manner in which forms, as com-
prehended by primitive people, are signified. Because barbarians lacked
the ability to analyze and to apprehend abstraction, they had to resort
to their fantasy to understand the world. Vico contends that “poetic
wisdom must have begun with a metaphysics which, unlike the rational
and abstract metaphysics of today’s scholars, sprang from the senses and
imagination of the first people” (144, emphasis added). Therefore, Vico
asserts that the first people’s knowledge of things was not “rational and
abstract,” but rather felt and imagined, and, in this vein, he denounces
the metaphysics—the focus on the rational and the abstract—of his con-
temporaries. He states:
The countless abstract expressions which permeate our languages today

have divorced our civilized thought from the senses, even among the
common people. The art of writing has greatly refined the nature of our
thought; and the use of numbers had intellectualized it, so to speak, even
among the masses, who know how to count and reckon. […] We are like-
wise incapable of entering into the vast imaginative powers of the earliest
people. Their minds were in no way abstract, refined, or intellectualized;
rather, they were completely sunk in their senses, numbed by their pas-
sions, and buried in their bodies. (147)
Denouncing both his precursors Aristotle and Plato as well as his con-
temporaries Patrizi, Caesar, and Castelvetro, Vico claims that “unlike
them, we have discovered that poetry was born sublime precisely because
it lacked rationality” (149). Poetry is a primitive necessity, a result of
curiosity that “sprang naturally from their ignorance of causes” (144).
Vico describes the giants’ reaction to the first thunderclaps and lightning
bolts, recounting that, in their ignorance, they imagined the skies to be
a massive living being named Jupiter, who was thus “born naturally in
poetry as divine archetype or imaginative universal” (146). The concept
of “imaginative universal” appears to be the predecessor of the meta-
phor: Jupiter is sky; Achilles is bravery—form and content are indistin-
guishable. In Greek, Vico explains, “poet” means “creator,” and in order
to create, the first Homo sapiens perceived all of nature “as a vast living
body that feels passions and emotions” (145–146).
Connecting known and unknown is essential for Strabo as well.
Skeptic of math and the measurements and cartographic projections
made by Eratosthenes, he believed that geographical description could
not but be metaphorical. “He described the world in the most literal of
ways,” Simon Garfield (2013) tells us, wherein
Taken as a whole, the inhabited world resembled a chlamys, a short taper-

ing cloak worn by Greek soldiers and hunters. Britain and Sicily were tri-
angular, while India was a rhomboid. He compared the northern part of
Asia to a kitchen knife; Iberia to an ox-hide; the Peloponnese to a leaf
68 A.S. Madan
on a plane tree; while Mesopotamia had the profile of a boat with the
Euphrates as its keel and the Tigris the deck. (33)
In a move that hearkens back to Strabo and Humboldt, then, Latin

America’s writer-statesmen travel from the particular to the universal,
from the part to the whole, allowing the modern-day “imaginative
universal” to animate their narratives. With their stylized writing, they
succeed in applauding the barbaric through what appears, at least on
the surface, to be a civilized mode of representation. In reality, how-
ever, their language appeals to the rivals of civilization, to the poetics
of the gaucho and the jagunço. With this appeal, they again uphold
their original tendency to flit back and forth between deprecation and
elevation. But as they poetically give form to the Latin American land-
scape, their linguistic admiration informs their political project, one in
which the barbaric remains, in Luiz Costa Lima’s words, “indispen-
sable to national literary expression” (The Dark Side of Reason 169).
Yet if, as Frederic Jameson contends, mediation allows us to read a
given style as a projected solution, then we cannot but see its lim-
its in what follows: despite their textual appeal to the land’s barbar-
ity, each author endorses (Sarmiento and Zeballos) or recounts with
horror (da Cunha) what can most concisely be deemed genocide. By
aspiring to geographically consolidate territory with the tools of lit-
erary language, Latin America’s writer-statesmen reduce their nation-
states to a totality, to a model of everydayness for a homogenous
citizenry. In reality, however, land only becomes territory for a narrow,
hegemonic segment of the population, while the subaltern is banished
into unproductive terrain or, worse, slaughtered. This act is deleted
from the national memory as contingency transforms into inevitabil-
ity, and the social process becomes obscured by a technical procedure.
Alexander von Humboldt, we might conclude, would have been none
too pleased with this turn of events.
Notes
1.
Kutzinski points to Ottmar Ette’s Alexander von Humboldt und die
Globaliserung (Alexander von Humboldt and Globalization 2009), a
book-length study that anchors on transdisciplinarity and on the art of
Humboldtian narrative, as well as Ette’s early 2000s analyses, together with
Nigel Leask’s Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840
(2002), as examples of such a turn. Within German-language criticism,
two of the most recent analyses of Humboldt’s work center on his liter-
ary impulse. Johannes Görbert focuses on Georg Foster’s influence on
Humboldt in Die Vertextung der Welt: Forschungsreisen als Literatur bei
Georg Forster (2014), while Annette Graczyk centers on the Humboldtian
intersection of art and science in Das literarische Tableau zwischen Kunst
und Wissenschaft (2004). Adriana Méndez Rodenas traces Humboldt’s
influence in shaping women’s traveling personae and their approaches to
representing New World nature in Transatlantic Travels to Nineteenth-
Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims (2014).
2. Humboldt’s approach has also been analyzed and unpacked under vari-
ous names, chief among them “Humboldtian science,” coined in 1959
by the famous historian of US Western exploration, William Goetzmann
(1986, 53–54). Meant to signal the sort of methodology embraced by
Humboldt’s followers, the term speaks to Humboldt’s search for patterns
and unities that linked the cosmos on numerous levels, whether practical,
philosophical, aesthetical, or spiritual. The term effectively became one
and the same as “Romantic science.” Big and unwieldy, “Humboldtian
science” is, even for Humboldt, “extravagant” in its scope, for it
describes “in one and the same work the whole material world—all that
we know to-day of celestial bodies and of life upon the earth—from the
nebular stars to the mosses on the granite rocks” (Humboldt, Letters to
Varnhagen 35–39). My term, “geographical discourse,” is meant to be a
subset of “Humboldtian science.” Its narrower focus allows us to tackle
his ample interdisciplinary paradigm for the ways in which it nourishes
Latin America’s foundational narratives.
3. The new millennium has seen several other general-audience biographies
of Humboldt, including Nicolaas Rupke’s Alexander von Humboldt:
A Metabiography (U of Chicago P 2008) and Gerard Helferich’s
Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American
Journey that Changed the Way We See the World (Gotham Books 2004).
Knopf actually bookends the English-language biographies of Humboldt
with Helmut de Terra’s The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt
(Alfred A. Knopf 1955), which appeared a couple of decades before the
other twentieth-century standout, Douglas Botting’s Humboldt and the
Cosmos (Harper and Row 1973).
4. In her forthcoming essay on Humboldt and the Orinoco river, Adriana
Méndez Rodenas convincingly traces the ways in which Humboldt in fact
sought to overwrite the accumulated European cartographic rendering of
the Orinoco region by creating a definitive Master Map, thereby ensuring
his own authorship and authority. Perhaps, then, Humboldt aims to be
the final European voice, he who sets the stage for local interventions and
revisions.
70 A.S. Madan
5. Like his brother Wilhelm, Alexander von Humboldt was also interested
in indigenous languages, specifically their linguistic terms for and under-
standings of natural phenomena. I will return to this matter more
explicitly in Chap. 4, where I examine writings from both Zeballos and
Humboldt to unpack the indigenous roots of geographical discourse.
6. I use the word “extractivism” in Alberto Acosta’s sense, which refers to
a mode of accumulation that began to be established on a massive scale
over 500 years ago with the conquest and colonization of the periphery.
He explains: “This extractivist mode of accumulation has been deter-
mined ever since by the demands of the metropolitan centres of nascent
capitalism. Some regions specialized in the extraction and production of
raw materials—primary commodities—while others took on the role of
producing manufactured goods. The former export Nature, the latter
import it” (62).
7. Unless otherwise signaled, the citations in this section come from the
Abridged Edition of Personal Narrative, edited and translated by Jason
Wilson (1996).
8. For a valuable discussion on the notion of cartographic accu-
racy, see David Turnbull’s Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1993), where he takes up the
question in the context of indexicality (19; 41).
9. Contrary to much-cited criticism jumpstarted by Mary Louise Pratt’s
indictment, Humboldt takes a polemical stance, regarding the New
World as a land without history—a contention initiated by the French
naturalist Comte de Buffon in the 1760s and 1770s and advanced into
the nineteenth century by Hegel—arguing against its cultural and even
geological “newness.” His writings bear testimony to societies with cul-
ture, with palaces and aqueducts and statues and temples, together
with knowledge about astronomy and mathematics as well as more
abstract concepts like “future” and “eternity.” Referring to the “happy
revolution” in conceptualizations of non-European civilizations—an
epistemological change that he himself ironically prompted with his capa-
cious corpus—Humboldt begins the 1813 introduction of Views of the
Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas with
the satisfaction that his “study of the indigenous peoples of the Americas
begins at a time when we no longer consider as unworthy of our atten-
tion anything that diverges from the style that the Greeks bequeathed
to us through their inimitable models” (2). See Vera M. Kutzinski and
Ottmar Ette’s 2012 edition of this text, which until now has never before
been wholly translated into English, for an expansion on these ideas in
their introduction, “The Art of Science: Alexander von Humboldt’s View
of the Cultures of the World” (xv–xxv). Though their central thesis is that
Humboldt put pressure on the commonly held “(mis)understanding of

the New World as a historyless ‘realm of nature’ populated by uncivilized
roving hordes,” they do not lose sight of his fundamental Eurocentrism,
albeit one that he, they say, “thematicized […], always turning it into an
occasion for critical self-reflection” (xvi–xix).
10. To be sure, Humboldt’s esteem for Bolívar inversely decreases as Bolívar’s
authoritarian ways increase to the point of him being something like a
tyrannical dictator; Humboldt recognizes that South America owed its
liberation to Bolívar, but he found his authoritarian ways “‘illegal, uncon-
stitutional and somewhat like that of Napoleon’” (qtd. in Wulf 192).
11. Godlewska notes that Humboldt’s stance was “[p]erhaps in response to
the influence of the early positivists,” a response that made him see “less
opposition between description and theory than between pure empiricism
and theoretical science. It was pure empiricism that was antithetical to
the aims of his Cosmos; its unreflective and uncritical approach to nature
would mislead” (123).
12. For a country-by-country chronology of international geographical socie-
ties and Spanish colonial acquisitions, see Eduardo Barredo Risco, “La
Cartoteca de la Real Sociedad Geográfica,” http://www.realsociedadge-
ografica.com/en/pdf/cartotecacsic.pdf.
13. Simon Garfield explains in On the Map (2013) that Strabo himself attrib-
uted his success to the fact that he, unlike many of his contemporaries,
had indeed traveled and personally viewed the locales he described with
such detail. These travels of course were a life’s work, perhaps explaining
why Strabo was nearly 60 before his first volume appeared in 7 BC, while
the last made its way to the world a year before his death at the age of 85.
All but 1 of the 17 volumes of Geographica survive to the present day.
14. This lack of cultural depth does not mean a lack of smarts, however.
Strabo compliments the Roman tenacity, noting that “this people, begin-
ning from the single city of Rome, obtained possession of the whole of
Italy, by warfare and prudent administration; and how, afterwards, fol-
lowing the same wise course, they added the countries all around it to
their dominion” (Strabo 296). For Strabo, acquiring territory is tanta-
mount to success.
15. Ackerman notes that, even now, we are much more inclined to approve
the use of mapping drones to gather intelligence abroad, but once those
same technologies are used on us, we consider them an infringement
upon our privacy and our rights.
16. This relationship between the ideological and the practical, between the
iconic and the instrumental, is of primary essence to my work. For, as
J.B. Harley notes, cartography and then its offshoot of geography served
to authenticate and manifest territorial claims of empires and of their
72 A.S. Madan
subsequent nation-states. So while on the one hand maps practically

served the planning of military operations, the creation of trade routes,
and the fortification of territories—and, in Latin America, even the pros-
elytization of indigenous peoples—they also naturalized territories and
confirmed their existence and grandeur. See Harley (2001, 51–60) for an
overarching understanding of these ideas, and Craib (2004) and Padrón
(2004) for analyses grounded in the specificities of the Latin American
context.
17. Harvey (1989) notes that “the mapping of the world opened up a way to
look upon space as open to appropriation for private uses” (228), while
Woodward (1991) insists that the rationalization of abstract space facili-
tated the notion of a world “over which systematic dominance was possi-
ble” (87). Such statements suggest that the geographical imaginary came
to exist prior to the colonial encounter and even predicated it. Yet what
is essential to remember—and here I am indebted to Ricardo Padrón—is
that “[f]ar from fueling the origins of colonialism, the culture of abstrac-
tion begins to look a rationalization after the fact, an attempt to grapple
with the challenges posed by a wider world, a world built by the trav-
els of a culture who thought about space primarily in terms of distance”
(235–236). In this sense, then, imperial and anti-imperial geography per-
haps differ in order: after all, the independence projects relied heavily on
Humboldtian maps to defeat the Spanish and Portuguese as well as the
internal threat of the unsettled indigenous populations.
18. I’m indebted to Harley’s ideas in “New England Cartography and the
Native Americans,” in which he notes a similar trend in North American
geographical practices, as well as to his “Rereading the Maps of the
Columbian Encounter.”
19. My use of transculturation implies a fusion between genres as well as
between Occidental and indigenous geographies. I thus call attention
to a multidirectional process of cultural transformation, precisely the
corrective that Ortiz offered to Bronislaw Malinowski’s term accultura-
tion, which signaled cultural changes only in one direction. I offer that
the Janus-faced figures of this study look both forward to their European
models, and also backward to indigenous roots. Beyond Rama, I build
upon the work of a long lineage of Latin Americanists who appropriate
Ortiz’s term transculturation, chief among them Mary Louise Pratt, who
also applies it in relation to Spanish American writers’ “Humboldtian
page-snatching,” what she describes as “a study in the dynamics of cre-
ole self-fashioning” (181, 5). Pratt examines the works of Bello, Bolívar,
Heredia, and Sarmiento, focusing less on Facundo and more on Viajes.
I extend and complicate her work by embracing the ways in which
Latin America fits into emancipatory acts of transculturation that were
happening across the world. In this sense, my study contributes to a
transnational and interdisciplinary conversation already begun by the

likes of Barbara Mundy (The Mapping of New Spain 1996), Thongchai
Winichakul (Siam Mapped 1994), and Sumathi Ramaswamy (“Maps and
Mother Goddesses in Modern India,” 2001), each of whom explores the
ways in which colonized peoples crafted cartographic and geographical
responses to imperialism that coalesced autochthonous mapping tradi-
tions with Occidental ones.
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CHAPTER 3
Sarmiento the Geographer: Unearthing

the Literary in Facundo
I have already indicated in the analysis of my maps the advantage which might be
drawn by the government from this extraordinary aptitude in constructing a map
of the country.
—Alexander von Humboldt (1811)
A new society will be established, a new nation, leaving behind the dead, there, to
bury their own dead. The Pampa is an immense piece of paper on which will be
inscribed an entire poem of progress, of prosperity and of culture.
—Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1871)
Baron Alexander von Humboldt’s prophetic words, from his Political Essay
on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811), ricochet across the Americas in the
decades following their grand declaration, prefiguring a moment in which
the young nations ubiquitously and systematically demarcate their territo-
ries and thereby boost their military defenses. Argentina is no exception.
In 1873, sitting President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento contracts the first
national map of the Argentine territory to Italian cartographer Pompeyo
Moneta. His presidency also backs the 1872 founding of the Sociedad
Científica Argentina (SCA), the organization whose founders go on to
inaugurate the Instituto Geográfico Argentino in 1879, with Sarmiento’s
determined guidance. For the Argentine statesman, writer, and educator,
geography can cure the nation’s ills: both word and image provide the key
to national “advantage,” as Humboldt describes it. Institutionalized geog-
raphy guards Argentina from the baqueano’s innate territorial knowledge

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55140-1_3
78 A.S. MADAN
(and, with that, p

otential domination), while also thwarting invasion from
antagonistic neighbors; the discipline thus provides protection not only
from external forces but also internal.1 In geography Sarmiento locates the
twofold benefits of a national defense system based on knowing the land:
economic stability and social progress.
In this chapter, I explore the ways in which Sarmiento’s engagement
with the institutionalization of geography unfolds in his most well-
known work, Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (1845). Geographical
discourse nourishes his literary project, yet its role remains insufficiently
understood. Though Cristóbal Ricardo Garro outlines Sarmiento’s
immersion in and dedication to the field of geography in Sarmiento y
los estudios geográficos (1988), his chronological and historical effort
is largely removed from the realm of Sarmiento’s aesthetic practice.
And while Roberto González Echevarría’s Myth and Archive (1990)
observes that Sarmiento seeks authority in the hegemonic discourse of
science, I believe that we can extend and problematize such a reading
by conversely narrowing our source of authorization to the more specific
discourse of geography.2
Sarmiento, I will illustrate, engages in a dialogue with Alexander
von Humboldt that allows us to think the separate realities of literature
and geography together in meaningful ways. Though Humboldtian for
the sake of credibility, his new national discourse breaks with Europe
both aesthetically and orthographically as he translates “writing the
earth” to “writing the nation.” He replicates Humboldt’s aestheti-
cized geographical discourse and thereby channels the political power
already imbued in the German naturalist’s works. His replica is not
exact, however. Ever aware of audience, Sarmiento fashions his narra-
tive as a brochure for two distinct but interrelated groups. Foremost,
he composes a didactic geography directed toward the citizens of
Argentina; in what becomes a rallying cry, Sarmiento explains that
knowing the Argentine land—its rivers in particular—is tantamount to
knowing the nation. Navigating the wide network of waterways will
reduce the barbarism fostered by isolation. Yet because Sarmiento
deems these lands empty and in need of settling by immigrant popu-
lations, he also writes for a second audience: potential European and
North American immigrants. He constructs his narrative as a marketa-
ble geography designed to convince foreign readers to populate the lush
Argentine terrain. Sarmiento thus employs geographical discourse as a
luring apparatus with persuasive ends.
3 SARMIENTO THE GEOGRAPHER: UNEARTHING THE LITERARY … 79
Sarmiento continues to transform Humboldtian geographical

iscourse beyond matters of audience. I will show that he amplifies the
d
Baron’s intertwining of politics and poetics such that the land emerges
from the very language; in so doing, he writes the Argentine—rather
than the European—version of the nation’s “true” tale. The poetic and
the geographical coalesce at the site of the narrative, harnessed to put
forth something like a national form (aesthetically) and national con-
solidation (politically). I detail this multistep formal process by analyz-
ing how the land/inhabitant relation—the basic premise of geography
(Hartshorne 1939)—reappears in Facundo. Though more than one
critic has acknowledged Facundo’s monstrous form (Piglia 1980; Ramos
1989; Lipp 1993; González Echevarría 2004), this scholarship has
overlooked the geographical roots and, indeed, order of Sarmiento’s lit-
erary language. I unearth these roots by excavating the host of literary
and figurative devices that Sarmiento employs to represent the national
land. Time is halted in the Argentine Pampa, where everything moves
slowly, where one can see the horizon for miles on end. Sarmiento thus
leans toward a narrative style that is slow and steady, replete with devices
to give form to the national land. His constant hyperbole mimics the
enormity of the Pampa, while his long periodic sentences and rhetorical
questions provide form to the never-ending character of the open coun-
try. Form and content unify in the creation of a politicized landscape;
this union, when thought through the language theories of Vico, points
toward an elevation of the primitive man, of the gaucho, of the barbar-
ian. Though Sarmiento’s rhetoric demands civilization, the form of his
language suggests otherwise; indeed, his appeal to metaphor appreciates
the very barbarism that he condemns.
I contend that Sarmiento’s aesthetic task yields two political byprod-
ucts: first, national consolidation in the form of a national literature; and
second, the institutionalization of geography in Argentina. His revision
amounts to reappropriation, to nationalization—in other words, he lit-
erarily snatches Argentina’s lands back from the grips of Occidental
geographers. Sarmiento therefore writes both alongside and against the
formation of geographical institutions; he writes both alongside and
against civilization’s maps, alongside and against barbarism’s baqueanos.
These contradictory formulae originate in Facundo and prefigure the
narrative evolution of seminal Latin American texts, including Os sertões
(1902), La vorágine (1924), and Doña Bárbara (1929), as well as minor
texts by authors like Estanislao Zeballos and Vicente Pérez Rosales.
80 A.S. MADAN
To draw out the implications of this first work of Latin American
geography, I highlight the means by which Sarmiento produces a lan-
guage that is an outgrowth of the land itself, in which literature and
geography unify to give form to an Argentine content and, consequently,
to a national literature.
The Geographical Roots

The fourth volume of Historia crítica de la literatura argentina—a tre-
mendous multiyear series coordinated by renowned Argentine critic Noé
Jitrik—is dedicated exclusively to Sarmiento’s ample body of writing.
Published in 2012, it includes nearly 1000 pages of articles and supple-
mentary materials by the most esteemed of Sarmentine critics, including
the volume editor, Adriana Amante. In the first lines of her introduction,
she writes:
A history of Argentine literature should exclusively concern itself with

Sarmiento the writer only to the extent that it does not exclude the ora-
tor, the soldier, the publicist, the esthete, the ideologue, the traveler, the
polemicist, the reader, the diplomat, the artist. It is not that Sarmiento is
all these things in addition to being a writer. Rather it is that his way of
being a writer is precisely what informs all the other practices. (Amante 7,
emphasis in original)
Though Amante explains on the subsequent page that absolutely noth-

ing is out of the realm of possibility for Sarmiento’s writings—“For
this writing, nothing in the world is foreign,” not even “geography” or
“topography,” nor “landscape” or “cartography”—I aspire to make the
case for including “geographer” in her suggestive original list (8). Unlike
the other figures of this study, Sarmiento does not venture into the field
with the geographer’s tools; nor does he sit at the cartographer’s table
and sketch out the nation’s borders. Rather, Sarmiento the Geographer
reveals himself as consistently concerned with making the nation geo-
graphical; that is, making it recognizable as an articulate entity wherein
the population is attuned to, and hence would be able to make efficiently
productive, the land itself. Appearing most explicitly in Facundo (1845),
this process unfolds through the words of an exiled journalist seeking to
promote a concrete political project in a nation that would not even have
a constitution for another 8 years (1853). It is perhaps this very political
and literary ambition that prompts Roberto González Echevarría to

describe Facundo as “the first Latin American classic and the most
important book written by a Latin American in any discipline or genre”
(González Echevarría, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism 1). Similarly,
Ricardo Piglia describes the “first page of Facundo” as the “first page of
Argentine literature” (“Sarmiento the Writer” 131).
In what follows, I would like to read Sarmiento’s literary project as
working alongside and even against the disciplining of geography in
Argentina, a process that amounted, in effect, to disciplining the nation.
Following David Harvey, I recognize that distinguishing between geog-
raphy and other social scientific disciplines results in an acute dilemma:
geography, after all, departs from the scientific method in most of its
subcategories. It would be best, then, to think of geography as an ever-
evolving term regarding the scholarly domination of space, which comes
to mean the conquest and rational ordering of the space of nature—a
fundamental component of the modernizing project (Harvey 27). Let
us not forget: colonial Spain had exploitation in mind upon offering
Humboldt a passport and free access to chart Latin American lands; little
did the country know that his maps would serve Bolívar and the pro-
independence armies.
With its tight relations to accumulation, geography reigns, in Richard
Hartshorne’s words, as the “mother of all sciences” between 1750 and
1850, the period in which it assumes the hegemony formerly given to the
umbrella-like category of science (Hartshorne 1939). Having risen to the
task of being governing matriarch, geography soon spawns an unmanage-
able, and disparate, amount of disciplinary progeny, which provokes it to
seek an independent role. It locates this role as a methodological hinge
functioning between art and science. This humanistic turn actually recap-
tures geography’s original conjoining of politics and poetics, as spelled
out by Strabo. I use this union as a springboard to read geography as sub-
limated into literature. Geoffrey Martin and Preston James (1972) argue
for just this bridging capacity. In tracing the process of geography’s rise
to institutionalization, Martin and James follow in pursuit of Hartshorne
and confirm the discipline’s nineteenth-century stature as the “mother of
all sciences.” They explain, however, that this umbrella-like designation
provoked the discipline to seek autonomy, to seek an independent and
articulated role; it located this role as something of a disciplinary hinge
functioning in the space between art and science.
82 A.S. MADAN
Sarmiento embraces this hinge status of geography as he writes

alongside its institutionalization. Composing Facundo on the heels of
the 1830 foundation of the English Royal Geographical Society—the
first institution actively to push geography away from the Strabonic and
humanistic “science of princes” and toward the statistical and explora-
tory “science of empire” (Mayhew 214)—he instead incorporates a mul-
tifaceted definition of geography into the national project. Sarmiento’s
approach conflates art and science to effectively create and institutional-
ize the new discipline of geography. To be sure, Juan Manuel Rosas’s
leadership necessitates such conflations. Facundo is a treatise against the
caudillo Rosas, whose authoritarian rule ensures that without an extra-
academic portal, science will fall by the wayside like all other intellectual
pursuits. Under Rosas’s rule, scholarly interest in science decreases to
such an extent that by the 1820s, so few jobs remain in the field that
the number of students, too, diminishes. Juan Carlos Nicolau (2004)
has explained that Argentine society was simply playing a waiting game,
its fingers crossed for “the fall of Rosas in the Battle of Caseros so that
some exiles, like Juan María Gutiérrez, might return,” all the while hav-
ing “adopted measures aimed at reverting the existing standstill in the
study of science and technology” (8). Those in exile—like Sarmiento,
exiled in Chile three times between 1831 and 1848—must await Rosas’s
defeat in order to advance the nation’s scientific agenda. All-consuming,
however, Sarmiento’s utter distaste for stagnancy (and profound taste for
literature) leads him to integrate geography into the modernizing project
immediately and from afar. With Facundo’s 1845 serial publication, he
spells out the first letters of contestation toward Rosas’s scientific, intel-
lectual, and national oppression, which materializes as he markets the
narrative and its lessons to both national and international audiences:
populate the Pampa, Sarmiento says.
I sense, however, that Sarmiento’s strategic and pointed deployment
of aestheticized geographical discourse does not stop with Facundo or
with Rosas’s overthrow. Throughout this chapter I challenge Ricardo
Piglia’s thesis that, upon signing his name with Rosas’s pen after the
Battle of Caseros in 1852, Sarmiento gives up literature. By revealing the
literary layers at work in his post-1852 production, I make the case for
just the opposite: even as literature is becoming an increasingly autono-
mous practice within the Argentine intelligentsia, Sarmiento continues to
inject it into the practice of politics.
Following his 1868 election to President of the Argentine Republic,

Sarmiento continues his rebuttal through the formation of institutions,
which amount to all that he deems necessary for progress: composi-
tion and education, organization and dissemination, and, most impor-
tantly, action and participation in the norms of Western civilization.
Argentina need not shy from—indeed, Argentina needs to embrace—
European industry and science. As President, he promises to solve the
nation’s most pressing challenge, at least as he sees it: its vast expanse
and the great feat of maintaining communication across it. Sarmiento
locates his solution in the telegraph and the train. The telegraph would
facilitate contact with Europe and therefore the construction of a mod-
ern state, while the train would close the distance between the interior
provinces and the capital of Buenos Aires. Both would reduce the sol-
ipsism and isolation feeding barbarism and thereby beget national pro-
gress (Curator Notes, Museo Histórico Sarmiento). Peppered across his
corpus, these ideas find their most literary expression in an 1871 speech
delivered in Rosario, where Sarmiento metaphorically declares that
the Pampa’s immense expanse must be embraced and overcome like a
blank sheet of paper awaiting a fresh national narrative: “A new soci-
ety will be established, a new nation, leaving behind the dead, there, to
bury their own dead. The Pampa is an immense piece of paper on which
will be inscribed an entire poem of progress, of prosperity and of cul-
ture” (Sarmiento anecdótico 245). This poem is Sarmiento’s pet project,
although its politics—that is, the hard work of instantiating the dialectic
of knowledge and conquest—falls to the nation’s burgeoning geographical
and scientific institutions backed by his presidency.
Sarmiento’s trajectory as a promoter of institutions follows the same
path of conflation that appears in geography’s rise to the “mother of all
sciences”—that is, from overarching scientific concerns to particular-
ized geographical investigations. According to José S. Campobassi in his
study Sarmiento y su época (1975), Sarmiento declares from the onset of
his presidency that science will be his administration’s primary concern;
to this end, his presidency supports the 1872 founding of the Sociedad
Científica Argentina by students of the Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Ambitious in their pursuit of advancing scientific studies in Argentina,
these students look to the likes of Hermann Burmeister and Estanislao
Severo Zeballos for leadership (Campobassi 18–24). These two indi-
viduals later come—again, under Sarmiento’s guidance—to outline
84 A.S. MADAN
the parameters of Argentine geography. Prior to a localized support for

geography, which I will speak of momentarily, Zeballos and Burmeister
dedicate their intellect to the SCA.
In La ciencia en la Argentina (1963), José Babini explains that the
primary tenets of the SCA were threefold: to foment the study and appli-
cation of mathematical, physical, and natural sciences; to promote scien-
tific publications, inventions, or improvements, in particular those that
encourage practical applicability in the nation; and to convene national
and international engineers, students of the applied sciences, and others
whose scientific knowledge might advance the aforementioned objec-
tives (48). Through these tenets, the SCA aims to expand national indus-
try and economy by better locating and utilizing Argentina’s natural
resources.3
Soon, however, the society sees the need not just to excavate into
the earth’s recesses, but rather to know its most minute details; the
year 1875 welcomes the SCA’s sponsorship of several geographical
adventures, including Francisco P. Moreno’s expedition into Patagonia
(Babini 15). This initiative discourages creative destruction of the nat-
ural world while encouraging productive knowledge of the terrain.4
Moreno’s telluric explorations thus boost the demand for a proper
geographical society, thereby prompting the 1879 foundation of the
Instituto Geográfico Argentino.
In the years separating the two institutions, I find that the terms
“science” and “geography” overlap. They conflate to such extremes that
the SCA sponsors another expedition to Patagonia in 1877, specifically
designed to study the territory contained with the southern 43rd and
49th parallels. These studies find dissemination in the various confer-
ences organized by the SCA, including the Congreso Científico Latino-
Americano, which takes place in Buenos Aires in 1898—incidentally, the
year of the Spanish–American war and the moment that Spain explicitly
recognizes the relationship between territorial knowledge and impe-
rial domination. These forums for intellectual promotion demonstrate
Argentina’s—and, more specifically, Sarmiento’s—insistence that geog-
raphy take precedence in advancing the national project. By providing
a locale in which national and international intellectuals can discuss ter-
ritorial concerns, Argentina solidifies the discipline’s move toward insti-
tutionalization. The impulse to convene continues several years later with
the Congreso Científico Internacional Americano in Buenos Aires, held
in 1910 (Babini 14–22).
Conferences aside, the society’s Annals primarily publicize and

isseminate its scientific and geographical pursuits. Published in 1922
d
as a series of monographs, the Annals provide a developmental summary
of the distinct branches of Argentine science during its first 50 years.
Between 1923 and 1926, eight of these monographs appear under
the title Evolución de las ciencias en la República Argentina. Written
descriptions of scientific endeavors thus come to dominate as the soci-
ety’s mode of publicity, the model for the nation appearing something
like: Publication → Institutionalization → Modernization → National
Project. Publication includes maps, too. In Las ciencias y la univer-
sidad en la vida de Sarmiento (2003), Ricardo R. Peláez explains that
in the last year of Sarmiento’s presidency, the SCA brings forth multi-
ple cartographic advances, including a map of “the Province of Buenos
Aires at a scale of 1:200,000 […], the construction of a relief map of
the Argentine Republic with altitudinal data” and “a perforation plan
of the Province’s territory, to learn about its hydrological structure”
(63). The cartographic controls, for in Sarmiento’s view, maps can rec-
tify the nation’s maladies; recall that maps are, according to his much-
esteemed Humboldt, the key to national “advantage.” To these ends,
the gran sanjuanino commissions the first national map of the Argentine
Republic.5 According to Cristóbal Ricardo Garro (1988), Sarmiento
contracts the Italian engineer and physicist Pompeyo Moneta to cre-
ate the first lithograph of the Argentine territory under the auspices of
Sarmiento’s very institutional creation, the Departamento Topográfico
Nacional (71). That the sitting President of Argentina—President from
1868 to 1874—should culminate his lifelong mission with the ulti-
mate map—that of the nation—should come as little surprise given his
cartographic trajectory: as governor of San Juan, Sarmiento creates the
Departamento Topográfico, Hidraúlico y de Estadística de la Provincia
on February 20, 1862; his primary motivation is to commission a map
of the province. Under the direction of engineer Gustavo Grothe, this
“non-governmental organization” succeeds in its endeavor, eventually
producing maps of both the province and city of San Juan (Garro 47).6
Exclusive to neither him nor Argentina, Sarmiento’s cartographic and
geographical ambition had infected most of the emerging nation-states
in the Americas. Mexicanist Raymond B. Craib (2004) concurs that
“[g]eography proved a key science in the formation of nineteenth-
century nation-states and had a close association with the technical,
regulatory needs of those in power,” explaining, too, the emphasis on
86 A.S. MADAN
map-making: “the powerful sway of territoriality as the basis for m odern

identity and control ensured that geographic science and its primary
medium, the map, occupied a place of preeminence in the nationalist
repertoire” (24). Similar to Argentina, Mexico sought territorial defense
from both international and domestic threats, and this defense appeared
in the form of the map—that is, in the form of precise, and often sta-
tistical, territorial knowledge: “Statistics and geography,” Craib explains,
“were sciences of statecraft” (22).7
For Sarmiento, this “science of statecraft” entails demarcating territo-
rial lines and thereby moving one step closer to civilization; it also entails
crafting the state that he wishes to market to his consumer, both immi-
grant and national. In his review of Zeballos’s La conquista de quince mil
leguas, for instance, he remarks on the impossibility of a “vast and con-
stant system of immigration” without “subdividing the land into propor-
tions that correspond to each family’s ability to add value to it through
work” (Obras 41: 82).8 Sarmiento assures that this exercise of statecraft
is, incidentally, none other than the “responsibility of the State,” which
must “assist in its complete development”—only lands with use-value
are, after all, of any value (Obras 41: 82).
Sarmiento’s inclinations toward plotting national lands have their
roots in an earlier moment inspired by a personal catalyst. In an 1855
article in El Nacional, “Ley de tierras de Chivilcoy,” he contends, “The
demarcation into plots of land, parting from a certain base, and cross-
ing regular lines and distances, brings the advantage of making impos-
sibile the interventions of some properties onto others” (Obras 23:
295). Whom does he incriminate for partaking in such “interventions”?
None other than Juan Manuel Rosas: “Who was Rosas? A landowner.
What did he accumulate? Land. What did he give to his supporters?
Land. What did he remove or confiscate from his adversaries? Land”
(Obras 23: 292–293). To prevent unequal distribution of land—
inequality being, according to Jacques Rancière (2007), the impetus for
all politics—Sarmiento argues for its proper naming and delineating.
He commends Buenos Aires’s status as the only South American city to
have undergone geographical delineation (his doing, to be sure), yet he
insists that the same must occur outside the city limits in order to main-
tain national integration. “Uncultivated land does not have geographic
names,” he explains, “and the Pamapa lacks geographic markers [acci-
dentes] to specify with precision the limits of a plot” (Obras 23: 299).
I read Sarmiento’s emphasis on place-names and delineation as laced

with fear: without naming and reorganizing the land, the nation risks
disintegration. Demarcation through a national map thus empowers
Argentina through the very suggestion of integration; in Craib’s words,
A national map had as much iconographic as it did instrumental power

[…] A national map refuted such troublesome realities by visually affirm-
ing what supposedly already existed: after all, if a map were simply a
mimetic reflection of an objective reality, then a national map by definition
presupposed the existence of the nation itself. (23–24)
The map thus “serves as a model for, rather than of ” what it aims to
represent (Craib 14, emphases in original). Aiming to rewrite and rein-
vent Argentina, Sarmiento gives form to the nation both textually and
cartographically: the textual unification of form and content as well as a
national map presuming integration “visually affirm” a model for a con-
solidated nation-state.
Whereas Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística—
later known as the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística and
renowned as Latin America’s first geographical society—was a feder-
ally subsidized creation of President Valentín Gómez Farías’s admin-
istration (Craib 21); in Argentina geography and cartography only
reach such heights with the help of non-governmental organizations
(NGOs). In mid-nineteenth-century Argentina, NGOs occupy a privi-
leged space, appearing across the continent at both the national and
international levels (Garro 49). Sarmiento forms an integral part of two
NGOs directly related to the study of geography. Secretary, first, of the
Instituto Histórico-Geográfico del Río de la Plata, created by General
Mitre between 1854 (the incipient stages of the institution) and 1856
(its effective execution), he later becomes honorary member and, even-
tually, honorary president of the Instituto Geográfico Argentino (IGF),
founded on February 6, 1879 by Estanislao S. Zeballos.
Zeballos’s leadership during the incipient stages of the SCA and
then in its geographical offshoot, the IGF, leaves a marked impression
on Sarmiento. Zeballos actively participates in writing and institution-
alizing the Argentine terrain, leading to his high esteem in Sarmiento’s
eyes. This esteem translates to laudatory book reviews, particularly of
Zeballos’s La conquista de quince mil leguas, which, in the October 8,
1878 issue of El Nacional, Sarmiento describes with immense praise:
88 A.S. MADAN
“Señor Zeballos has achieved a great feat with the compilation of such
a rich collection of information, and his book is destined, rather than
to adorn libraries, to be the inseparable companion of expedition mem-
bers headed to the desert, be it to the East of Córdoba or the South
of Buenos Aires” (El Nacional, October 8, 1878). Sarmiento’s faith in
the power of written geographical descriptions seeps through these lines.
Despite the accessibility of photographic or artistic images, he believes
that Zeballos’s textual compilation of descriptions and data will accom-
pany all future expeditions. Written description, to Sarmiento’s mind,
paints a better picture than an actual photograph, cartography notwith-
standing. This textual picture begets territorial knowledge, which, in
turn, leads to national progress.
Given his multiple pre-presidential textual pictures that engage with
the discipline and discourse of geography, Sarmiento unsurprisingly dedi-
cates a significant portion of his 1868 inaugural speech to the subject.
Along with some lines from his 1871 inauguration of the Obsevatorio
Astronómico de Córdoba—“I say that we ought to renounce our rank
as nation, or the title of civilized people, if we do not do our part in
the progress and the movement of the natural sciences”—his presiden-
tial inauguration speech makes a cameo appearance at the International
Geographic Congress of Paris, held in 1875 (Archivo de Observatorio
Astronómico de Córdoba 1).9 Sarmiento’s international recognition merits
commendation, for power relations and intellectual hierarchies between
Europe and the Americas maintained their disparities. For Sarmiento’s
beloved France, expanding its empire was as much about prestige as it
was about power (Said 204). In fact, the French believed that theirs was
a vocation supérieure, a mission civilisatrice. In this context of assumed
superiority, then, the irony of the conference theme—potential for power
through territorial knowledge—resonates even more strongly. In his
introductory words, Assembly president Admiral La Rouciere-Le Noury
proudly encourages further exploration of the relationship between
“knowing the earth” and “conquest”:
Gentlemen, Providence has dictated to us the obligation of knowing the

earth and making the conquest of it. This supreme command is one of
the imperious duties inscribed on our intelligences and on our activities.
Geography, that science which inspires such beautiful devotedness and in
whose name so many victims have been sacrificed, has become the philoso-
phy of the earth. (trans. in Murphy 46)
The admiral overlooks the fact that Sarmiento—and Argentina, and

Latin America—had long ago discovered the clear connection between
“knowing the earth” and “conquest” (from the other side of the colo-
nial/colonized divide, of course). As early as 1845, Sarmiento was com-
posing the first of his geographical treatises—Facundo—only to officially
institutionalize a component of the discipline with the 1872 Sociedad
Científica Argentina (SCA). Spain, on the contrary, blamed the 1898
colonial defeat upon its late entry into the geographical game; after
all, not till 1876 did the former colonizer even found the Sociedad
Geográfica de Madrid. “Imperious duties” aside, then, for Sarmiento
territorial knowledge equals protection from imperial powers. Having
successfully protected and advanced the nation by his presidency’s end,
Sarmiento declares geography, and in particular cartography, as among his
administration’s most influential contributions to the nation (Garro 43).
Argentina’s inclusion in an international conference dedicated to
geography confirms the success of Sarmiento’s efforts. Through his writ-
ings, Argentina gains entry into world geography. As an advocate of
intellectual camaraderie, moreover, Sarmiento applauds the conference as
a site to gather and distribute findings and where “the spirit of universal
brotherhood and common interest flourish” (Obras 35: 294). Diplomacy
holds center stage in his national project. Argentina’s geographical pro-
gress under Sarmiento’s determined guidance occurs, in part, because of
his ability to foster productive relationships with European scientists and
naturalists. Peláez explains that by 1871 Sarmiento contracts the German
expeditionaries Paul Lorentz (botany) and Alfred Stelzner (mineralogy)
to conduct scientific explorations on Argentine territory (90). Beyond
botanists and mineralogists, Sarmiento also recruits the German natural-
ist Karl Hermann Burmeister on the basis of his work being compara-
ble to Alexander von Humboldt’s. On September 25, 1875, Sarmiento
convinces the Senate to allocate 2000 pesos per volume for the publica-
tion of Burmeister’s geographical findings, titled Description physique de
la République Argentine (1876); this collection comes to be one of the
premier resources regarding Argentine geography (Garro 69).
As his participation in the Burmeister volume indicates, Sarmiento
maintains a legitimate, and often direct, engagement with various nine-
teenth-century publications linked to the discipline and practice of geog-
raphy. Francis Bond Head’s entire corpus plays cameos in his writings,
especially Facundo. Other works include Sir Woodbine Parish’s English-
language study (Buenos Aires and the Provinces of the Rio de la Plata,
90 A.S. MADAN
from Their Discovery and Conquest by the Spaniards to the Establishment of

Their Political Independence, 1836), Víctor Martin de Moussy’s French-
language Description géographique et statistique de la Confédération
Argentine (1860–1864), Richard Napp’s German-language Die
Argentinische Republik (1876), and, of course, Burmeister’s Description
physique de la République Argentine (Garro 69). Such an expansive list
confirms, as numerous critics have noted (e.g., Pratt 1992; Montaldo
1993; Prieto 1996; Cicerchia 1998; Haberly 2005), that Sarmientois
an intellectual bricoleur whose influence cannot be reduced to a single
source. Even so, in the following section I make the argument that he
leverages Humboldt over and above any of this vast bibliography, for
Humboldt lends him authority and provides a model of geographical dis-
course to incarnate and reincarnate in Facundo. Despite vast knowledge
of international works, Sarmiento seeks promulgation of national works
as the means to institutionalization.10
The Argentine Tocqueville: A Didactic Geography

Sarmiento’s willingness to spread his bibliographic knowledge—which
spanned languages, cultures, and subdisciplines—hints at his appreciation
for the written word, for the composed article, for the published study.
In his view, textual descriptions of land most efficiently contribute to the
continued documentation and proliferation of geographical knowledge.
Similarly, maps allow for detailed knowledge—and with it, domination—
of national territory. “Writing the earth” governs Sarmiento’s politi-
cal and literary trajectory. More to the point, the geographical impulse
drives his many publications beyond Facundo (e.g., Viajes por Europa,
Africa, América 1849; Recuerdos de Provincia 1850; Argirópolis 1850).
Sarmiento’s reappropriation of national land and letters takes
Alexander von Humboldt as its point of departure. Both Chaps. 1 and
2 of Facundo include epigraphs from Humboldt, though the first is mis-
takenly attributed to Sir Francis Bond Head. It reads: “L’étendue des
Pampas est si prodigieuse, qu’au nord elles sont bornées par des bos-
quets de palmiers, et au midi par des neiges éternelles” (55).11 The sec-
ond, rightly attributed to Humboldt, also appears in French: “Ainsi que
l’Océan, les steppes remplissent l’esprit du sentiment de l’infini” (75).12
These two thematic veins—the vast expanse of the territory and its simi-
larity to the ocean—originate in Humboldt’s work and are replicated
across Sarmiento’s corpus. In Facundo, however, Sarmiento nullifies
his initial veneration for the Baron when he announces the need for a
scientific traveler—like Tocqueville, he insists—to explore South America
and, more specifically, Argentina: “South America in general, and the
Argentine Republic above all, has lacked a Tocqueville who, previously
equipped with a knowledge of social theory just as a scientist travels with
a barometer, compass, and octant, would have penetrated the interior of
our political life” (40; trans. from Ross 32).13 If Sarmiento so eagerly
seeks to infuse Humboldtian strategies into his narrative, why does he
look for another Tocqueville? Put another way, what does Tocqueville
get him that Humboldt does not?
Sarmiento is Argentina’s Tocqueville, or so he aspires to be by writ-
ing Facundo. Perturbed by Europeans staking textual claim to American
lands, he also bristles at Americans shunning national knowledge, yet
lithely spouting factoids about Europe. In his piece “German Emigration
to the Río de la Plata,” Sarmiento attributes this neglect to “a general
defect of our spieces”:
We Americans know everything, we understand a bit of everything, except

for American things. We know people who can name from memory the
eighty-six departments of France and the thirty-nine states of Germany,
and that do not know how many provinces Ecuador is divided into, or the
Argentine Republic. […] The nosce te ipsum of the intellectual, we under-
stand, is to know the French or the Spanish, in Europe, their wars, their
kings and their discussions. And thus we have why America does not make
a decisive step forward toward progress unless a European geologist, geog-
rapher or traveler comes to enlighten us with what we have in plain view
yet do not examine or know; this must be a general defect of our spieces
[…]. (Obras 23: 154, emphases in original)
Sarmiento’s tone indicates his discontent with Americans as well as

his desire to actively assuage those feelings by appointing himself as
Argentina’s geographer. No Humboldt, Tocqueville, Wappaüs, or
any other European geologist, geographer, or traveler will suffice for
Sarmiento; rather, he, Sarmiento the Geographer, will reveal what they
have in plain view. Lines later, the Argentine statesman acquiesces to his
very demands and criticisms as he details that “[t]he Argentine Republic
is divided into fourteen provinces distributed in this way: Jujuy, Salta
Tucumán, Catamarca, La Rioja, San Juan and Mendoza, on the western
border of the Republic” (Obras 23: 158). After listing all 14 provinces,
he concludes by situating his neighboring countries: “Paraguay is at the
92 A.S. MADAN
base of this system of rivers, and Uruguay forms the Eastern Band of
the Río de la Plata” (Obras 23: 158). His provincial breakdown appears
alongside repeated praise of the climate and declarations that Argentina
lacks the diseases of other American countries: “The climate is healthy in
every sense of the word, and we do not even know by name the endemic
illnesses that reign in other parts of the Americas that are situated in
the tropics” (Obras 23: 156). Again, he is the national Tocqueville, the
national Humboldt, marketing his product to a national and interna-
tional clientele who deserves to know that Argentine geography is, to his
mind, the best.
Explaining a deficiency (i.e., Argentina needs a Tocqueville, Argentines
need to know the provinces) and then resolving it define Sarmiento’s
method. Though he appreciates the work already accomplished by the
likes of Humboldt, who indeed traversed the Latin American lands armed
with an arsenal of classifying devices and a pen to record his findings, and
though he considers Humboldt’s account to be the region’s “truth,”
Sarmiento himself wants to tell Argentina’s true geographical tale.
Thus, despite his inclusion of Humboldtian epigraphs and his immedi-
ate elevation of those scientists presumed to have had a relationship with
Humboldt (such as Karl Hermann Burmeister, as well as the astronomer
Benjamin Gould), Sarmiento seeks not simply to commend Humboldtian
geographical discourse; rather, for this first national geographer, his revi-
sion becomes a means to stake claim to the Argentine nation.14
To start this dual project of commendation and departure, Sarmiento
appeals to the Humboldtian notion of immensity as he rewrites the
Argentine land. Whereas in his other narratives geography appears as a
secondary or even tertiary concern, in Facundo territorial descriptions
dominate the text, as though the land’s enormity necessarily occupies
a majority of the narrative’s pages. From the first paragraphs Sarmiento
illustrates this size:
There, immensity is everywhere: immense plains, immense forests,

immense rivers, the horizon always unclear, always confused with the earth
amid swift-moving clouds and tenuous mists, which do not allow the point
where the world ends and the sky begins to be marked in a far-off perspec-
tive. (56; trans. in Ross 45–46)
Sarmiento undergirds his declarations of vastness by referring, time

and time again, to the land’s undefined horizons (56, 78, 170). If
this land seemingly never ends, then its potential—both material and
symbolic—is also endless; in other words, Sarmiento illustrates the

limitless potential of both Argentina’s lands and its literatures as he
emphasizes the unreachable horizons.15 The nation’s ubiquitous trait,
grandeur surfaces at even the sentence level of its most famous narrative
as Sarmiento’s rhetorical landscape returns to the geographical space of
the continent. This style appears in the first pages of Facundo:
La parte habitada de este país privilegiado en dones y que encierra todos

los climas, puede dividirse en tres fisonomías distintas, que imprimen a la
población condiciones diversas, según la manera como tiene que entend-
erse con la naturaleza que la rodea. Al norte, confundiéndose con el
Chaco, un espeso bosque cubre con su impenetrable ramaje extensiones
que llamaríamos inauditas, si en formas colosales hubiese nada inaudito
en toda la extensión de la América. Al centro, y en una zona paralela, se
disputan largo tiempo el terreno, la Pampa y la Selva: domina en partes
el bosque, se degrada en matorrales enfermizos y espinosos, preséntase de
nuevo la selva a merced de algún río que la favorece, hasta que al fin al
sur triunfa la Pampa, y ostenta su lisa y velluda frente, infinita, sin límite
conocido, sin accidente notable: es la imagen del mar en la tierra; la
tierra como el mapa; la tierra aguardando todavía que se la mande pro-
ducir las plantas y toda clase de simiente. Pudiera señalarse, como un rasgo
notable de la fisonomía de este país, la aglomeración de ríos navegables
que al Este se dan cita de todos los rumbos del horizonte, para reunirse
en el Plata, y presentar dignamente su estupendo tributo al Océano, que
lo recibe en sus flancos, no sin muestras visibles de turbación y de respeto.
(57-58, e mphases mine)16
The diction in this passage enacts the varying textures of this pecu-
liar space, seen, for example, in the “matorrales enfermizos y espi-
nosos” [sickly, spiny bushes]. The adjectives claw at the reader, like the
diseased and thorny bushes. Moments later, the “lisa y velluda frente”
[their smooth, downy brow] is deliberate, allowing us to feel (immediately
after being clawed) the velvet-like surface of the Pampa: contradictions,
dialectics, and binaries are the norm in this land, a land that is triply
accentuated via Sarmiento’s anaphoric “tierra” [land]. The author fur-
ther underscores the terrain’s expanse by means of assonance with the
repeated and smooth i sound.
Sarmiento’s sense that the land’s power surges from its oceanic size spans
the entire narrative. While the reference to the Pampa as “an image of the
sea on land” evokes Humboldtian undertones of indomitable expanse,
Sarmiento’s declarations additionally call to mind the endless supply of rivers
94 A.S. MADAN
that twist their way through his lands.17 He considers these rivers to be the
nation’s underused lifeline, that metaphorical blood that (ought to) surge
through its veins and sustain its being. Yet “[a] different spirit is needed to
stir up those arteries, in which the vivifying fluids of a nation today lie stag-
nant” (58; trans. in Ross 47). Key in this declaration is the notion that these
arteries—these rivers—need to be stirred up, for in their present state they
remain stagnant. And, as it can only be, stagnancy impedes the progress, the
forward movement, the flow of the national sphere.
Sarmiento blames Argentine disinterest in the rivers upon his coun-
trymen’s Spanish ancestry, remarking that “[t]he son of the Spanish
adventurers that colonized the country detests navigation, and feels him-
self imprisoned within the narrow confines of a boat or launch. When
a large river cuts off his path, he calmly undresses, prepares his horse,
and directs it to swim toward some barren island out in the distance”
(58; trans. in Ross 47). In this fictional scene, horse and horseman cross
the waterway, yet the crossing is forced, lacking both pleasure and effi-
ciency. Without proper, efficient navigation of the rivers, Sarmiento
argues, Argentina cannot have adequate intellectual and capital exchange
between exterior and interior, between city and countryside. This
exchange, for Sarmiento, is integral to the civilizing project, a belief that
he highlights again late in Facundo as he articulates Rosas’s two primary
faults—first, that he opposes free navigation of the rivers; and second,
that he wants to close the doors of immigration:
Because Rosas, opposing so tenaciously the free navigation of the rivers,

protesting fears of European intrusion, harassing the cities of the interior
and abandoning them to their own resources, does not simply obey the
prejudices of a Goth against foreigners. He does not only give into the
persuasions of an ignorant Buenos Aires native who possesses the port and
the main customshouse of the Republic, without caring to develop the civ-
ilization and wealth of this whole nation so that its port will be full of ships
loaded with products from the interior and its customshouse with mer-
chandise. Rather, he principally follows his instincts as a gaucho from the
Pampas, who looks at water with horror, at ships with contempt, and who
knows no happiness or joy equal to that of mounting a good racehorse to
take him from one place to another. (277; trans. in Ross 186).
As Sarmiento so often emphasizes in the passages of Facundo, this

inability to overcome distance fosters isolation, which, in turn, fosters
barbarism. Alongside trains and telegraphs, Argentina’s rivers and their
traversal will allow the country to continue “one and indivisible,” a

status indebted to “[i]ts continuous plains, its rivers confluent to a single
port” (182; trans. in Ross 127).
For Sarmiento, putting the great abundance of waterways to use will
reduce the prevalence of barbarism in the national sphere. His belief in
the potential of fluvial navigation recapitulates an insistence that origi-
nates in Humboldt’s Personal Narrative. Here, the Baron dedicates seven
chapters (out of 23) to South American rivers and particularly to their
confluences, remarking that “Everywhere water, like land, displays its
unique characteristics” (186). These characteristics, Humboldt contends,
lend themselves to commerce: “The position of San Fernando on a great
navigable river, near the mouth of another river that crosses the whole
province of Varinas, is extremely useful for trade” (174). And trade pro-
pels the modernizing project, of which Sarmiento is abundantly aware.
Returning to Facundo, the waterways serve as a civilizing life force
when Sarmiento employs the corporeal metaphor in the narrative’s clos-
ing chapters. This time, however, he highlights not just the ancillary
arteries and veins, but rather what he refers to as the “aorta” of navigable
rivers—the Plata:
That state will rise up despite them, although every year they may cut off
its shoots, because the greatness of the state is in the grassy Pampas, in the
tropical products of the north, and in the great system of navigable rivers
whose aorta is the Plata. In any case, we Spaniards are neither navigators
nor industrious men, and Europe will provide us for long centuries with
her wares in exchange for our raw materials, and they and we will win in the
exchange. Europe will put the oar in our hands and will tow us upstream
until we have acquired a taste for navigation. (353–354; trans. in Ross 237)
Argentina’s superiority, Sarmiento contends, inheres in the national ter-

rain: in the grassy Pampa, in the tropical North, in the infinite quantity
of rivers. Yet young Argentina and its vestigial Iberian tendencies have
allowed for neither navigation nor industry. Sarmiento condemns Rosas’s
prohibition of free navigation and lists it among the myriad issues arising
from the latter’s administration, issues that Sarmiento unapologetically
aims to overturn: “Because he has placed an insurmountable barrier to
the free navigation of our inland rivers and the NEW GOVERNMENT
will promote a preference for river navigation. Thousands of ships will
go upriver” (364, emphases in original; trans. in Ross 237). Contentions
like these are omnipresent, such that Sarmiento’s iterations of the river
96 A.S. MADAN
question become something of a broken record to the soundtrack of

Facundo. Sarmiento concludes with a series of fluvial references to firmly
cement his primary contention: free navigation of the rivers is the only
path to industrial progress in the interior (369).
River odes of this sort limit themselves not just to the pages of
Facundo. Instead, they inundate much of Sarmiento’s writing, with one
of the most expressive appearing in Campaña en el ejército grande (1852).
Here, he pronounces his undying, magnificently charged love for the riv-
ers of Argentina, noting that they inspire a poetic pulse within him:
He vivido en estos últimos tiempos entregado a una monomanía de que

se resienten todos mis escritos de cinco años a esta parte. ¡Los ríos argen-
tinos! Ellos han sido mi sueño dorado, la alucinación de mis cavilaciones,
la utopía de mis sistemas políticos, la panacea de nuestros males, el tema de
mis lucubraciones y si hubiera sabido medir versos, el asunto de un poema
eterno. (101–102, emphases mine)18
Sarmiento’s modest undertones regarding his stylistic, indeed poetic,

abilities suggest a self-perception of lack, of inability. Had he been able
to write in measure, he claims, the rivers would certainly be subject to an
eternal poem. Sarmiento attempts to convince his reading public that he
is no poet; for them, after all, he is a statesman, perhaps capable of being
moved by poetry but ultimately interested in national progress. His
efforts fall by the wayside, for his narrative unifies the aesthetic and the
social; it mediates between literary language and social life. Indeed, his
lines suggest that he crafts his “prose” with a particular—even poetic—
style that is infused with political meaning.19
Beyond the immediate apostrophe (“¡Los ríos argentinos!”) and met-
aphors (in italics), let us return to the closing lines of one of the above
passages: “Pudiera señalarse, como un rasgo notable de la fisonomía de
este país, la aglomeración de ríos navegables que al Este se dan cita de
todos los rumbos del horizonte, para reunirse en el Plata, y presentar
dignamente su estupendo tributo al Océano, que lo recibe en sus flancos,
no sin muestras visibles de turbación y de respeto” (57–58).20 Sarmiento
writes the waterways into his landscape, whereby he emphasizes their
integrality to “the physiognomy of this country”—that is, the connec-
tion between its outward appearance and inner character. Each of the
sentence’s seven clauses—separated by commas like riverbanks—come
together like tributaries at the first confluence of the Plata, only then to
feed into nothing less than the whole of the mighty ocean. To emphasize
the immense power of both the rivers and the ocean, Sarmiento employs
charged diction—“dignamente” [worthily], “estupendo tribute” [stu-
pendous tribute], “turbación” [turbulence], and ends with the sentence’s
lasting impression: “respeto” [respect]. The personified rivers and ocean
have a mutual respect, evinced in the rivers’ stupendous tribute and the
ocean’s signs of turbulence: the land seems to possess more awareness
regarding its prowess than its very human inhabitants. In the following
sentence Sarmiento laments that “these immense canals, excavated by
the solicitous hand of nature, do not bring about any changes at all in
national customs” (58; trans. in Ross 47). Desperately seeking change
in the national customs as he composes Facundo, Sarmiento fashions a
didactic geography for his fellow citizens while he details his prescrip-
tion for subjugating the land. The first remedy equals better navigation
of rivers. For Argentina to civilize its expanse, the nation must invest in
the modes available to connect that vastness. Departing from his overt
call to supplant barbarism by defeating geography, however, Sarmiento’s
language contradictorily alludes to an underlying elevation of barba-
rism. As his words poke and prod and sleep, as his sounds startle and
stumble, and as his paragraphs suddenly burst with the intensity of a
storm, Sarmiento unifies form and content. This language, according
to Vico, originates with the primitive man, thus Sarmiento—indeed, the
Argentine Tocqueville—embraces the language of the barbarian to write
the “true” national tale.
The Immigrant’s Brochure: A Marketable Geography

Taking into account Sarmiento’s tendency to flit back and forth, to
say one thing while arguably doing another, we can conclude that he
thrives on contradiction. He even declares in Facundo that contradic-
tions are only ended by means of further contradictions: “No! a future
so unlimited, a mission so exalted, will not be surrendered because of
this accumulation of contradictions and difficulties. Difficulties can be
vanquished, and contradictions are ended by contradicting them!” (46;
trans. in Ross 36). Contradictions, dialectics, and binaries continue to
surface as he describes the “subject” component of the subject/land
relationship that constitutes geography. While in one moment Sarmiento
deplores the open and monotonous expanse of the Pampa, in the next
he attributes the state’s unity and indivisibility to that very Pampa, one
98 A.S. MADAN
“generalmente llana y unida” (61). These peculiarities reflect a discourse

of a consolidated state faced with the challenge of penetrating—by real-
izing its sovereignty—the barbarism of this “empty” space.
In his piece “Enmigración alemana al Río de la Plata,” Sarmiento
attempts to lure German immigrants and explains that “the national pop-
ular is scarce” and that the country is “still unpopulated and admits mil-
lions of settlers that cultivate it and gain wealth from their work” (Obras
23: 155–156). In Facundo, he employs a series of rhetorical questions to
persuade readers that the “uninhabited land” might still be utilized to
the national advantage:
[M]oreover, are we to abandon one of the most privileged soils in America

to the devastations of barbarism, to leave one hundred navigable riv-
ers abandoned to the aquatic birds that calmly possess and furrow them
all alone ab initio? Are we to close our doors voluntarily to the European
immigrants who knock repeatedly, wanting to populate our deserts and to
make us, in the shadow of our own flag, a people as innumerable as the
ocean sands? (44; trans. in Ross 35)
Sarmiento’s rhetorical questions suggest that the land cannot be left

by the wayside—to the birds—intimating that the land is, in fact, unoc-
cupied by humans. A few sentences later, he explicitly juxtaposes Europe
and America: “After Europe, is there any other uninhabited and civiliz-
able world besides America?” (44; trans. in Ross 35).
The discourse of emptiness is thus a metaphor for land ripe for set-
tlement. Yet the land is far from empty, leading us to consider the peo-
ple already populating it. With each detailed analysis of the different
gauchos, Sarmiento’s contradictions intensify. Foremost, he notes that
moral progress—civilization—is impossible to achieve in a land in which
human and education remain isolated from one another due to distance.
The cultivation of intellect is impossible where “barbarism is the norm”
(70; trans. in Ross 55). Sarmiento describes the gauchos’ desire to dom-
inate nature with a deliberate diction entrenched in negativity: “indomi-
table,” “haughty character,” “isolated,” “savage,” “brute,” “grave,”
“serious” (72; trans. in Ross 57). His adjectives overflow with deprecation.
All the same, Sarmiento’s admiration for the gauchos seeps through his
stylized writing, and we can unquestionably hear something akin to praise.
The gauchos may lack the ability to read, but they can topple and slay a
fierce bull, described in one of many lines that reads like verse: “dagger in
one hand and a poncho in the other to stick in its mouth, while he runs
it through the heart and leaves it lying at his feet” (73; trans. in Ross 57).
Sarmiento notes that the gauchos’ tendency to subdue nature develops the
individuality, nationalism, and vanity intrinsic to the Argentine; might his
appreciation for these characteristics surface because of his self-fashioned
inclination toward such traits? Indeed, gaucho arrogance has provoked,
according to Sarmiento, independence in this segment of America (73).
As Sarmiento scorns the barbarism behind the gauchos’ abilities
with horses and contrasts it with their intellectual inabilities—they are,
he insists, barbaric illiterates—his writing shines light on an underly-
ing respect for the beauty and the necessity of the act. He believes that
physical nature yields human nature, and this belief escapes through his
language, through his rhythm, through his repetition. Yet, at the same
time, he wishes to erase these barbaric non-readers from the Argentine
expanse and to replace (or integrate) them with European immigrants.
Sarmiento’s immediate contradiction surfaces through the intertwining
of literature and geography, through his attempt to attract “civilized”
inhabitants to the Argentine Pampa with his descriptions of the terrain.
Sarmiento is not alone in his efforts. Nineteenth-century moderniza-
tion policies in Latin America (particularly the Southern Cone) sought to
populate the vast stretches of land with European immigrants; this plan,
as Juan Batista Alberdi put it, consisted in governing by populating—
gobernar es poblar. To this end, thinkers and statesman like Sarmiento
and the Chilean Vicente Pérez Rosales embarked on geographical
ventures designed as marketing tools to attract immigrant popula-
tions. Johann Eduard Wappäus, professor of statistics and geography at
the University of Göttingen, facilitated these ventures and, in fact, his
German-language brochures had drawn prospective emigrants to the Río
de la Plata region (Obras 23: 152–156). After befriending Dr. Wappäus,
Sarmiento had the brochures translated and even included a Preface to
the Spanish editions, wherein he lauds the geographer’s success in steer-
ing German immigrants to Chile:
el Dr. Wappäus will soon find himself producing in German a history of

Chile, rich in useful information about the land of this strip of earth, its
population, its institutions, the spirit of its inhabitants and the riches that
it contains; this an admirable work, calculated to inspire Germans ready
to emigrate to those countries that offer a helping hand, stability in due
order, and promise of employment. (Obras 23: 105)
100 A.S. MADAN
Sarmiento’s words reveal his belief in the power of deliberate and

calculating designs to attract German immigrants. Publications advertising
the merits of a particular locale increase the likelihood of immigration, he
concludes. With this in mind, Sarmiento urges the Chilean government to
publish brochures similar to those of Dr. Wappäus across France and Italy.
Sarmiento’s certainty regarding the relationship between “geographical
knowledge” and immigration is founded; he admiringly details the USA’s
recent influx of Germans as evidence, suggesting that it is a result of “geo-
graphical knowledge that the generalized system of public education dis-
seminates with uniformity” (Obras 23: 384).
Geographical discourse as a means to immigration often occurs by
governmental request, as happens when Sarmiento serves as an Argentine
representative to the USA. Upon being asked to describe Argentina in an
1865 letter to the Cónsul General de la República Argentina, he crafts
a missive on the geographical qualities of the national sphere—all, to be
sure, with the purpose of attracting immigrants from the USA (Obras 34:
291). The letter, written in New York, employs North American strate-
gies to attract North Americans. In three pages Sarmiento guides read-
ers through the rivers (291), the borders (292), and the climate of his
national land (293), taking care to pause en route upon the agricultural
production and human populations that are its natural byproduct; his
endgame, “to interest those who might wish to move to [Argentina]”
(Obras 34: 291). That the geographical would constitute so much of the
“brief note” signals that, for Sarmiento, territorial description outweighs
other national qualities that might draw foreign settlers (Obras 34: 291).
He follows the same pattern in the piece “Emigración alemana al Río
de la Plata” as he describes in vivid detail the climate, the lack of diseases,
and the great tracts of land, which, he explains, are better and cheaper
than those in Argentina’s leading competition: the USA. His rhetoric
indicates to prospective immigrants that, in the other hemisphere,
with the excess of population, and the multitude of emigrants coming

from all parts, life comes to be as difficult as in Europe itself because of the
increased price of land, the long distance to the coasts where one might
find colonizable tracts, and the difficulty each day in increasing lucrative
employment opportunities for immigrants. (Obras 23: 155)
Sarmiento insists that the Argentine system, on the contrary, always

places land within monetary reach of immigrants by maintaining fixed
and reasonable prices; “to speak in Buenos Aires about the advantages
of immigration,” he proudly declares, “is to prove that the light of the
sun brings light and warmth at the same time” (Obras 23: 359). With
these words, Sarmiento translates “writing the earth” to “writing the
nation”—in other words, geography presents itself as being inevitably
interwoven with national organization and national pride.
Like Sarmiento, in Recuerdos del Pasado (1882) Vicente Pérez Rosales
details the value of attracting German immigrants to populate the vast
expanses of his Chilean lands. Geography, for him, reigns supreme in the
mission to draw foreign peoples, such that he dedicates an entire previ-
ous narrative, Ensayo sobre Chile (1857), to describing Chilean geography,
customs, and opportunities for immigrants. Akin to Sarmiento, his source
knowledge on the methodology of geography stems from Europe and
North America. Generally speaking, Pérez Rosales learns from friends;
Sarmiento learns from reading. Thus, the Chilean socialite casually men-
tions acquaintances while the Argentine bibliophile does the same with
texts and authors. Other times, however, both simply engage in name-
dropping for the sake of celebrity by association. For instance, Pérez
Rosales proudly lists his scientific adventures in Recuerdos del Pasado:
I had traveled throughout Europe, earning the good will of some truly
esteemed individuals, and honored by friendship with Humboldt, Pöppig,
Wappäus, Korff, and other eminent prodigies of human knowledge, whose
caring letters and honorary titles for multiple scientific societies I proudly
held close and, yet, there was still a space in my heart to fill. I longed for
my beloved lands; I longed for the sun of my dear country. (586)
Sarmiento similarly documents his engagement with the intellectual elite

in a letter to his alleged lover Aurelia Vélez Sarsfield:
From Mrs. Mann’s house they took me to Cambridge, the famous univer-
sity, where I have spent two days in continuous feast and have been intro-
duced to all the imminent sages convened there: Longfellow, the great
poet, who speaks Spanish perfectly; Gould, the astronomer and friend
of Humboldt; Agassiz (son), for whom they are predicting greater fame
than his father’s; Hill, the former president of the University. (El Gran
Sarmiento 81)
Like Sarmiento, Pérez Rosales’s pride surges in the context of nation-

ality—that, despite such powerful friendships, he still wishes to return
102 A.S. MADAN
to Chile and ultimately does. Yet his integration into European circles
of science and geography informs his beliefs significantly. His new-
found knowledge, in fact, moves him to refute Richard Napp’s Die
Argentinische Republik (1876), commissioned with Sarmiento’s support
by the Comité Central Argentino para la Exposición en Filadelfia. His
accusation is that Napp fabricates the Argentine territory’s boundaries,
thereby bestowing that nation with more land:
As I review the notes I made and compare them with subsequent trips,
I can attest to the wholly capricious nature of Napp’s affirmation, on p.
67 of his La República Argentina, that “south of the 32nd parallel the
Andrean plateau narrows until it becomes a ridge that at gradually dimin-
ishing elevation extends to the southern tip of the continent.” When the
worthy Napp presented such inaccuracy as fact, he either did so in keep-
ing with the then prevalent aim of narrowing the territory of Chile at that
latitude, or he took the opportunity to bolster in writing the correctness
of the many lapses that appear on his map of the Argentine Republic with
respect to its border with the Chilean Republic. (219; trans. in Polt 219)
Here, we have the conflation of several relevant leitmotivs: an enhanced

sense of nationality, a respect for and pride in geographical knowledge,
and an immediate need to accurately delineate national territory based
on said knowledge. Moreover, we see the need to clarify (Pérez Rosales
might argue, further fabricate) the visual representation of the mapped
territory through writing. Despite Sarmiento and Pérez Rosales’s friend-
ship—the former serves as the latter’s tour guide upon his visit to
Buenos Aires—nationalism and its promotion come first.
Geography is, therefore, as much about maintaining territorial integ-
rity as it is about exerting a pull on an immigrant population. The
thought process follows a circuitous route: if we attract European immi-
grants, we can populate these “sparsely inhabited lands” not only with
humans, but also with homogenous ideas representative of the whole
nation; in this way, we might reduce the physical and mental isolation
that plagues the national territory. Sarmiento evinces this plague through
his descriptions of Córdoba, that backward city he perceives to be the
antithesis of the modern Buenos Aires. Córdoba’s own trappings feed its
backwardness, he believes. More simply, a large part of Sarmiento’s fear
for Argentina stems from its natural inclination to isolate, to lock itself,
in solipsistic fashion, within its very self, to become its own worst enemy:
the barbarian. Echoes of this fear resound in varying forms throughout
Facundo, be they the isolation caused by the vast expanse of the Pampa
or that caused by the trappings of tradition. Both types of isolation lead
to stagnancy, which leaves no exit, no forward movement away from the
land’s natural barbaric tendencies. Sarmiento speaks of this latter sort of
isolation in regard to Córdoba, the national territory that he imagines to
be entrenched in the barbaric, the ignorant, and the stagnant. He dedi-
cates several pages of Chap. 7 to painting a textual picture of Córdoba’s
geographical qualities, starting first with its climate, then moving on
to its eastern side, to its main plaza, to its churches and convents, and,
finally, to its university. In Córdoba, he laments, religion dominates all
facets of life, while a public theater, an opera, a daily newspaper, or a
printing industry has yet to exist. He emphasizes the lack of art, the lack
of free, creative thinking. Sarmiento fears that this intellectual isolation
impedes Argentina’s progress:
Hasta dónde puede esto influir el espíritu de un pueblo ocupado de estas

ideas durante dos siglos, no puede decirse; pero algo ha debido influir,
porque ya lo véis, el habitante de Córdoba tiende los ojos en torno suyo y
no ve el espacio, el horizonte está a cuatro cuadras de la plaza; sale por las
tardes a pasearse, y en lugar de ir y venir por una calle de álamos, espaciosa
y larga como cañada de Santiago, que ensancha el ánimo y lo vivifica, da
vueltas en torno de un lago artificial de agua sin movimiento, sin vida, y en
cuyo centro está un cenador de formas majestuosas, pero inmóvil, estacion-
ario: la ciudad es un claustro con verjas de hierro; cada manzana tiene un
claustro de monjas o frailes; los colegios son claustros; la legislación que
se enseña, la teología, toda la ciencia escolástica de la edad media es un
claustro que se encierra y parapeta la inteligencia contra todo lo que salga
del texto y del comentario. (170–171, emphases mine)21
A lack of physical space leads to a lack of intellect: these are self-fashioned

trappings that extend from the corporeal to the mental. Contrary to those
who reside on the vast expanse of the Pampa and thereby suffer from iso-
lation, the inhabitants of Córdoba fail to see past what they know; rather
than actually lacking space, they fail to recognize it—they do “not see
open space” even though “the horizon is four blocks beyond the plaza.”
Space, here, becomes a metaphor for room to broaden one’s intellectual
horizons. Though there exists actual, tangible space in Córdoba—space,
sensing from Sarmiento’s flowing assonance with the repeated a in “en
lugar de ir y venir por una calle de álamos, espaciosa y larga como cañada
de Santiago, que ensancha el ánimo y lo vivifica” [instead of coming and
104 A.S. MADAN
going down a street of poplars that broadens the soul and enlivens it, long
and spacious like the stream through Santiago], that lends itself to kines-
thetic energy—its inhabitants nevertheless entrap themselves in a life that
is “sin movimiento” [motionless], “sin vida” [lifeless], “inmóvil” [immo-
bile], “estacionario” [stationary], much like the artificial lake around
which they monotonously walk. We return to the Humboldtian water
metaphor: Sarmiento finds progress in the flowing currents of Argentina’s
rivers; quite the opposite, the nation’s barbaric citizens find themselves
willingly stuck in the murky stagnancy of a fishpond without fish, with-
out life, without motion. Sarmiento follows the water metaphor with a
series of comparisons between the city, its inhabitants, its institutions, and
a cloister. Córdoba materializes as a barred jail (“la ciudad es un claustro
con verjas de hierro”) enclosed in the grip of a religion and conservative
education (“cada manzana tiene un claustro de monjas o frailes; los cole-
gios son claustros”), both entrenched in the Middle Ages (“la legislación
que se enseña, la teología, toda la ciencia escolástica de la edad media es
un claustro que se encierra y parapeta la inteligencia contra todo lo que
salga del texto y del comentario”).
Sarmiento’s metaphors nourish his Volksgeist orientation insofar as
they allude to the Córdoban man as emerging from his surroundings,
even those that are manmade or, in other words, unnatural.22 Man is like
the promenade in Córdoba, locked in, immobile, stagnant: the readers
are locked into Sarmiento’s never-ending sentence, trapped by his punc-
tuation for a total of 11 lines. To cement the notion of immobility, he
returns to the lake replete with dead waters:
What support could revolutionary ideas, the children of Rosseau, Mably,

Raynal, and Voltaire, find there, if by chance they crossed the Pampas to
descend into the Spanish catacombs, into those new heads disciplined by
peripatetic philosophy to look beyond all new ideas, into those minds that,
like their promenade, had an immobile idea in the center, surrounded by a
lake of dead waters, making them difficult to penetrate. (171; trans. in Ross
120, emphases mine)
That these revolutionary ideas cannot enter the impermeable geographi-

cal center of Córdoba negates, too, their ability to enter its imperme-
able intellectual center. And, without ideas, Sarmiento contends,
progress is rendered impossible. Stagnancy thus persists. Whether they
are metaphorically locked in (the cloisters) or metaphorically stagnant
(the dead waters), the peoples of Córdoba resist any potential for upward
intellectual or cultural movement. For this reason, Sarmiento contends
that only through European immigration might Argentina’s lands and
people locate said movement.
Yet Sarmiento’s literary strategies reverse his textual insistence on rid-
ding the national sphere of its barbaric element. By demonstrating the
relationship between land and subject, between Córdoba and its inhabit-
ants, he looks to the tenets of geography to legitimize his declarations.
However, his literary language further politicizes and radicalizes those
declarations as it contradicts their negativity. Sarmiento’s stylized writ-
ing returns to the land in defense of the “inferior classes,” always vouch-
ing for the merits of primitivity: “If the origin of this national vanity in
the lower classes is a mean one, its results are no less noble for that rea-
son, just as the water of a river is no less pure because it may be born
at a marshy infected source” (73; trans. in Ross 57–58). Sarmiento the
Geographer looks to the land to explain its inhabitants, and his contra-
diction continues. Via immigration he aims to incorporate, much like the
tributaries of a river, those “marshy infected sources”; simultaneously, he
pushes to maintain “this national vanity”—that is, the barbarism of the
proletariat. Sarmiento’s appeal to barbarism thus underlies his attempts
to write the Argentine earth, to write this geography that will, he hopes,
draw the civilization of European and North American immigrants.
The First Page of Argentine Geographical Discourse

For a marketable geography, the dry prose of scientific writing
proves insufficient to sell the land. In this vein, we must acknowledge
that Sarmiento learns of aestheticized geographical discourse from
Humboldt, also inclined to sell Latin American lands to his Spanish com-
missioners. Recall that Humboldt often admits his tendency toward the
poetic; in an 1834 letter to Varnhagen von Ense, he wistfully regrets,
“the besetting sins of my style are, an unfortunate propensity to poeti-
cal expressions, a long participial construction, and too great concentra-
tion of various opinions and sentiments in the same sentence” (Letters to
Varnhagen von Ense 19). Always grandiose, Sarmiento takes Humboldt’s
admitted “propensity” and amplifies it tenfold. Going beyond the
German naturalist, Sarmiento transculturates geographical discourse,
thereby giving form to the Argentine landscape and, at the same time,
telling its most dramatic political tale. Like Olmedo with whom I began
106 A.S. MADAN
this book, he assumes the role of geographer as storyteller, he who

recounts the relationship between land and subject in ways that place
his Facundo as the standard for canonization. Yet he does so in harmony
with the literary origins of geography, as explicated by Strabo: in this
sense, the literary surfaces as integral to geography. Geography unfolds as
a genre of literature.
Even Argentina’s most esteemed fiction writers tout Sarmiento’s lit-
erary skills. In the Prologue to the 1974 edition of Facundo, Jorge
Luis Borges contends, “Sub specie aeternitatis, Facundo is still the best
Argentine story” (vii). Recall, too, that Ricardo Piglia describes the “first
page of Facundo” as the “first page of Argentine literature” (131). To
further nuance these contentions, I argue that Sarmiento simultane-
ously writes Argentina’s first nationally composed geography; the first
page of Facundo, therefore, is also the first page of Argentine geographi-
cal discourse. The conflation with literature—a necessary tool—allows
Sarmiento to bring geography’s political potential into the mainstream;
he achieves such publicity through periodicals. During his Chilean exile,
Sarmiento establishes Santiago’s first newspaper, El Progreso, under the
auspices of Manuel Montt. His position as editor of the paper coincides
with the installments of Facundo, which appear between May 2 and
June 1, 1845.23 He immediately seeks national and international read-
ership, sending copies of the text—published in book form as early as
July 1845—to Chilean statesmen, to politicians in Buenos Aires, to lead-
ers throughout the Americas, even across continental lines. Referring to
his narrative as the Odyssey, Sarmiento begs his primary distributor, Juan
Maria Gutiérrez, to send Facundo as far and as wide as the limits of nine-
teenth-century transportation will allow: “But let’s return to your mis-
sion of spreading the Odyssey throughout the world. I bet you haven’t
written a word about it to your friends in France, to the National, to the
Pacific Democracy, to the Paris Review and the Revue des Deux Mondes,
etc., etc.? Come on, do it” (trans. in Sorensen-Goodrich 36).24 This
1845 letter reveals Sarmiento’s zealous insistence that Facundo attain
worldwide circulation and, with that, rise through the ranks of mythol-
ogies to become the definitive account of Argentina. Breaking with
established tradition—particularly with Europe’s institutionalized geog-
raphies—Sarmiento creates a new national discourse firmly planted in his
incarnation of Humboldtian geographical discourse.
Why the urgency to distribute? Writing nearly 2 decades prior to the
1879 founding of the Instituto Geográfico Argentino, the pioneering
geographer in Sarmiento achieves three of the institute’s primary

objectives, which co-founder Estanislao Zeballos lists in the inaugu-
ral Boletín del Instituto Geográfico Argentino: “to explore and describe
territories, coasts, islands and seas adjacent to the Argentine Republic;
to make the country known to foreigners by means of a journal; and
to write an Argentine geography” (Zeballos 79). For Sarmiento, his
tale of Argentina establishes differences between the emergent nation
and Europe, particularly Spain. Argentina can mature only as fast as
his national narrative can circulate, reaffirming, indeed, his faith in the
power of the written word. I suggested that Sarmiento revels in dictating
a call to arms to which he actively responds. This pattern continues with
regard to “writing the earth” in order to “write the nation.” He explains
in Facundo:
If the glimmer of a national literature momentarily shines in new American

societies, it will come from descriptions of grand scenes of nature, and
above all, from the struggle between European civilization and indigenous
barbarism, between intelligence and matter. This is an awesome struggle in
America, which gives rise to scenes that are very peculiar, very characteris-
tic, and very alien to the sphere of ideas within which the European spirit
is educated, since dramatic forces become unfamiliar, customs surprising,
and characters original outside the region wherever they occur. (75–76;
trans. in Ross 59)
Sarmiento prescribes and promptly abides by his solution for the new
American societies: if we are to produce a national literature, we must
locate it, above all, in “grand scenes of nature.” And these natural scenes
include land and landscape, topography and climate, flora and fauna—
Latin American geography. However, straightforward Spanish will not suf-
fice for these scenes. In an attempt to institutionalize linguistic difference
between Latin America and Spain, Sarmiento writes his Memoria sobre
ortografía (1843), a spelling model for the budding nations. The new
national discourse thus breaks with Europe in several ways: Humboldtian
only for the sake of credibility, Sarmiento’s transculturated geographical
discourse writes against the established institution not only by employing
Latin American spelling, but also by coalescing form and content.
Sarmiento unabashedly notes on several occasions that his Facundo
arises from literary intentions; at other times his false modesty wins and
leads him to deny his literary capabilities.25 Regardless of his admissions
or non-admissions of literary aptitude, Sarmiento’s narrative is replete
108 A.S. MADAN
with land-inspired passages that employ poetic prose and literary devices.
In his essay “Literatura e cultura de 1900 a 1945,” Brazilian sociolo-
gist and critic Antonio Candido observes that “the best expressions of
thought and feeling have always assumed, in Brazil, literary form” (152).
The internal logic of his text—if superimposed on all of Latin America
(Lund 69)—captures the dynamic at work in Sarmiento’s Facundo.
Foremost, literature successfully introduces (and makes more digestible)
Sarmiento’s new geographical discourse, engaging society and providing
“sensibility” and “national consciousness” alongside “the pride and the
overcoming of sensed inferiorities” (154). By the same token, Candido
explains that “the power magnet of literature interfered with the soci-
ological tendency”—analogically speaking, geography is to the novelist
what literature is to the geographer (153). From the outset, then, soci-
etal intellectual demands dictate that Sarmiento approach Facundo at the
confluence of geography and literature.
In Argentina particularly, the demand for literature translates to a
demand for poetry, which is to say the political expression of the national
soul. In the second chapter of Facundo, for instance, Sarmiento sets out
to explain why Argentines are the way they are, why they are poets. He
contends that this poetic pulse beats in the land, in the climes, in the
geography. Following his tendency to literally (and literarily) exemplify
his explanation, Sarmiento explains with poetic prose:
De aquí resulta que el pueblo argentino es poeta por carácter, por natu-
raleza. ¿Ni cómo ha de dejar de serlo, cuando en medio de una tarde serena
y apacible, una nube torva y negra se levanta sin saber de dónde, se estiende
sobre el cielo mientras se cruzan dos palabras, y de repente el estampido del
trueno anuncia la tormenta que deja frío el viajero, y reteniendo el aliento
por temor de atraerse un rayo de dos mil que caen en torno suyo? La oscu-
ridad se sucede después a la luz: la muerte está por todas partes; un poder
terrible, incontrastable le ha hecho en un momento reconcentrarse en sí
mismo, y sentir su nada en medio de aquella naturaleza irritada; sentir a
Dios, por decirlo una vez, en la aterrante magnificencia de sus obras. ¿Qué
más colores para la paleta de su fantasía? Masas de tinieblas que anublan el
día, masas de luz lívida, temblorosa, que ilumina un instante las tinieblas,
y muestra la pampa a distancias infinitas, cruzándola vivamente el rayo, en
fin, símbolo del poder. Estas imágenes han sido hechas para quedarse hon-
damente grabadas. Así, cuando la tormenta pasa, el gaucho se queda triste,
pensativo, serio, y la sucesión de luz y tinieblas se continua en su imagi-
nación, del mismo modo que cuando miramos fijamente el sol, nos queda
por largo tiempo su disco en la retina. (78–79, emphases mine)26
The passage as a self-standing paragraph makes landfall just as randomly

as the storm that it describes—“sin saber de dónde” [out of nowhere].
In the midst of a chapter that is “serena y apacible” [serene and pleas-
ant] and speaks of a calm aesthetics, Sarmiento suddenly exemplifies the
Argentine’s erratic nature and innate poetry as resulting from the land’s
unpredictability. With the figurative speed of two words being spoken—
“se cruzan dos palabras”—the thunderous storm hits the textual land-
scape with the cacophony of a consonant t in addition to the rhythmic
end rhyme sounding through the repeated o. The darkness that hits
after the light of the storm punctuates the passage literally with a series
of short clauses separated, in short succession, by a colon, them a semi-
colon, later a couple of commas, another semi-colon, and two more
commas. Brief, threatening, and lacking flow (evident in the diction:
“oscuridad” [darkness], “muerte” [death], “terrible” [terrible], “nada”
[nothing], “irritada” [irritated]), the scene nevertheless exudes beauty,
a grandeur that demands poetry—the aesthetic sublime, as it were: “to
feel God, to put it plainly, in the terrifying magnificence of His works.”
Sarmiento’s textual painting explicitly asks, then, what more might be
done, what more might be achieved; indeed, “más” [more] reverber-
ates here first in the question “¿Qué más colores para la paleta de su
fantasía?” [Is this color enough for the palette of fantasy?] and then as
part of the word “masas” [masses], which is repeated twice. That the
idea of more is repeated multiple times lends to the notion of power
(“símbolo del poder”) explicit in the Pampa’s expanse (“distancias
infinitas”), which is exposed only through the “masas de luz lívida”
[masses of trembling, livid light].
“These images are meant,” Sarmiento writes, “to stay deeply
engraved.” And, arguably, he writes these images into posterity, for only
literature can do them justice; only literature can engage and attract his
reading public. As he literarily constructs the Argentine land, he writes
the nation’s geography as one removed from Europe both materially and
symbolically. The terrain requires complex language to articulate its con-
tradictions and binaries. To this end, “cuando la tormenta pasa” [when
the storm passes], so, too, does the paragraph, leaving readers with the
image of subject and land inextricably bound. The tempo now slower
with a series of adjectives separated by commas, the lines ache with the
gaucho’s torment (“triste” [sad], “pensativo” [pensive], “serio” [seri-
ous]); as the succession of light and darkness continues in his imagina-
tion, it also burns through the text. The oscillation between light and
dark is lasting, overwhelming, and best explained by the metaphor of the
110 A.S. MADAN
sun leaving its (sometimes painful but always beautiful) imprint on one’s
retina, “in the same way that the disk of the sun stays on the retina for a
long time when we stare at it.”
For Sarmiento, these scenes of unmitigated beauty and power demand
literature, leaving little recourse other than poetic language for their
transmission. Some paragraphs after the above passage, he poses the
rhetorical question, “How could he who witnesses these impressive
scenes not be a poet,” and proceeds to cite the meter of Echeverría
and Domínguez as examples of such behavior (79; trans. in Ross 62).
Sarmiento follows his “storm poem” with the poetry of esteemed
Argentine poets, suggesting that he includes himself with the likes
of said writers. By concluding his “storm poem” with such analysis,
he hints that he perceives himself to be, in fact, a poet inspired by the
“impressive scenes” taking place on the Argentine land. Sarmiento the
Geographer is now Sarmiento the Poet. In this sense, he follows the
Strabonic school of thought, in which poetics and politics combine to
yield geographical discourse. Bent on departing from European tradition
and institutionalization—bent on “writing the earth” à la Argentina—
Sarmiento locates Argentine difference in a language that constructs the
land. This transculturated rendition of geographical discourse is, when
read through Candido’s productive theory, “that line of essay—in which,
with greater or lesser happiness—combine imagination and observation,
science and art,” a genre that ultimately constitutes “the most charac-
teristic and original trait of our thinking” (14). If we expand Candido’s
Brazilian “our” to include Latin America, Sarmiento’s transculturated
geographical discourse thus constructs and legitimizes a national dis-
course that sets Argentina apart from the European canon. Neither
Cervantes nor Humboldt, Sarmiento writes the earth—entirely tram-
meled “by the demands of form” (in Roberto González Echevarría’s
words)—to tell Argentina’s true tale via the relations between subject
and land.27
The national subject—primitive, barbaric, the gaucho—receives
Sarmiento’s flattery in the form of imitation: Sarmiento imitates and
thereby elevates the gaucho’s language. As he gives form to the land,
Sarmiento appropriates and thereby extols the language of the Vichean
primitive man, nationally embodied in the Argentine gaucho. Here is
a language in which form and content conjoin, in which the concrete
prevails over the abstract, in which simplicity carries more weight than
complexity. Sarmiento’s willingness to include himself, Echeverría, and
Domínguez—writers under the rubric of high art—with the gauchos,

who have their own, more rudimentary poetry, indicates a move toward
national consolidation. Though he distinguishes between the poetry
of the city and popular poetry, the separation arises in the context of a
shared trait: the rhythm shared by all those of Argentine descent. Here,
then, emerges something akin to respect for the primitive poetics of
the gauchos: “But this is learned poetry, the poetry of the city. There
is another kind whose echoes are heard through the solitary fields; the
popular poetry, innocent and disorderly, of the gaucho” (80; trans. in
Ross 62). Whether high or low, poetry serves as remedy, as innate, and
as spanning the classes. Poetry surfaces as the political expression of all
national souls. In the push toward an original expression, high art and
low art intersect with the discourse of geography, thereby allowing the
national form (aesthetically) to beget national consolidation (politically).
Explaining the “Unknown” Through Metaphor

Sarmiento ultimately succeeds in applauding the barbaric through what
appears, at least on the surface, to be a civilized mode of representa-
tion. Yet in reality, his language appeals to the rivals of civilization, to the
poetics of the gaucho, as it establishes alignments through metaphor. For
Vico, effective language—in his words, “poetic wisdom”—avoids exces-
sive complication, and thereby facilitates communication, by ground-
ing itself in concrete comparisons. The “first people” deny “rational and
abstract metaphysics” as they think through the “imaginative univer-
sal,” which is the predecessor of the metaphor: Jupiter is sky; Achilles is
bravery. Form and content are indistinguishable (144–147).
Sarmiento’s work reflects this discourse of alignments through meta-
phor. In Chap. 6, for example, Sarmiento enacts a detailing of La Rioja
comparable to that of Córdoba, insofar as the land serves to explain the
shortcomings of humanity. For the sake of context, I shall include the
entire passage:
De los Andes se desprenden ramificaciones que cortan la parte occidental

en líneas paralelas, en cuyos valles están Los Pueblos y Chilecito, así lla-
mado por los mineros chilenos que acudieron a la fama de las ricas minas
de Famatina. Más hacia el Oriente se extiende una llanura arenisca, desi-
erta y agostada por los ardores del sol, en cuya extremidad Norte, y a las
inmediaciones de una montaña cubierta hasta su cima de lozana y alta
112 A.S. MADAN
vegetación yace el esqueleto de la Rioja, ciudad solitaria, sin arrabales, y

marchita como Jerusalén al pie del Monte de los Olivos. Al Sur y a la larga
distancia, limitan esta llanura arenisca los Colorados, montes de greda pet-
rificada, cuyos cortes regulares asumen las formas más pintorescas y fantás-
ticas: a veces es una muralla lisa con bastiones avanzados; a veces créese
ver torreones y castillos almenados en ruinas. Últimamente, al Sudeste y
rodeados de extensas travesías, están los Llanos, país quebrado y monta-
ñoso, a despecho de su nombre, oasis de vegetación pastosa, que alimentó
en otro tiempo millares de rebaños.28
El aspecto del país es por lo general desolado, el clima abrasador, la tierra

seca y sin aguas corrientes. El campesino hace represa [emphasis in origi-
nal] para recoger el agua de las lluvias y dar de beber a sus ganados. He
tenido siempre la preocupación de que el aspecto de la Palestina es pare-
cido al de la Rioja, hasta en el color rojizo u ocre de la tierra, la sequedad
de algunas partes, y sus cisternas; hasta en sus naranjos, vides e higueras
de exquisitos y abultados frutos, que se crían donde corre algún cenagoso
y limitado Jordán. Hay una extraña combinación de montañas y llanuras,
de fertilidad y aridez, de montes adustos y erizados, y colinas verdinegras
tapizadas de vegetación tan colosal como los cedros de Líbano. Lo que
más me trae a la imaginación estas reminiscencias orientales, es el aspecto
verdaderamente patriarcal de los campesinos de la Rioja. Hoy, gracias a
los caprichos de la moda, no causa novedad de ver hombres con la barba
entera, a la manera inmemorial de los pueblos del oriente, pero aún no
dejaría de sorprender por eso la vista de un pueblo que habla español y
lleva y ha llevado siempre la barba completa, cayendo muchas veces hasta el
pecho; un pueblo de aspecto triste, taciturno, grave y taimado; árabe, que
cabalga en burros, y viste a veces de cuero de cabra, como el hermitaño de
Engaddy. Lugares hay en que la población se alimenta exclusivamente de
miel silvestre y de algarroba, como de langostas San Juan en el desierto. El
llanista es el único que ignora que es el ser más desgraciado, más miserable
y más bárbaro; y gracias a esto, vive contento y feliz cuando el hambre no
le acosa.29 (146-47, emphases mine)
Inhabitant and land intersect through language as Sarmiento writes

the terrain of La Rioja, jumping from the east, to the south, and then
finally to the southeast. He continues the metaphor of the Orient that
treads the whole narrative, albeit now more explicitly and concretely.
For Sarmiento’s Volksgeist orientation, man stems from land, therefore
because the land of La Rioja is like the Orient, the man too must be like
the Oriental. Notice the many similes and metaphors that the Argentine
statesman employs to align the two regions: “a solitary city with no
surrounding areas, withered like Jerusalem at the foot of the Mount of

Olives,” “idea that Palestine is similar in aspect to La Rioja, down to the
reddish or ocher color of the earth, the dryness of some areas, and their
cisterns; down to the orange and fig trees and grapevines with exquisite,
massive fruit, grown where some muddy, narrow Jordan flows,” and
“vegetation as colossal as the cedars of Lebanon”30 are some that stand
out. Sarmiento notes, moreover, that these “Oriental reminiscences”
bring to mind “the truly patriarchal aspect of the peasants in La Rioja,”
who, with their long beards “in the immemorial style of the Oriental
peoples,” ultimately shock those around them when they speak perfect
Spanish. Why so? Because, he contends, their countenances reveal not
the jovial and carefree expression of the Argentine, but rather the pained
one of the Arab: “a people of sad, taciturn, grave, and sly aspect, Arab-
like, riding on donkeys and sometimes dressed in goatskins, like the her-
mit of Engedi.”
Sarmiento is far from subtle in his comparisons between the Orient
and La Rioja. Rather, his metaphor conspicuously pushes the correla-
tion in the direction of the negative, the pejorative, the condescending.
To refer to the inhabitants of La Rioja as sharing characteristics with the
hermit of Engedi deprecates said inhabitants. Yet Sarmiento’s poetry
elevates those same inhabitants and the land on which they reside, con-
cluding that both are replete with contradictions. Sometimes the land is
one way, sometimes another, but it always contains “las formas más pin-
torescas y fantásticas” [most picturesque and fantastic forms]: “a veces es
una muralla lisa con bastiones avanzados; a veces créese ver torreones y
castillos almenados en ruinas” [sometimes it is a smooth wall with project-
ing bastions, sometimes one can see towers and the battlements of castles in
ruins]. Like the wall it describes, the first clause is initially smooth and
replete with vowel sounds (“muralla lisa,” “bastiones avanzados”) that
repeat and thereby give the sense of wholeness; the second, on the con-
trary, projects strong consonants (v, t, r, c, l, n) and therefore halted
flow, much like the very collapsed protrusions that it presumes to repre-
sent. Despite differences in message, pre- and post-semi-colon connect
through the repetition of “a veces” [sometimes], suggesting that both
images are part and parcel of the same package; that, in fact, both the
good and the bad are to be accepted as one.
Form and content unite beautifully in this segment of Facundo,
in particular as Sarmiento transitions from the first to the second para-
graph. Moving from smooth walls to battlements in ruins and on to the
114 A.S. MADAN
Llanos, which, he notes, are a “país quebrado y montañoso, a despecho

de su nombre” [broken and mountainous country in spite of its name], he
abruptly ends the paragraph; one is left with the sensation that the Llanos
break the flow of both the literal and the textual landscape despite the
notion of continuity that one might extract from their name. The para-
graph splits in two, and we arrive at a lengthy description of the Llanos;
now, there is no flow. To construct this desolate, burning hot, and dry
ambiance, Sarmiento cobbles together a dry, halted sentence, one punc-
tuated to the extremes and therefore staccato-like, “sin aguas corri-
entes” [without flowing water]. As soon as “the narrow Jordan flows,”
however, Sarmiento picks up the tempo with a polysyndetonic series of
“y” as well as the anaphoric “de,” thereby emphasizing the contradic-
tion, the “strange combination” that characterizes Argentina. The closing
slew of polysyllabic words (“colinas verdinegras tapizadas de vegetación
tan colosal”) carpets both the literal and the textual landscape with its
expanse, ultimately entangling and enveloping readers.
Yet who does Sarmiento wish to entangle and envelope? Given his
tone, his attention to detail, and his constant comparison between the
presumably known/written (the Orient) and the unknown/unwrit-
ten (La Rioja), Sarmiento writes this first text of Argentine geography
to a specific audience: readers unfamiliar with the terrain. This category
could include Argentine readers (if so, the narrative functions as a didac-
tic geography) or European readers (to whom he markets an immigrants’
guide). Obliged to paint an accurate textual picture for these two audi-
ences, Sarmiento cautiously includes all the characteristics—positive and
negative—of the subject and land composing the national geography.
He nevertheless minimizes the effect of the negative by comparing the
situation to one already known and, on some level, already conquered:
the Orient. Sarmiento’s intrigue with attracting European immigrants to
South America begins with his visits, at the behest of the Chilean gov-
ernment, to France, Spain, and Algiers. The French defeat of the Arab
horsemen—to his mind, the Arab equivalent of the Argentine gaucho—
impresses him, as does the subsequent French colonization and eco-
nomic development in Algiers (Bunkley 261–266). In Sarmiento’s view,
European immigration can quash the Argentine land’s barbaric tenden-
cies in the same way that French colonization allegedly aids the mod-
ernization process in Algiers, for the lands, united by metaphor, are the
same. Lest the European immigrant fear Argentine barbarism, Sarmiento
cannot but include a familiar solution.
Sarmiento attempts to assuage any fears regarding the unknown

lands by writing them and thereby making them known. Clarifying
not only the similarities but also the differences between Europe and
the Americas, he describes Argentina as a safe harbor, protected from
“other illnesses […] known in Europe” where the climate “is analo-
gous to that of Andalucía in Spain and that of noontime in France”
(Obras 23: 156–157). Because familiarity leads to comfort, and
because he writes, in part, to a European audience, Sarmiento pro-
motes the Argentine terrain as similar to Europe but better. He takes
care to define patiently why Buenos Aires received such a name (the
naming colonizers were “charmed to breathe such pure air”), what
sort of land composes the Pampa (“a land of plains, without trees,
and as equal and united that in every direction carriages roll on”), and
what exactly “estancieros” means (“farmers,” he writes in English;
Obras 23: 158–159). These definitions indicate that the intended
recipient falls, potentially, in the category of the non-Spanish speaker—
that is, the European or North American.
Though Sarmiento underscores national independence—both intel-
lectual and political—throughout his narratives, he, like so many of his
contemporaries (Pérez Rosales, for instance), seems willing to perpetuate
colonial hegemony through European and/or North American immi-
gration. Whereas his initial impulse toward immigration (pre-1880s)
bears the aim of civilization and modernization through integration,
Sarmiento’s later writings (post-1880s) reveal his discontent: the immi-
grant groups, particularly the Italians, refuse to integrate. Contrary to
the Germans he so actively seeks, the Italians cross the Atlantic in vast
numbers and unify through their exclusive schools; the curricula in these
institutions include Italian language, history, and geography—indeed, all
the ingredients necessary for the nationalism recipe (Favero 180–181).
Sarmiento fumes at the thought of these schools, begrudged by the pres-
ence of “an Italy in America, giving an Italian education in schools to
little Americans, such that they begin now to absorb Italy’s monarquic
ideas, in their war with the Papacy, in their aspirations for an unrepent-
ant Italy, because at end we do not know other traits that distinguish an
Italian Argentine from an Argentine Italian” (Obras 36: 69, emphases in
original). His concerns relate to both nationalism and national defense.
These schools—“in which one pays to get educated Italian-ly, that is,
in the name of another country, and to raise as foreign those children
who were born here”—create Italian nationals who settle into hamlets
116 A.S. MADAN
from where, he fears, they might assist Italy in colonizing Argentina:

“Let us suppose, God forbid, that one of those students educated
Italian-ly comes to be Minister of War or of Foreign Relations, and
one day […], Italianizes us or betrays us, which is the same, obeying
his Italian education and working like a foreigner” (Obras 36: 71–72,
emphases in original). Without integration, Sarmiento posits, immigra-
tion essentially gifts parcels of land and allows for potential recoloniza-
tion by citizens uncommitted to their citizenship.
In his early writings—Facundo (1845) and “Emigración alemana al
Río de la Plata” (1847)—Sarmiento pays less attention to integration
and proper declaration of nationality. His uses of nosotros [“we”] evince
his own wavering and undefined patria: at times he is a Spaniard (“los
españoles no somos ni navegantes ni industriosos” [we Spaniards are
neither sailors nor industrious]) and at others an American (“los america-
nos conocemos todo, entendemos de todo un poco, menos de las cosas
americanas” [we Americans know everything, we understand a bit of eve-
rything, except American things]). We even see a tormented Sarmiento
sympathize with both sides (Spanish and American) in a reply to Chilean
writer José Victorino Lastarria’s report on Spanish cruelty during the
conquest. In the 1844 letter, Sarmiento defends Spain, declaring:
Because we need to be fair with the Spanish; to exterminate a savage peo-

ple whose territory they were going to occupy, they simply did what all
civilized people did with savages, what the colony carries out intention-
ally or unintentionally with the indigenous: absorb, destroy, exterminate.
(Obras 2: 217–218)
Aware of understandable distaste for the Spaniards’ colonizing policies,

Sarmiento employs a measured rhetoric to build up to his final mes-
sage—absorb, destroy, and exterminate continue as viable solutions
to resolve the “Indian problem.” European immigration allows for the
most benign of the three options: absorption. Benign though it may
be, absorption’s efficacy is limited by the foreign group’s willingness to
integrate into the nation. Thus, while populating via immigration might
intend to reaffirm the nationalistic impulse, immigration potentially con-
tradicts the thrust toward independence. It encourages non-Americans
to take the reins of the country and serve their interests, exemplified
in the italianización of Argentina. If Sarmiento’s didactic geography
encourages Americans to take the national reins (i.e., write and know
their lands), then to attract immigrants through a marketable geography

challenges the independence project.
Alongside and Against
Sarmiento’s contradictions advance the narrative in Facundo. Though

he seeks authority in Alexander von Humboldt’s geographical discourse,
he refuses simply to reproduce the Occidental mode of representation.
Rather, Sarmiento literarily simulates consolidation—and thereby territo-
rialization—of the Argentine nation via the political project of Facundo.
He stakes claim on both the literary and geographical space of his coun-
try by underwriting politics with an aesthetic of domination; he writes
the earth in ways that demand to be unearthed.
Directing this national product—land and letters—to his fellow
Argentines as well as to potential immigrants, Sarmiento the Geographer
describes the nation’s productive qualities, particularly its wide network
of waterways. This detailing never strays from literary language. While
giving form to the Argentine land through a range of literary devices,
Sarmiento’s use of metaphor reveals the tensions that ultimately shape
Latin American identity. First, he elevates the barbaric by revising the
“civilized” geographies of the Old World. The Argentine nation remains
incomplete and ill defined without the barbaric, without Vico’s primi-
tives. Yet Vico’s primitives and their immediately sensual poetry repre-
sent Sarmiento’s fear: that he (Argentina) might be “primitive,” and,
above all, the need to resolve that fact. Second, his metaphor conjoins
the known and the unknown, thereby marketing the Argentine geogra-
phy as not entirely foreign and exerting a pull on national and immi-
grant populations. In this sense, Sarmiento’s new national discourse
writes alongside and against the formation of geographical institutions,
alongside and against civilization’s maps, alongside and against barba-
rism’s baqueanos. Resting on the sometimes uncomfortable conjunction
and, Sarmiento’s Hegelian dialectics leave no choice but to accept, even
cement, the contradiction at the heart of Latin American narrative: to
embrace the land’s singular quality—its barbarism—and, simultaneously,
to dilute it by introducing European civilization.
118 A.S. MADAN
Notes
1. In cartography Sarmiento finds defense from the baqueano, an indigenous
tracker at one with the land and capable of reading its signposts; he is one
of the many human fauna that Sarmiento beautifully details in Facundo.
Knowing that the baqueano can easily navigate the land’s every nook and
cranny and thereby defeat any city-dwelling military, Sarmiento decides
that a civilized nation needs a textual rather than a human map. The fig-
ure of the baqueano is significant because he represents indigenous modes
of knowledge, which are in stark contrast to the maps and instruments
of Western civilization. Sarmiento simultaneously fears and respects the
power of such knowledge.
2. Fermín Rodríguez, in his “Sarmiento en el desierto: exceso de vida,
instinto de muerte,” examines Sarmiento’s engagement with the space of
the Pampa, in particular the ways in which “conquest” [vencer] becomes
necessarily aligned with dominating space through a language of war
(1121).
3. Carlos Moreno explains the antecedents for geographical exploration in
Argentina, noting that the first Jesuit priests sought knowledge of the
land for purposes of excavation and profit (4).
4. Each of the authors studied in this project will come to exemplify this
crux in Latin American geography—in other words, the impulse to know
the land in an effort to defend it from interior and exterior forces, rather
than knowing it for the sake of exploitation. In this sense, they prefig-
ure contemporary ecocritical tenets while always contradicting them with
their stance toward progress. Sarmiento himself has been the subject
(or point of departure) of numerous recent environmentally oriented
studies (see De Vries 2013; Hiller 2013; Palacio 2012; Zimmer 2013).
5. Pompeyo Moneta published an 1867 study on the feasibility of extend-
ing the Argentine railway from Córdoba to Jujuy, and his map, which
was contracted in 1873, was finally completed in 1875. That same year
also saw the publication of Arthur von Seelstrang and A. Tourmente’s
map, which includes the hotly contested Patagonian territory and illumi-
nates border disputes between Argentina and Chile. Their map, pictured
at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b530253461, was commis-
sioned for the Centennial International Exhibition, held in Philadelphia
in 1876, illuminating the ways in which the image would confirm “truly”
Argentine territory for the international community.
6. For a more detailed historical chronology of cartography in the Argentine
territory, see Guillermo Schulz (1948).
7. Whereas Facundo does not explicitly embrace the empiricism of science,
Sarmiento’s other narratives often include an overwhelming quantity
of data and statistics, most often to the end of attracting immigrants
through their folletín qualities. See Campaña en el ejército grande

(1852 [1958]), especially starting on p. 236, as well as Obras Completas
23: 157. But as I have tried to illustrate throughout this study, it is pre-
cisely philosophical speculation over and above empirical data that con-
tributes to any geography’s lasting (or not) legacy.
8. Sarmiento’s orthography evolves from piece to piece; I will respect the
integrity of the original spelling.
9. The Argentine representative to the Geographic Congress, Carlos Calvo,
reproduces the former President’s words as a means of demonstrating the
national commitment to geographical knowledge.
10. This is not to deny Sarmiento’s esteem for national writers, namely the
Argentine naturalist Francisco Javier Muñiz (1795–1891). Sarmiento
commends Muñiz for describing “our way of being,” “the words added
to our language from the use of the lands,” and “other particularities of
our country” without getting bogged down in pure imitation: “We have
had writers, wisemen, statesmen and poets that have written epic poems.
Little would have been lost to the world with the loss of their words,
although we would lose something by being copies, even weak ones, of
the grand classical and artistic model that abound in Europe” (Obras 43:
10). For Sarmiento, then, Muñiz already embodies the essential peculiari-
ties of transculturated geographical discourse, for he forges new ground
rather than purely imitating European classics. Sarmiento uses the word
peculiaridades or its multiple variants at least 13 times through Facundo.
This notion of “peculiarity” continues in other Sarmentine writings,
specifically in the introduction to Muñiz’s Escritos Científicos: Naturales
Argentinas (1916), in which Sarmiento contends that the nation’s pecu-
liarities and particularities can only be fleshed out through “a scientific
and literary movement”; Muñiz succeeds with precisely this amalgama-
tion: “He impartially calls his attention to how very peculiar is the coun-
try he inhabits, and it suffices to read the preambles to his notes to catch
a glimpse of the fact that with him begins a scientific and literary move-
ment that has as its object of study ourselves and the country in which we
live” (Obras 43: 9). The passage illustrates Sarmiento’s cognizance of the
ways in which science, literature, and nation intertwine with Múñiz’s pio-
neering, if peculiar, style.
11. In their annotations of Facundo (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho 1977),
Nora Dottori and Silvia Zanetti indicate that Sarmiento’s citation comes
not from Sir Francis Bond Head, but rather from Humboldt’s Tableaux
de la nature (1808), vol. I, p. 21 (35n1). In her 2003 translation of
Facundo, Kathleen Ross translates the epigraph as: “The expanse of the
Pampas is so huge, that to the north it is bordered by forests of palms,
and to the south by eternal snows” (264).
120 A.S. MADAN
12. Ibid. “Like the ocean, the steppe fills the soul with a feeling of infinity”
(265). She notes, too, that the quotation comes from Humboldt’s Voyage
aux regions équinoxiales du Noveau Continent (1816).
13. Sarmiento’s fascination with Tocqueville is also a result of their shared
intrigue with the USA. In her biography The Life of Sarmiento (1952),
Allison Williams Bunkley notes an important difference, however:
Tocqueville eventually found himself disenchanted with democracy,
whereas Sarmiento walks away from the USA entirely enchanted. See
Chap. 24 (pp. 299–307) of her work for a comparative analysis of the
two thinkers.
14. Through his relationship with Mary Mann (widow of the North American
educator Horace Mann and translator of the first English edition of
Facundo), Sarmiento comes to meet the German astronomer Benjamin
Gould, whom he eventually contracts to found and run the Observatorio
Astronómico in Córdoba. When describing his first meeting with Gould,
Sarmiento includes the astronomer on a list with other celebrities of
the time. Of note is that Gould’s celebrity status stems from his ties to
Humboldt (Bombini 81).
15. This intrigue with the metaphysical implication of the horizon begins with
Humboldt and surfaces through Sarmiento, Zeballos, and da Cunha,
even making an appearance in twentieth-century classics like La vorágine
and Doña Bárbara.
16. In passages that require close textual analysis of the Spanish language, I
will provide the translation via footnote: “The inhabited part of this
country, so privileged in riches and containing all manner of climates,
may be divided into three distinct physiognomies that imprint different
qualities on the populace, according to the way in which it must come
to terms with the nature that surrounds it. In the north, melding into
the Chaco, a dense forest with impenetrable branches covers the expanses
we would call unheard of, were there anything unheard of about colossal
forms anywhere in the entire expanse of America. In the center, paral-
lel zone, the Pampas and the jungle dispute the land for a long while;
the forest dominates in places, then breaks down into sickly, spiny bushes;
the jungle appears again thanks to some river that favors it, until in the
south the Pampas finally triumph and display their smooth, downy brow,
infinite, with no known limit, no noteworthy break. It is an image of the
sea on land, the land as it looks on the map, the land still waiting for a
command to produce plants and all kinds of seed. As a notable feature of
the physiognomy of this country, one could indicate the agglomeration
of navigable rivers that meet in the east, from all points on the horizon,
to unite in the Plata and gravely present their stupendous tribute to the
ocean, which takes it on the flank, not without visible signs of turbulence
and respect” (Ross 46–47).
17. The notion of infinite expanse arises on several occasions in the rest of

Sarmiento’s corpus, particularly as he attempts to draw German immi-
grants to the Argentine Pampa. Because he perceives the need to out-
shine the USA, he tends to underscore two related facts: the vastness of
the land and its proximity to rivers. In his piece “Emigración alemana al
Río de la Plata,” he writes of “lands of an expanse without limits” (155),
of the “immense expanse of a country equal in surface area to Europe”
(156)—a land that is “unpopulated” and in need of occupants, to be
sure—and of the “immense plans,” a “sea of greenery,” “an unlimited
carpet that gets lost on the horizon” (Obras Completas 23: 158–159).
Note, too, that he continues the Humboldtian water metaphor with the
“sea of greenery.”
18. “I have lived in these recent times committed to a monomania that has
been nagging at all my writings for the last 5 years. The Argentine rivers!
They have been my golden dream, the hallucination of my worries, the
utopia of my political systems, the panacea for our ills, the topic of my
reflections and if I had known how to measure verse, the subject of an
eternal poem.”
19. I refrain from counting meter or attempting to qualify Sarmiento as a
proper poet in this project; to do so does not better my reading of his
language as related to geographical discourse. For an in-depth analy-
sis of Sarmiento’s verse, see Horacio Castillo’s Sarmiento Poeta (2007),
particularly pp. 153–164, in which Castillo reads what he calls Facundo’s
implicit poetry.
20. “[O]ne could indicate the agglomeration of navigable rivers that meet in
the east, from all points on the horizon, to unite in the Plata and gravely
present stupendous tribute to the ocean, which takes it on the flank, not
without visible signs of turbulence and respect” (trans. in Ross 46–47).
21. “To what point this may influence the spirit of a people concerned with
these ideas for two centuries, one cannot say; but it must have some
influence, because you see how the inhabitant of Córdoba casts his eyes
around him and does not see open space; the horizon is four blocks
beyond the plaza. He goes out in the afternoon for a stroll, and instead
of coming and going down a street of poplars that broadens the soul and
enlivens it, long and spacious like the stream through Santiago, he circles
around an artificial lake of motionless water, lifeless, in whose center is a
pavilion of majestic, but immobile, stationary form. The city is a cloister,
locked in by cliffs; the promenade is a cloister with an iron fence; every
block has a cloister of nuns or monks; the colleges are cloisters; the leg-
islation that is taught, theology; the entire scholastic knowledge of the
Middle Ages is a cloister, in which intelligence locks itself in and parapets
itself against all that may come from the text and its commentary” (trans.
in Ross 119)
122 A.S. MADAN
22. A believer in the dialectical relationship between organisms and their

environment, Sarmiento was heavily influenced by the general thought
of the time, which stemmed from a distorted reading of the works of
Herder and his subsequent adherents. Deeply immersed in the study of
geography, climate, and history, these scholars thought that these past
and present exterior factors had the potential to shed light on contem-
porary internal qualities and characteristics of humankind. In line with
this thinking, argues William H. Katra in his study Domingo F. Sarmiento:
Public Writer (1985), Sarmiento was informed by the particularities of
the Volksgeist, “which proposes that events were largely influenced by
the physical environment and that the leaders of social struggles were
to a great degree the personifications of the forces of nature” (145).
Katra contends that the Volksgeist orientation—whose roots are planted
in Vichean thought and potentially traced their way to Sarmiento via
Herder—was commonplace in the nineteenth-century French historical
school, thus Sarmiento might have been influenced by Tocqueville as well
(146). No matter the source of Sarmiento’s ideological framework, the
idea of Volksgeist and his abidance by its tenets are crucial to any under-
standing of his purported exposé of the caudillo regime in Argentina. I
say “purported,” because he reveals and combats the particularities of
both Facundo and Rosas, but also explicates the systematic debilities that
allowed for their ascendancy in the first place. In view of this, Sarmiento
writes an entire section detailing the geographical and anthropological
antecedents that “influenced” these leaders, thereby opportunistically
employing the Volksgeist historical orientation to deliver his ideological
lines and advance his political project.
23. The Minister of Justice and Public Education under the administration of
President Manuel Bulnes, Manuel Montt becomes something of a men-
tor to Sarmiento during his exile in Chile. Montt’s belief in education
and immigration, which ultimately infects Sarmiento, leads him to con-
sider populating the “empty” lands of southern Chile with European
immigrants. To this end, he sends Sarmiento to Europe late in 1845 in
an effort to better understand the French methods of colonization in
Algiers as well their education system. Sarmiento’s thoughts on immigra-
tion thus begin in these early years of his career, and they are intrinsically
connected with ideas of (re)colonization. See Samuel L. Baily (1993):
131–141.
24. In Viajes por Europa, África i América 1845–1847, Sarmiento indicates
his desire to circulate his works through Paris, which is, to his mind, the
Mecca of literature (102). And, not unmodestly, Sarmiento includes him-
self as the American representative in the halls of literature, if only to learn
from the masters “Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Dumas, Jaquemont” (7).
25. See, for example, the end of Facundo’s Chap. 6, in which Sarmiento

defends his periodic exclusions as based on literary ambitions: “I tire of
reading infamies, confirmed in all the manuscripts I consult. I sacrifice
their telling to an author’s vanity, to literary aspirations. By saying more,
the scenes would end up overdone, mean, repulsive” (163; trans. in Ross
115). At the end of Chap. 13, contrarily, Sarmiento recounts the night of
Facundo’s death, noting that he has omitted no details in order to tell the
story most effectively (303).
26. “The result is that the Argentine people are poets by character, by nature.
How could they not be, when, in the middle of a serene, pleasant after-
noon, a grim, black cloud appears from who knows where, stretches itself
across the sky before two words can be said, and suddenly a stampede of
thunder announces a storm that leaves the traveler cold and holding his
breath, for fear of attracting one of the thousands of lightening bolts com-
ing down around him? Darkness is followed by light; death is everywhere;
a terrible, incomparable power in one moment has made him go inside
himself and feel his nothingness in the midst of that disturbed nature, to
feel God, to put it plainly, in the terrifying magnificence of His works. Is
this color enough for the palette of fantasy? Masses of darkness that cloud
the day, masses of trembling, livid light that illuminate the darkness for
an instant and show the infinite distance of the Pampas, lightening flash-
ing across them, the final symbol of power. These images are meant to
stay deeply engraved. Thus, when the storm passes, the gaucho is left sad,
pensive, serious, and the succession of light and darkness continues in his
imagination, in the same way that the disk of the sun stays on the retina
for a long time when we stare at it” (trans. in Ross 61).
27. Upon comparing Sarmiento’s novelty first to Bello and then to Heredia,
González Echevarría suggests that while the latter were “corseted by
neoclassical poetics,” Sarmiento, “a romantic, wrote, untrammeled by the
demands of form” (2, emphasis mine). Although the critic’s contention—
that Sarmiento feels less than obliged to the strict formalism of Bello
and Heredia—is rather benign, he ultimately implies that the Argentine
indulged in something of a formlessness. Here, González Echevarría acqui-
esces to the reading already mandated by Sarmiento himself; in his 1851
letter to Valentín Alsina—in which he defends Facundo’s methodological
shortcomings—the Argentine statesman speaks of his narrative as some-
thing of a myth, a drama, a formless work, which, if constrained by any
structural formulation, might lose its primitive physiognomy: “I have
slowly used your amazing notes, putting aside the most substantial for
better times and more mediated works, fearful that by retouching such
a formless work, its primitive physiognomy might disappear” (51–52,
emphasis mine). Sarmiento thus encourages the reading eventually
124 A.S. MADAN
enacted by González Echevarría, whose ambiguity suggests that despite

an awareness of Sarmiento’s formal strategies—metaphor in particu-
lar—and stylized descriptions, he continues to gloss over the subtleties
of the Sarmentine form in relation to the Latin American landscape. In
particular, González Echevarría briefly appeals to the text’s metaphor as
one in a constant state of engagement with nature, in which “we must
be ready to read the opposite of what words appear to mean” (245). He
underscores—in passing—Sarmiento’s beautiful natural descriptions, par-
ticularly the detailing in the famous tiger scene (247). While González
Echevarría alludes to the political significance behind Sarmiento’s stylized
details, he stops there. His acute observations thus fall by the wayside, for
he does nothing to sustain them in the face of “formlessness.”
28. “Branches of the Andes break off and cut into its western part with paral-
lel lines, in whose valleys are Los Pueblos and Chilecito, named for the
Chilean miners who went there because of the fame of the rich Famatina
mines. Further to the east extends a sandy plain, deserted, parched by the
heat of the sun, at whose northern extreme, alongside a mountain cov-
ered to the summit with luxuriant, high vegetation, lies the skeleton of La
Rioja, a solitary city with no surrounding areas, withered like Jerusalem
at the foot of the Mount of Olives. To the south, at a far distance, this
sandy plain is bordered by the Colorados, mountains of petrified chalk,
whose regular outline takes on the most picturesque and fantastic of
forms: sometimes it is a smooth wall with projecting bastions, sometimes
one can see towers and the battlements of castles in ruins. Finally, to the
southeast and surrounded by extensive travesías, are the Llanos, broken
and mountainous country in spite of its name, an oasis of pasturage that
in other times fed thousands of flocks” (trans. in Ross 103).
29. “The aspect of this countryside is, in general, desolate; the climate, burn-
ing hot; the earth, dry and without flowing water. The peasant makes res-
ervoirs to collect rainwater and give drink to his livestock. I have always
had the idea that Palestine is similar in aspect to La Rioja, down to the
reddish or ocher color of the earth, the dryness of some areas, and their
cisterns; down to the orange and fig trees and grapevines with exquisite,
massive fruit, grown where some muddy, narrow Jordan flows. There
is a strange combination of mountains and plains, fertility and aridness,
gloomy, bristling mountains and gray-green hills carpeted with vegeta-
tion as colossal as the cedars of Lebanon. What most brings this Oriental
reminiscence to my mind is the truly patriarchal aspect of the peasants in
La Rioja. Today, thanks to the whims of fashion, it isn’t a novelty to see
men with full beards, in the immemorial style of the Oriental peoples.
But even so, the vision of a people that speaks Spanish and wears, and has
always worn, complete beards often falling to the chest, still would not
fail to surprise; a people of sad, taciturn, grave, and sly aspect, Arab-like,
riding on donkeys and sometimes dressed in goatskins, like the hermit
of Engedi. There exist places where the population eats only wild honey
and carob beans, as John the Baptist ate locusts in the desert. The llanista
is the only one unaware that he is the most unfortunate, most wretched,
and most barbarous of beings and thanks to this, he lives contented and
happy when not beset by hunger (trans. in Ross 104).
30. “ciudad solitaria, sin arrabales, y marchita como Jerusalén al pie del Monte
de los Olivos,” “el aspecto de la Palestina es parecido al de la Rioja, hasta
en el color rojizo u ocre de la tierra, la sequedad de algunas partes, y sus
cisternas; hasta en sus naranjos, vides e higueras de exquisitos y abulta-
dos frutos, que se crían donde corre algún cenagoso y limitado Jordán,”
“vegetación tan colosal como los cedros de Líbano.”
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Instituto de Estudios Geográficos, 1948.
Zimmer, Zac. “Barbarism in the Muck of the Present: Dystopia and the
Postapocalyptic from Pinedo to Sarmiento.” Latin American Research Review
48.2 (2013): 131–147.
CHAPTER 4
Estanislao Severos Zeballos

and the Transatlantic Science
of Statecraft
The geographer, who is civilization’s emissary, must be at the vanguard of any army
that traverses wild countries across unexplored terrain.
—Estanislao S. Zeballos,
La conquista de quince mil leguas (1879)1
In a 1916 issue of La Nota, an unnamed author published a scathing

political satire on Argentine geographer, engineer, journalist, linguist,
lawyer, professor, diplomat, politician, and writer Estanislao Severo
Zeballos (1854–1923). Accompanied by caricatures from the famous
political cartoonist Ramón Columba, the piece ridicules Zeballos for
his recently announced presidential candidacy, claiming that, like the
doomed Kaiser whom he looks down upon in the drawing, Zeballos is an
utterly failed diplomat (Fig. 4.1).
The piece takes Zeballos to task for his infallible belief in himself
(“He’s a man who before anything believes in himself. […] His party
is himself, [and] his personality exceeds his ideas” [502–503]); in his
literary acumen, this despite scarce readership (“Perhaps his aspiration
has been this: write it himself, read it himself [501]), and in his (abys-
mal) role as Minister of Foreign Relations (“In only one thing has he
always failed and that’s why he has especially dedicated himself to it:
international relations” [501].)
There is no doubt that controversy and poor decision-making checker
Zeballos’s political career. As the satire notes, he nearly spawned a war

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55140-1_4
128 A.S. MADAN
Fig. 4.1 Untitled caricature by Ramón Columba (1916) in “Siluetas políticas:

Estanislao S. Zeballos” in La Nota
with neighboring Brazil during his turbulent third term as Foreign

Minister. Yet there is also no doubt that he helped shepherd Argentina
into its current incarnation as a modern nation-state.
Born into a military family in the province of Sante Fe, Zeballos
moved to Buenos Aires to study at the Colegio Nacional, where he
began a fruitful career as a journalist whose writings crossed generic
boundaries between editorial, non-fiction, fiction, and political essay.
During the years 1875–1876 he participated in a divisive controversy
regarding the best strategy for combating the indigenous inhabitants of
the Pampa. The powers-that-be ultimately chose warfare over diplomacy.
4 ESTANISLAO SEVEROS ZEBALLOS AND THE TRANSATLANTIC SCIENCE … 129
And so, in 1878, at the behest of Minister Julio Argentino Roca,

Zeballos published La conquista de quince mil leguas, a text aimed at
convincing members of the National Congress to economically support
the offensive war, also known as the “desert campaign.” Beyond his work
toward the ideological construction and visual conquest of the desert,
Zeballos was a founding member of the Sociedad Científica Argentina
(1872), and created and directed the Instituto Geográfico Argentino
(1879) as well as its publishing organ, Boletín del Instituto Geográfico
Argentino. Together with his volumes of politicized narrative, Zeballos’s
contributions to institutionalizing the sciences (in general) and geogra-
phy (in particular) make him an undeniably important figure, whether
easy to poke fun at or not.
Yet Zeballos has never been known for being a “good” writer. In fact,
his penchant for aesthetics has been dismissed or even mocked, both
in his times and in ours.2 The 1916 political satire with which I began
aligns Zeballos’s political death with a defunct literary life—“a beauti-
ful political cadaver” whose “literary life continued in the political sep-
ulcher,” a figure who so desperately sought fame for his poorly received
and “ridiculed” Painé y la dinastía de los zorros (1886) that he had it
translated to French and distributed to Parisian bookstores in hopes of
better reception in Europe (501). The books must have been lost, the
article jests, because “although in Buenos Aires the translation was
announced, the same didn’t happen in France’s capital” (501).3
In this chapter I aim to relocate Zeballos’s multigenre corpus, to
uncover its potential to help us understand the critical political juncture
between geography and literature in Latin America’s long nineteenth
century. I argue that Zeballos’s pieces are worth examining precisely
because they are not good in the traditional sense, precisely because the
common denominator of critical entry into his corpus is a focus on his
singular lack of literary talent—precisely because his multivolume tomes
never entered the canons of Latin American literature. Yet why would
an otherwise shrewd statesman continue to nourish a failed register for
which he had received copious negative attention?
Like the other figures of this study, Zeballos finds in geographical dis-
course the medium by which to articulate the emergent nation-state’s
contradictions and, in particular, to make sense of its diverse inhabit-
ants and terrain. However, he does so in a manner that is an intermezzo
between Sarmiento and da Cunha, for it sheds light on the interior
movements of a discipline and state in formation by an actor who never
130 A.S. MADAN
became head of state or of literati—an actor who was most notoriously

known as head of an extermination campaign. Zeballos thus stands apart
from Sarmiento and da Cunha both politically and literarily, at once
more invested in the institutionalization of geography and less in the
human inhabitants of the Argentine territory. Yet so much of his writ-
ing emphasizes the nation-state’s plural subjectivities because they—like
the land upon which they reside—are the source of an autochthonous
authenticity. This contradictory formula emerges in Sarmiento, as I have
shown in Chap. 3, but it takes upon a distinct and more condemnable air
in Zeballos because his aesthetics are less successful. The Zeballos archive
puts a spotlight on the ways in which literature and geography necessar-
ily, and even messily, collide in fin-de-siècle projects of Latin American
national consolidation. His writings reveal an emancipatory compul-
sion grounded in aesthetics in ways entirely distinct from—and perhaps
more successful than—the geographical work happening in coeval Spain,
an empire losing its last threads of power because of its very negligence
of the discipline of geography. At bottom, Zeballos spells out and often
theorizes the essential attributes of geographical discourse, even if he fails
to put them into practice.
I have divided what follows into three parts. In Part I, I tackle a
pair of early Zeballos texts, La conquista de quince mil leguas (1878)
and La rejión de trigo (1883), to illustrate Zeballos’s indebted-
ness to Sarmiento’s ideas on immigration as well as those on the role
of the geographer. I continue unpacking Zeballos’s theorization of
the geographer in a heretofore unanalyzed and curious piece titled
“Apuntaciones para una bibliografía argentina,” which he serially pub-
lished in the Boletín del Instituto Geográfico Argentino between 1897
and 1898. By illuminating and finding meaning in Zeballos’s evalua-
tive criteria for texts both praised and criticized, I identify several sali-
ent characteristics of a transculturated geographical discourse unique
to Latin America. I pay special attention to his entry on Marcos
Arredondo’s Croquis Bonaerenses (1896), a text illustrative of (1)
Zeballos’s valuing of the textual over the cartographic, and (2) a new
literary form in service of national consolidation. Zeballos’s anno-
tated bibliography in “Apuntaciones…”—a rendition of a national
inventory characteristic of the nineteenth-century lettered city—allows
a segue to his transatlantic counterpart in Part II, which focuses on
the Spanish geographer Joaquín Costa, a Spanish politician, lawyer,
economist, and historian who spearheaded the Spanish movement of
regeneration by homing in on the nexus between geography and com-

merce. Zeballos and Costa respectively lay bare the ways in which both
states and empires are united as much by information as by force. Yet,
despite this shared impetus to compile and catalogue, my sense is that
if Zeballos is representative of Latin America’s return to philosophical
speculation and the original tenets of Strabonic geography, then Costa
proves just the opposite in his empirical quest to itemize and inven-
tory Spanish possessions in the New World vis-à-vis his Sociedad de
Geografía Comercial and Spain’s Museos Comerciales. These museums
represent a new definition of conquest in which a former hegemonic
power establishes the intellectual scaffolding for a commercial empire,
which ultimately falls; Spain, after all, loses its last colonies. Finally, in
Part III, I return south and draw attention to Zeballos’s embroilment
in territorial feuds with neighboring nation-states, in particular Chile,
Uruguay, and Brazil. By unpacking these antagonistic entanglements
and Zeballos’s failed attempt at diplomacy, I further evince his pivotal
role as a fulcrum who ultimately connects the larger pieces of hemi-
spheric literary geographies.
State Formation, Canon Formation

Starting with his earliest writings such as La rejión del trigo (1883)—the
second part of a tripartite sequence of geographical narratives under the
title Descripción amena de la República Argentina—the problem that
surges again and again in Zeballos is that of territorial expanse: how are
the emergent nation-states to wrangle in the sprawling geography and
thereby unify territories and peoples? In his 1902 inaugural lecture for
the Course on Private Law at the University of Buenos Aires, for exam-
ple, Zeballos explains that “just as it is difficult to govern territories as
vast as those of Brazil, and it has been arduous to organize and govern
the Argentine Republic while its members lived poorly communicat-
ing with one another across long distances, in the same way it would be
impossible to govern Humanity” (438). A necessary corollary of the dis-
tance challenge is to populate these tracts of “empty” lands, since “[a]
ll Argentine problems are subordinate to the problem of population.
Without it we will not be rich, without it we will not be free, without it
we will not subjugate the barbarism of the deserts that form six-eighths
of the Nation” (La rejión del trigo 181). Zeballos worries about the same
problem that troubled Sarmiento 40 years prior to the 1883 publication
132 A.S. MADAN
of La rejión del trigo and nearly half a century before Zeballos’s own
Course on Private Law.4
However, akin to his contemporaries in the throes of industrialization,
Zeballos offers a concrete solution: the railroad, which is to say, tracks of
steel providing both an instrumental and an iconographic marker of before
and after, of primitive and progressive, of separate and unified. In La rejión
del trigo he emphasizes that, after a period of anarchy prompted by civil
wars in Santa Fe, the train came to symbolize “a new dawn,” the opening
notes of the rumbling symphony of modernity and an overture of money
to be earned (13). The “barbarism” of the barren desert—dappled by the
death, desolation, and “Indians” that stalled any national project—could
be surmounted with this first hint of civilization, with the first tracks laid
in Bell Ville in 1866, in Villa María in 1867, and in Córdoba in 1870.
While Zeballos recognizes the challenges of steel cutting through
the sparsely inhabited space, he insists that the train’s power to attract
European colonizers cannot be underestimated; nor can its promise of
regional transformation. His exposition looks to the antithetical of a jux-
taposed before and after. He choreographs an image of Argentina as a
linked nation and economy, thereby conveying to immigrants and inves-
tors that Argentina had, in Engels’s words, “the means of communica-
tion adequate to modern means of production” (qtd. in Hobsbawm,
The Age of Capital 33). For Zeballos, the trifecta of the train, European
immigration, and extensive agriculture can best be understood as the
seeds for Argentina’s growth from a primitive, poor, and violent past to
a Hegelian future firmly planted in modernity. Yet how to ensure that,
first, the most amenable Europeans settle the lands and, second, they
install themselves with some sort of permanence?
And this is where Zeballos’s commitment to the imaginary of geo-
graphical discourse shines: he insists that a true transformation of the
European settlers depends on knowledge of Argentine geography and
the Spanish language. Only once immigrants understand the land and
language do they find happiness and a commitment to the nation:
Look at the colonist on the dock, poor, helpless, driven there after having
been disembarked at the expense of the Government, without family, with-
out capital, without a clear-cut path, ignorant of the Argentine geography
and the Castilian language, full of embarrassment and the palpitations that
agitate the heart at the supreme moment in which man stands face to face
with his destiny to meet the solutions of the future. […]
Come now with me to see this same immigrant in the first grade of his
social transformation. I have him here! He comes to receive me at his
home because he now has a home. His spontaneity and the expression of
sincere joy on his burnt and ruddy face truly tell the health of his soul.
How beautiful is the contrast! Listen to it! (34)
Zeballos paints a portrait of two distinct men, the first “ignorant of the
Argentine geography and the Castilian language” and the second, while
not explicitly aware of the geography, who “now has a home” and is sat-
isfied to his soul, filled to the brim with something beautiful, with “spon-
taneity” and “health.” The transition—the “contrast”—is a twofold
familiarization in which the “colonist” comes to know the Argentine ter-
ritory and then to colonize it; knowledge and conquest again reveal their
inextricable connection.
However, to whom is Zeballos directing this “beautiful” metamor-
phosis? The plural commands (“look” [mired], “come!” [venid], “lis-
ten” [oídlo]) suggest that he has an intended recipient: other immigrants
who need one final push to make the leap into the Argentine hinterland,
potential colonists who might benefit from knowing that Argentina
is “the land where foreigners enjoy the greatest protections, the most
positive stimuli, and the most attractive and complete privileges” (La
rejión del trigo 182). He goes on to emunerate other perks available to
those keen on settling the Americas: equal rights, freedom of national-
ity and religion, the right to publish without censorship, the possibility
of holding public office (182–183). After offering that “to moral goods
we might add abundance and facility of material goods,” Zeballos then
switches gears to go beyond Argentine institutional superiority to dis-
cuss its natural resources—the climatic variety that would appeal to
Europeans both Northern and Southern; the fertile soil; the vast and
“virgin” territories.
While size often takes on a negative register in many of Zeballos’s
writings, here it conversely benefits Argentina’s geographical diversity.
To begin, the nation-state’s 2,906,647 km2 of territory is compara-
tively massive: “it exceeds Germany’s almost 6 times, France’s almost as
many times, Italy’s 10 times, Great Britain’s 10 times and 6 times that
of Spain’s” (186). But size is just the first of its many merits. Size con-
tributes to endless permutations of climate and features, from mountains
and deserts to jungles and rivers, each of which might independently
appeal to Europeans from all walks:
134 A.S. MADAN
[Argentina] can offer to the Swiss, the Scandinavians, the Russians, the
Germans and the Anglo-Saxons, the Andean climates, the region of south-
ern Buenos Aires, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and its adjacent islands; to
the inhabitants of southern Europe, all the rest of the Republic with its
pampas of rich and bountiful loam like in the Valle del Nilo, like the Chaco
and Mesopotamia, shaded by colossal jungles, almost virgin and on the
banks of two of the most beautiful rivers on the Planet: the Uruguay and
the Paraná. (187)
Zeballos underscores these prospects in a way that illustrates his indebt-

edness to the Sarmentine project of creating a marketable geography. For
him, the immigration question necessarily coincides with the discipline
of geography. Geographical discourse looks to aesthetics to attract a par-
ticular demographic to settle lands. Sarmiento wanted to draw Germans
over and above Italians; Zeballos reveals a similar hierarchy of preference.
He distinguishes between better and worse sorts of immigration, nam-
ing them the more productive “spontaneous immigration” versus the
less desirable “artificial immigration.” Contending that “until now we
have proceeded erroneously,” he attributes this erroneous path to artifi-
cial immigration, a consequence of government-sponsored recruitment
in Europe that sought brawn—“to traverse the line corps” and “bulk up
the armies employed to construct railroads”—over and above brains (Le
rejion del trigo 214). Zeballos laments that such recruitment, enacted by
government agents, entices an uninspired and unmotivated immigrant.
He even suggests that Argentine immigration officers and contractors
hold such little influence that their word “has been discredited in Europe
for the last century. Not only is it ineffective: it is not even heard” (224).
Zeballos counterpoises this disingenuous, artificial immigration with
“spontaneous immigration,” that of an intrinsically motivated migrant
“who moves on his own and pays for his journey, attracted by news
acquired of the advantages provided in our theatre of work, or convinced
by advice or propositions, even contracts, offered by relatives and friends
happily established in the Republic” (215). Unlike his artificial counter-
part—who is spoiled, demanding, unmotivated, and dependent on the
government for everything from food to clothing to monies—the spon-
taneous immigrant is “confident, resigned, energetic, persistent and filled
with faith and initiative” (215). The notion of initiative distinguishes
these two sorts of immigrants. He who exhibits great initiative in making
and paying for the arduous journey south; he who makes the move of
his own volition, drawn not by remuneration but by friends and relatives
who have already made of Argentina a home; he who relies on his own
hard work instead of handouts. Yet beyond a matter of intrinsic motiva-
tion, Zeballos’s praise for the spontaneous immigrant is intricately bound
to the latter’s zeal for the written word, to migrate upon reading “news
acquired of the advantages provided in our theatre of work”; the artificial
immigrant, on the other hand, is privy only to Argentine agents whose
spoken word, according to Zeballos, “is not even heard” (215; 224).
Perhaps, then, Zeballos’s extensive corpus responds to and is a byprod-
uct of understanding the written word to be the optimal means of mar-
keting to the most productive immigrant. Productivity, here, amounts to
intellect.
Some 5 years earlier, Zeballos had already created another variant of
a marketable geography with La conquista de quince mil leguas (1878).
Commissioned by sitting Minister of War Julio Roca, its primary objec-
tive was first to garner Congress’s support for the war and, second, “to
distribute it in part to the commanders and officials that will take part in
the Expedition” (Roca, La conquista de quince mil leguas 5). The expedi-
tion to which Roca refers is the notorious Conquista del Desierto, the
military campaign that took place between late 1878 and early 1879
against the indigenous communities of the southern Pampa. Until this
period Patagonia was something of an every-man’s-land, with multiple
inhabitants and entities claiming rightful ownership. While at times it was
confirmed as part of present-day Argentina, on occasion it was deemed
Chilean territory, and on some maps it even appeared as independent
territory belonging to one or another disparate state (Lacoste 2003). To
represent the territory discursively was tantamount to staking claim to
it, to putting forth a description that retroactively confirmed the zone as
belonging to Argentina and therefore ripe for extraction and settlement.
Despite Zeballos’s disclaimer about his lack of “literary preten-
sions” and the speed with which he wrote the book, “in the free times
he had at hand over the course of a month, robbing a few hours from
sleep at times” (4), Roca insists that the book is of such quality that it
will accompany expedition forces and be “read with interest within and
beyond the country” (7). For Roca, the highly readable study both
teaches and sells. His commentary thus signals the transcendence of
the Sarmentine project and its value to future iterations of geographi-
cal discourse. On the one hand, he commends the narrative’s capacity
to synthesize and narrate a great deal of information clearly, quickly, and
136 A.S. MADAN
accurately, in a way that will be accessible and revealing to the Argentine

public. As a didactic geography, it will expand knowledge in just a few
pages:
It is going to be a sort of revelation for the majority of the Argentine peo-

ple, who would have to hunt down in a hundred different volumes the his-
tory that you present in a few pages, narrated in an easy and entertaining
style, accompanied by very exact observations and reasoning. (8)
While first Roca appeals to Zeballos’s instructive value for an internal

audience, just lines later he frames his praise within the parameters of the
economic, a marketable geography sure to be read outside the country
for its
scientific description of the vast region that we are going to conquer, dem-
onstrating at the same time the economic importance that the new territo-
ries will acquire as immigration spreads forth upon their bosom in search
of fertile land and a mild climate, arriving upon our beaches from all points
across the European continent. (8)
If we superimpose Raymond Craib’s observations about national maps

onto this genre of national narrative, we see that La conquista… does
“not simply imagine the nation-state into existence,” but rather serves
“as a means through which an object could be more effectively imag-
ined, propagated, and circulated; circulated […] not only to one’s
purported subjects, but to foreign investors eager to see an image rep-
resentative of the political stability and spatial predictability necessary for
profitable investment” (9, emphasis in original). Zeballos’s description,
in the end, looks to sell an image of fertile soils and temperate climate
to “all points of the European continent” (8). Thus, as Jens Andermann
has noted, Roca’s march to the Río Negro “was indeed a ‘campaign,’
but in the advertising rather than the military sense: a concerted, care-
fully plotted media effort, a piece of political theater that deployed a
characteristically modern apparatus of specularity” (162). Beyond strate-
gic representation for the national media, it would seem that Roca also
appreciates Zeballos’s appeal to an international audience of immigrants
and investors.
In addition to matters of reception, Roca lauds the text’s correc-
tive potential, thereby emphasizing the impulse to rectify previously
composed geographies of the region and to identify potential fluvial

sources stemming from the Andes (8). For Roca, Zeballos’s geographi-
cal task—undertaken in chapters with titles like “The Río Negro and
Its Tributaries,” “Description of the Territory,” “The Indians,” and
“Navigation of the Rivers”—is twofold: defensive and economic. Yet
Zeballos’s motivation is intensely patriotic and selfless. In fact, respond-
ing to Roca’s invitation to compose the study and to receive compensa-
tion, Zeballos renounces any payment, insisting on serving his country at
no charge “because I have devoted myself to these studies, with no inter-
est in profiting from them” (5).
Though he may not seek to benefit monetarily from this text,
Zeballos is rewarded professionally. This is to say, if Sarmiento establishes
the genre of transculturated geographical discourse, then Zeballos proves
an astute disciple who succeeds in the eyes of his master. One year prior
to becoming honorary president of the Instituto Geográfico Argentino
(IGA), Sarmiento bylines several laudatory book reviews of geographical
treatises written by and about Argentines. In a particularly remarkable
piece published in an 1878 issue of El Nacional, he extols La conquista
de quince mil leguas and elucidates his faith in the power of written geo-
graphical descriptions. Despite the accessibility of art or photography
or cartography, he believes that Zeballos’s textual portrayal will “be the
inseparable companion of expedition members headed to the desert, be
it to the East of Córdoba or the South of Buenos Aires”; rather than
gather dust in the library stacks, the book will accompany all expeditions
traversing Argentina’s territories (Obras 41: 79–80). Writing, Sarmiento
seems to think, paints a better picture than a tangible image. Technical
knowledge has little value without a practical understanding of context,
of history, of discourse.
This belief drives Zeballos’s depiction of the military geographer—
Señor Pico—who accompanies Roca’s expedition in La conquista. With
great conviction, Zeballos declares that “[t]he geographer, who is civi-
lization’s emissary, must be at the vanguard of any army that traverses
wild countries across unexplored terrain” (349). Despite affirming the
geographer’s indispensability, Zeballos devotes several lines to mock-
ing Señor Pico’s commitment to the technical elements of his discipline.
In the scene following Zeballos’s declaration regarding the role of the
geographer, we see Señor Pico, together with one Commander Amaya,
getting a bit too close for comfort to a hostile group of Amerindians.
Instead of responding appropriately—that is, what Zeballos perceives to
138 A.S. MADAN
be the appropriate reaction when faced with an armed enemy—“there

went Señor Pico, more interested in catching the sunset that in observ-
ing the fugitive Indians” (349). Zeballos continues to scoff that Amaya
“was too fearful” while “el señor Pico was too absorbed in espionage of
the sky with the help of his sextant to recall the lessons of Balsa, as he
threw himself with a handful of brave men to the ends of a desert popu-
lated by thousands of Indians” (349).
By referencing Balsa, an emblematic example of military defeat at the
hands of the indios, Zeballos disparages Señor Pico’s distraction by the
sunset and sextant while stressing its potential for fatal consequences.
However, then the reality of the earth ultimately snaps Pico out of the
dream of delineating it: when the thunderous sounds of battle become
so intense that they “called the geographer back to terrestrial life, leav-
ing the sun still in its cloud fortress, […] the geographer, the emissary
of science, put the sextant in the box, formed back into the ranks of the
troop” (350). Zeballos’s portrait of the military geographer is less about
acclaim and more about a disciplinary absentmindedness: the geographer
is, at the same time, too invested in the technical and too distracted from
the practical. Thus, despite finding infinite worth in the geographer’s
task, he finds such work incongruous with the actuality of the situation,
be it danger or diversity or a divided young nation. So what sort of geo-
graphical work does Zeballos value? Why, in his professional estimation,
should the geographer stand at the vanguard of the troops?
For Zeballos, the most relevant geographical work occurs in service of
consolidating the budding nation-state. Several qualities essential to this
project emerge across his multiyear and multigenre body of work: a focus
on writing, on correcting, on undertaking these activities to remedy the
nation’s ills rather than to reap financial gains. The geographer is respon-
sible for each of these tasks in order to ensure territorial integrity in the
face of both internal and external threats.
We see these characteristics coalesce again in an understudied Zeballos
text from 1897 titled “Apuntaciones para una bibliografia argentina,” a
fascinating contribution to a larger mid-nineteenth- and twentieth-cen-
tury effort among geographers to compile a systematic and exhaustive
geographical bibliography in Argentina. To anchor his own 1959 bib-
liography published in the Revista Geográfica, Raúl C. Rey Balmaceda
delineates this long history, starting first with an attempt by the sitting
president of the IGA, Dr. Francisco Segui, published in the Boletín del
Instituto Geográfico Argentino (1892) in acquiescence to international
demands to generate a universal geography.5 Shortly thereafter, José

Chavanne published a “classification guide,” also in the Boletín (1895),
though Balmaceda deems that study antiquated and of limited value to
his contemporaries. Next in line is Zeballos, whose bibliography prompts
Balmaceda to include something of a disclaimer, for it “includes works
not only of a geographic character but also of the most varied nature”
(144). Within the subtext of a phrase as vague as “the most varied
nature,” we might deduce that Zeballos values a different variant of
earth-writing than his predecessors, texts not wholly geographical in tra-
ditional terms.
By identifying Zeballos’s evaluative criteria for texts both praised and
criticized in “Apuntaciones para la bibliografía argentina,” we capture
the zeitgeist of late nineteenth-century Argentina and gain insight into
a dramatically changing country at a pivotal moment in history. Zeballos
published his running bibliography serially over the course of 3 years
(1897–1899) and four volumes (17–20) of the Boletín del Instituto
Geográfico Argentino. Numbered sequentially and totaling 484 entries,
the compilation illustrates the fin-de-siècle impulse to catalogue all writ-
ing essential to constructing a national identity. Although each segment
of the bibliography assembles texts of both ordinary and extraordinary
merit, I am interested in the entries in Volume 18, which number from
73 to 219, for two primary reasons: foremost, the publication date of
1897 offers a glimpse of minor narratives appearing at the cusp of the
Spanish Crown’s demise and the rise of Argentina as a hemispheric
powerhouse. Secondly, while the texts selected for Volume 18 differ in
degree rather than kind from their counterparts, those shades of differ-
ence are colored by literary tones that contribute to the genre of geo-
graphical discourse.
Zeballos emerges as an unlikely player in this variant of canon formation,
which perhaps incongruently takes place under the aegis of the recently
formed Instituto Geográfico Argentino. Yet his commentary and selected
texts reveal that the IGA is anything but an incongruent home for such
work. Zeballos begins Volume 18 with 11 pages of enumerated entries,
but then transitions to annotations. Some are scathing reviews, while oth-
ers—bestowed upon narratives that I identify as exemplary of geographi-
cal discourse—offer singular praise. In constructing this veritable Argentine
canon, Zeballos’s dedication to reading, compiling, and evaluating texts
bears greater weight than, say, Balmaceda’s suggestion that the impetus for
an Argentine geographical bibliography was merely a similar project in the
140 A.S. MADAN
USA that seemed to have simplified geographical research there (143). The
objective in Balmaceda is organizational at best and rote at worst, whereas
in Zeballos we see a poignant illustration of the ways in which Argentine
literature, institutions, and geopolitics come to be defined.
Part of this internal definition is ventriloquized through external
voices. In a move rather suggestive for an “Argentine bibliography,”
Zeballos portrays foreign naturalists as not only invaluable but under-
valued for their contributions to Argentine epistemology. This portrayal
nourishes his insistence on literary writing as the necessary register for the
discipline of geography. Yet to understand Zeballos’s take on foreign nat-
uralists and aestheticized earth-writing, we need to further complicate his
ever-evolving thoughts on immigration. In the 1883 La rejión del trigo,
Zeballos passionately promotes Alberdi’s open-door and immediate natu-
ralization policy, in particular for three populations: (1) those who wish
to work the Argentine land; (2) those who wish to enhance Argentine
industry; and (3) those who wish to teach the sciences and the arts:
To find and lovingly attract a foreign population is a constitutional duty of

Argentine governments, Congress cannot enact laws that will remove, limit
or restrict healthy and useful immigrations, nor tax the entrance of foreign-
ers onto Argentine territory, they who come with the objective of working
the land, bettering the industries, and teaching the sciences and the arts.
(La rejión del trigo 184)
With these declarations in 1883, Zeballos reveals his faith in diversity

to create forward momentum for an otherwise stagnant and homog-
enous populace. Yet, as Santiago Javier Sánchez (2009) shows, by 1887
Zeballos pronounces to the House of Representatives that Argentina’s
biggest ailment is nothing less than the heterogeneity caused by massive
European immigration:
Within a bit we will see ourselves become like Montevideo a city without
traits; […] we will be the obligatory center where five-hundred-thousand
travelers will converge annually; we will find ourselves transformed one day
into a Nation that does not have language, nor tradition, nor character, nor
flag […] since foreigners do not have a homeland here, they are devoted to
the cult of the absent homeland. (qtd. in Santiago Sánchez 239–240)
Zeballos creates a dialogue between a “current homeland” (New World)

and an “absent homeland” (Old World). If we bring his thinking from
La region de trigo into this conversation, then to colonize Argentina

properly and make of it a Nation that has language, tradition, character,
and flag, the settlers must have these very internal knowledges to be cat-
egorical denizens of the state. Indeed, just a few pages ago I underscored
the essential, and enduring, axiom of Zeballos’s thinking: the most
essential knowledges are the geographical and the linguistic.
While this axiom continues to hold true by the time he writes Volume
18 of “Apuntaciones…” in 1897, Zeballos’s pendulum nevertheless
swings back to supporting citizenship, back to insisting that those who
have contributed robustly to Argentine civilization should have the right
to enjoy the benefits of nationality. If Zeballos only explicitly names two
sorts of immigration in La rejión de trigo, here we see hints of a third
category that we might call “intellectual immigration.”6 A substantive
portion of Zeballos’s list includes those foreigners with the potential to
contribute, using Leopoldo Zea’s words, to the “blood-washing and
brain-washing” thought to be necessary for modernization (Zea 121).
Zeballos introduces this throughline in his annotation of Dr. Cárlos
Berg, a Russian who began his scientific research in Argentina at the
behest of Sarmiento’s favorite German, Dr. Burmeister (a protégé of
Humboldt and director of the Museo Público de Buenos Aires). Our
first introduction to this “active and laborious naturalist” is as “our fel-
low citizen,” and from there the thrust of Zeballos’s narrative addresses
Berg’s newly acquired Argentine citizenship. Berg, who becomes
director of the National Museum after Burmeister’s death, “has car-
ried out in the Republic a systematic, perseverant and efficient labor”;
“he is one of the precursors to the intellectual and scientific movement
in the Argentine Republic, as proven by the complete bibliography of
his fecund research, which precedes these lines” (83). For Zeballos,
like Sarmiento before him, immigration is essential to modernization,
albeit the right sort of immigration—“not as an instrument of material
labor, but rather as a force of social and political perfection” (83). In
other words, Zeballos seeks “efficient citizens”—Dr. Berg serves as the
primordial example—to populate the national terrain. He encourages all
his compatriots to support selective citizenship, stating that “the coun-
try should stimulate it with profound sympathy and prepare the means
for foreigners who have contributed and contribute to realize our ide-
als of civilization, to enjoy its benefits, if they so desire, with the dou-
ble title of Precursors and efficient citizens” (83). Zeballos emphasizes
Berg’s “fecund research” and his “social force” as tantamount to efficient
142 A.S. MADAN
citizenry. Such work is in complete contradistinction to the manual labor

of other immigrant populations. He thus points to a language of out-
put, of productivity and performance, but within the realm of intellectual
production.
This third category of “intellectual immigration” looks to heal the
ills of Argentine society by revisiting its past geographical errors; it was,
after all, none other than Carlos Berg who, in 1878, deemed the Ombú
tree native to Argentina and thereby rewrote a century’s worth of misat-
tribution to reclaim the tree from Spain (Felice, “Carlos Felice: Blog
Personal”). We see this corrective stance several pages after the Berg
annotation in Entry #219 on José Medina’s Juan Dias de Solís: Estudio
Histórico, in which Zeballos reaffirms his enthusiasm for foreign con-
tributions to Argentine epistemology, especially those that rewrite past
knowledge and confirm Argentine superiority. This particular entry
praises a Chilean (Medina) while simultaneously lambasting a Portuguese
(Solís). After detailing the decline of post-1880 Argentina, Zeballos criti-
cizes Argentine egotism, suggesting that it eclipsed any sense of patriotic
duty, while hypocrisy replaced any sense of virtue:
The Argentine Republic has retroceded morally and intellectually since

1880. You could say that, with the deaths of Sarmiento and Avellaneda,
two lighthouses on the path to political, intellectual and artistic culture have
been extinguished. Primary education has been derailed and leads to deep
perturbations in the social organism. Secondary and university instruction
drag along lazily, postponed, without science, without ideals. (91)
Zeballos’s diagnosis reveals three primary ailments at the core of

Argentine stagnancy. Without the public intellectual to lead the nation-
state, the citizenry drifts aimlessly. Education, critical for a dynamic
and creative populace, takes a hit, too; this, of course, is no surprise
given Sarmiento’s involvement and investment in the Argentine educa-
tional system. Yet the original catalyst for national and political organi-
zation, Zeballos goes on to explain, was the financial collapse of 1890.
Retracted funding prompts institutional demise. Zeballos underlines the
many ways in which Argentine institutions—the literal and figurative
locale where subjects band together and rise above individual impulse—
support cultural production, noting that “this shipwreck of institutions
and of Argentine sociability also drowned the scientific and literary move-
ment, which was initiated with such brilliance after Rosas’s fall” (91).
Within this triple vortex of institutions, science, and literature, Zeballos

locates Argentine progress in cultural productivity emerging from
national institutions—like the IGA from which he writes—that are impos-
sibly undernourished without financial sustenance and political stability.
Zeballos pieces together the component parts of this downfall to fore-
ground a surprising turn of events: with Argentine intellectual work at a
standstill, the proverbial doors opened wide for foreign scholars genuinely
fascinated by and committed to unraveling and revealing the individual
threads of Argentine identity. Key here, Zeballos notes, is José Toribio
Medina, the author of the entry at hand.
With nary a dime of external support, Medina funds his revision-
ist histories on colonial Argentine history, rewriting “points obscured
or entangled by a lack of documentation or by common errors of
flighty authors” (92). Medina’s narrative, published in his house, tack-
les the question of origins: who discovered the Río de la Plata first?
Foregrounding the discussion, Zeballos explains that discovery of the
river had given way to lengthy debates between Argentine, Uruguayan,
and Chilean writers (99). Was it Solís, as had been assumed for numer-
ous years? Was it Solís together with Vicente Yañez Pinzón? Or was it
Diego García? For Zeballos, the Río de la Plata was unequivocally
Argentine maritime territory; any evidence in service of that thesis
proved correct from his point of view. Yet he takes care to emphasize
the private nature of Medina’s work, which emerges independently of
any official entity and therefore—to his mind—objectively. Zeballos thus
deems Medina’s findings for Argentina unbiased, exceptional, and even
essential (92). Despite a meager audience in his birth country, Medina
dedicates himself entirely to the neighboring territory and enters a cor-
rected version of Argentine epistemology into universal history. He is but
one of many foreign scholars committed to Argentine knowledge pro-
duction, embodying several of the contributions that Zeballos highlights:
first, non-Argentines take on the daunting job of overcoming post-1880
stagnancy, continuing “the patient task of describing and explaining
national origins” (91). Secondly—and a true testament to the power
of the text—Zeballos notes that these foreigners hunt down lost yet
essential national documents in European archives, ultimately allowing
Argentina to win otherwise unwinnable legal proceedings. And, finally,
foreigners rectify, clarify, and fact-check “the national chronicle, reducing
it to real and human conditions, after eliminating the fantasies or simply
the errors of a deficient critical investigation” (91).
144 A.S. MADAN
I would like to stress Zeballos’s obsession with veracity—on fact ver-

sus fiction, on accuracy versus error. If, as Derrida says, every text is
bricolage—if we are always, in Levi-Strauss’s thinking, reusing available
materials to solve new problems—then perhaps we have another lens
through which we might filter the notion of transculturated geographical
discourse: that of layers. Yet herein lies the challenge: by superimposing
the new onto the old, the resulting image might pardon or even amplify
previous errors. Zeballos dismisses cartographic works precisely because
of their layers of inaccuracies. As we unpack his annotated bibliography,
we find an overwhelming appreciation for the discourse of geography
(errors and all), alongside a vehement reproach of cartography that con-
tinuously reproduces past errors.
Zeballos is not alone in noticing this tendency, implicit though his
criticism may be. If we fast-forward about 20 years past his bibliogra-
phy, the accuracy complaint surfaces explicitly in a 1927 article in the
American Geographical Society’s (AGS) Geographical Review. Writing
about “The Millionth Map of Hispanic America”—the first attempt to
aggregate all available cartographic data about Hispanic America into
one map—Raye Roberts Platt, sitting director of the AGS’s Department
of Hispanic American Research, tallies up the difficulties of assembling
source material for such a feat. The overarching problem? Layers upon
layers of inaccuracies. Platt evidences his argument with Dr. Wilhelm
Sievers’s 1915 survey along the cordilleras of Ecuador and Peru, which
was published in Volume 61 of Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen:
We had considered these maps of great importance not only as to accu-

racy of detail within themselves but also for tying in other less accurate
material. However, when the composition of the Quito, Piura, and Cerro
de Pasco sheets, on which these surveys fall, was undertaken, it was found
that neither in detail nor in location did Sievers’ maps correspond with
other surveys of unquestionable merit which coincided with them at vari-
ous points. On further study it was discovered that Sievers had used the
Raimondi Map of Peru as a base and had only roughly filled in details
along his route.
Map titles are frequently misleading. Again and again our compilers
have come upon maps accompanying an article on exploration entitled
“Author’s Sketch Map” only to find that the map is merely a copy of some
earlier general map upon which the author has drawn a line to represent
his route. (Platt 302)
Beyond the challenge of accuracy, the AGS also faced the reality of eco-
nomics. Alastair Pearson and Mike Heffernan (2009) enumerate some
striking numbers in their genealogy of the Millionth Map. The project
cost $570,000, estimated as equivalent to about $16 million today. On
average, 7 full-time staff collaborated to bring the series to completion.
At its pinnacle, 11 employees ranging from compilers and editors to
draughtsmen toiled away at the task, which took 25 years from begin-
ning to end (1920–1945). Of these workers, none was Latin American
(Pearson and Heffernan 219). Yet IMW guidelines stipulated that,
whenever possible, sovereign states bore the responsibility to chart and
publish maps of their respective territories. That the mapmakers hailed
mostly from Europe (with a disproportionate number of White Russian
refugees) proved just as or even more problematic than the origins of
the sponsoring organization: the USA. Indeed, the AGS endorsed and
created the Hispanic Map. Although many Latin American states had
eagerly contributed to the international mapping effort from the out-
set, the AGS—led by an enthusiastic and driven young director, Isaiah
Bowman—decided that creating a bigger and better map series of
Central and South America and the Caribbean would ensure its status as
the dominant geographical society of the New World.
Private funding surprisingly sustained this ambitious task. Archer
Milton Huntington, heir to a vast sum of railroad earnings and founder
of the Hispanic Society of America, committed $25,000 of start-up
funds and, over the course of production, contributed nearly $250,000
to the project. Beyond the obvious gains it offered to regional geo-
graphical knowledge, the map served as a greater symbol of the USA’s
hemispheric presence and prowess, particularly when accounting for the
commercial possibilities from untapped natural resources.7
The project’s first and most important task involved convincing Latin
American governments to allow AGS geographers access to sensitive
classes of map collections: on the one hand, unpublished maps made by
Latin American governments themselves and, on the other, surveys con-
ducted by foreign entities interested in developing areas with potential
natural resources. The AGS depended on the well-known masterpieces
of early Latin American cartography known as the “mother maps,” the
pinnacle byproduct of the nineteenth-century era of natural exploration
inaugurated by Humboldt and continued by European cartographers
like the Italians Raimondi—mentioned above in Platt’s denounce-
ment of cartographic inaccuracies—and Agustín Codazzi, as well as the
146 A.S. MADAN
Frenchmen Soldan, de Moussy, and Pissis. These maps were the source
of authorization for future maps and, at the same time, a source of con-
tention because of their errors and territorial shortchanges. After all, they
were rendered by—and to some extent for—a European cast and were
therefore replete with perceptions and misperceptions in kind.
I would like to superimpose this idea of “mother maps” onto geo-
graphical discourse and, in turn, onto the recasting of both the textual
and the imagistic. Part of the evaluative criteria for Zeballos’s bibliogra-
phy includes accounting for and canonizing erudite foreigners commit-
ted to rectifying old mistakes, and, on the other hand, identifying Latin
Americans who give form to the Argentine territory in ways that revise,
rectify, or reject Humboldtian geographical discourse; that is, the mother
texts composed by many of the same European naturalists listed above.
In the arena of the cartographic, overcoming the power of the “mother
maps” proved an insurmountable undertaking, as evidenced by the error-
laden Millionth Map, which was in production for half a century and was
ultimately outdated by the time it went to print in 1945.
Yet, as Zeballos seems to recognize, the discursive realm allows
ample opportunity for the empire to map back and rewrite the master
narrative—to seek authorization from Humboldtian geographical dis-

course, but to transculturate it in ways that reclaim both land and let-
ters. Such an endeavor turns the axes of production southward, so that
when local authors rectify global narratives, Zeballos stamps his seal of
approval; yet, when global authors haphazardly correct the local narra-
tive, he derides them for even the most minute of errors.
This pattern emerges in Zeballos’s annotation on Frenchman Henry
Harisse, a lawyer, bibliographer, and historian born in Paris, but dedicated
to early explorations of the USA. Zeballos reviews Harisse’s John Cabot,
the Discoverer of North America and Sebastian His Son: A Chapter of the
Maritime History of England under the Tudors (1496–1557), an 1896
study on Venetian father-and-son explorers Juan and Sebastián Cabot,
the latter of whom, upon receiving silver trinkets from the Guaraní near
present-day Asunción, gave the Río de la Plata its name. According to
Zeballos, Harisse’s book is “a true demolition of all information admitted
until now about these sailors” (83). Zeballos explains that the discoveries
of their first expedition, in 1497, cannot be q
uantified because
SEBASTIAN CABOT has copied upon his planisphere a French let-

ter from NICOLAS DESLIEUS (p. 95), and his affirmations concern-
ing their first landing in North America do not deserve any credit. They
are, in effect, in contradiction to the drawing and the legends of the 1544
planisphere and are entirely based on discoveries made by JACQUES
CARTIER in 1534 and in 1536 and are in no way based on Cabot’s dis-
coveries. These different incidences of plagiarism have nothing strange
beyond this since SEBASTIAN CABOT was capable of occasionally dis-
simulating the truth when it suited his interests (p.115) (84)
Zeballos is unchained in his disdain for Sebastián Cabot in particular,

concluding that he does not deserve any more merit as a cosmographer
than as a navigator. […] He has never made even the slightest magnetic
discovery, contrary to whatever he may have claimed (p.295); and of his
two methods to observe longitude, the first is not original (p.300;) and
the second leads to an error of sixty degrees, or one-sixth of the earth’s
circumference!” (84)
Zeballos’s line of criticism conjures several paradoxes. He fervently
opposes the Cabots’ work as inaccurate and plagiarized, denying the
commonly held understanding of cartography as a palimpsest, of
knowledge built upon and revised, as an epistemology born of the earli-
est forms of crowd-sourcing. In Mapping the Renaissance World (1994),
Frank Lestringant explains that cartography was, and is, at some point
a bricolage, a melding of known and unknown, layers and lapses—noth-
ing new but rather another iteration of the old. Maps, he explains,
reveal the state of the world at that very moment in history. The errors
and revisions say just as much as the unchanged or undisputed masses
of land. So for Zeballos to fixate on the younger Cabot’s longitudinal
blunders, whether for a lack of originality or for measurable inconsist-
encies, is particularly remarkable when juxtaposed with his benign reac-
tion to (perhaps more) egregious errors in other texts that he includes
and annotates in his bibliography. The key difference, though, seems
to be cartography versus geography—that is, mathematical maps versus
descriptive writing.
For example, in his comments on Martiniano Leguizamón’s Recuerdos
de la tierra (1896)—just five pages after the Harisse review—Zeballos
writes:
148 A.S. MADAN
The author describes […] scenes of semi-savage life with enthusiasm and
often humor […]. Nature that is hardly picturesque, without the great acci-
dents that form an admirable landscape, serves as the stage for the heroes of
this book. Its moral undertones warn us to remember the worries and misfor-
tunes suffered by the rustic peoples dominated by a blindly imposed, urban,
and still incipient civilization in an effort to consolidate the nation. The book
is not exempt from deficiencies, nor errors; but the doctor LEGUIZAMON
has revealed narrative and descriptive skills that, with quiet work, will offer to
our letters new pages of descriptive and historical merit. (88–89)
Several lines of this contradiction-filled passage stand out. Foremost,

Zeballos reveals another side of his otherwise critical persona, gener-
ous of spirit and capable of seeing the lush forest beyond the dead trees.
Though he acknowledges that the “book is not exempt from errors
and deficiencies,” the comment seems like an obligatory disclaimer,
while the overarching tone is one of praise. Zeballos puts emphasis on
Leguizamón’s “narrative and descriptive skills”—that is, his literary tal-
ent over and above his abilities as a “geographer” per se. By allowing his
natural propensity for description and narration to flourish gently, then,
Leguizamón will continue to advance Argentine letters, adding “new
pages of descriptive and historical merit” to its canon.
The palpable difference of tone between the two sections exposes a
certain demand for cartographic precision, in complete contradistinc-
tion to the literary acumen necessary for textual description. This is geo-
graphical discourse—a register that appeals to and invites readers into
and across the national territory. Were Leguizamón’s text to lack descrip-
tive merit and be laden with errors, then Zeballos would be hard pressed
to laud the work. Nevertheless, Zeballos appreciates the challenge—and
values he who rises to it—of writing unattractive land in an attractive
way. After all, the Argentine territory that serves as the setting for his
tale repels more than it attracts. The land at hand here is not, in fact,
picturesque, nor does it boast the geographical accidents that character-
ize the rest of Argentina. That sort of landscape would be relatively easy
to represent, whereas Leguizamón’s territory—difficult to delineate and
describe—is quite the opposite.
That such commentary appears in the Boletín del Instituto Geográfico
de Argentina is in itself illustrative of the double helix of geography
and literature in nineteenth-century Argentina. The bulletin proves
highly interdisciplinary with its melding of statistical studies, relief maps,
annotated bibliographies, and literary reviews entrenched within the bib-

liographies. One Zeballos review in particular brings to bear on the triple
juncture between literature, geography, and politics—that of Dr. Carlos
A. Aldao’s translation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1870 collection of
essays, The Conduct of Life. Published in 1896 and titled Guía de la vida,
Aldao’s text prompts the following praise from Zeballos:
The new translation has been received with praise. It is not a literary exercise
of the translator but rather a political act in favor of Argentine youth. The ten-
dency that DR. ALDAO has inspired is revealed in the prologue that precedes
the translation. It discusses the sociological and political problems of our
country, and by indicating solutions, DR. ALDAO reveals the distinguished
qualities of a sagacious writer of resolute and independent temper. (87)
A translation of Emerson, one of the USA’s most esteemed writ-

ers, appears here as less about literature and more about politics. To
be sure, aesthetics does not fall by the wayside, for Dr. Aldao’s solu-
tions for Argentina’s problems emerge as a result of his writerly skills.8
Zeballos privileges the aestheticized text as a means to mediate the path
to the social. Writing thus serves as the primary tool to inspire Argentine
youth and thereby effect political change within late nineteenth-century
Argentina. And the Boletín del Instituto Geográfico—with each printing
estimated at 1000 issues distributed through the Argentine Republic and
abroad (Galarce 186)—bore the critical responsibility for disseminating
and publicizing the vast array of geographically bent texts.
As editor of the Boletín del Instituto Geográfico, Zeballos uses this
publishing organ to demand both cartographic precision and liter-
ary acumen, the latter an absolute requisite for territorial descrip-
tion. In short, maps cannot have errors but texts can, so long as they
are poeticized. This difference manifests again in his review of Marcos
Arredondo’s Croquis Bonaerenses (1896), which oscillates between
praise and criticism, both grounded in his assessment of Arredondo’s
writing. By way of introduction, Zeballos explains, “I have here a
reporter that tries out his literary inclinations despite the indifference
of his colleagues” (87). The bulk of his examination seeks to under-
stand Arredondo as a writer, both literary and journalistic, and thereby
determine why Croquis Bonaerenses was met with critical silence upon
its publication. Zeballos finds the answer in the text’s genre-bending:
“The reporter often reappears and the artist surrenders to that vehement
150 A.S. MADAN
style” (87). In the duel between matter-of-fact reporting and aestheti-

cally inclined description, the latter proves more amenable to Zeballos.
It is a literary style that can only be learned, conversely, by writing less
and reading more—“to achieve it one must write little and study a lot.
The mature fruit will soon provide legitimate and lasting successes” (87).
However, Zeballos already sees hints of these successes in Arredondo. In
fact, Croquis is one of the more unusual texts I encountered in the bibli-
ography, so I decided to take a closer look at it instead of at Zeballos on
it, this to better understand the genre that emerges alongside the insti-
tutionalization of geography and the canonization of certain national
narratives. Why would Zeballos be so drawn to this text? And which of
its qualities might help us to identify the fundamental characteristics of
geographical discourse? Three components of Croquis stand out imme-
diately: (1) the florid, nearly baroque language; (2) the introduction
by one of the great “unknowns” of Spain’s Generation of ’98, writer
Francisco Grandmontagne, who proclaims Arredondo and his Argentina
as the future of Spanish-language literature about to mature past a stage
of Hegelian infancy; and (3) the narrative’s city setting and subject mat-
ter, which allow for an unparalleled presence of the human subject.
Published in 1896, Croquis Bonaerenses appears the year prior to
Zeballos’s bibliography and purports to paint the Argentine capital with
words. In a Prologue that likens Arredondo to Jesus Christ and Argentines
to Darwin’s fittest species, Grandmontagne—a Spaniard relocated to
Buenos Aires—explains that “Arredondo has what is called the gift of see-
ing. He paints without effort, with admirable spontaneity, because it is
his nature, exquisitely sensible, and all movements of exterior life have
an effect on him” (x). A few pages later, we learn that Arredondo “loves
literature as the most sacred of the arts” (xiii). For Grandmontagne, a
vanguard at the cutting edge of the international republic of letters and
a disseminator of Spanish texts through the Southern Cone, this literary
inclination defines Argentine and even South American citizenry:
When it emerges from Buenos Aires, it is not a simple revolution of

Castilian letters, as some believe, but rather a vigorous literature that
brings the scorching force of this sun to the literary concert of the Orb,
the grandiosity of this nature and the complex face of a people made with
the brave blood of the autochthonous immigrant of all races, so perhaps
someone can bless us who put the first tiny grain of sand in the great and
future edifice of South American literature. (xiii)
Grandmontagne perceives a latticework between land, its inhabitants,

and literature, between “the grandiosity of this nature,” “a people made
with the brave blood of the autochthonous immigrant of all races,”
and “the literary concert of the Orb.” In this equation, the land and
its plural subjectivities merge in what is necessarily “a vigorous litera-
ture.” If we think back to the publication date of this text and consider
all the writing emerging at this moment in Spain with the anguished
Generation of ’98—anguished upon impotently witnessing their nation’s
demise—then Grandmontagne’s belief in Buenos Aires not merely as
the site of “a simple revolution of Castilian letters” but as the edifice
and future of Spanish-language narrative resonates as praise of the high-
est order. Lest we forget, the Generation ’98, which includes Zeballos’s
favorite intellectual Miguel de Unamuno and also Joaquín Costa, to
whom I will return in Part II of this chapter, nourishes its narrative
angst with imperial decline, which culminates with the loss of Spain’s
last four colonies in 1898.9
In a sense, then, Grandmontagne passes the proverbial torch from
colonizer to colonized, noting that the changed locus of enunciation
reveals a Hegelian future constructed on a cornerstone of smallness—on
a “tiny grain of sand” that is to be built upon, but that is already grow-
ing out of its infancy and into something alive and “vigorous.” The revo-
lution is literary, yes, but it also situates Argentina and, more broadly,
South America as sites of production writ large.
Such a revolutionary introduction from a Spaniard would, of course,
be quite appealing to Zeballos, for it corroborates what he already
believes to be fact: South American and especially Argentine literature is
the new site of Spanish-language cultural production because of its very
grounding in geography. Returning to Arredondo, the geographical dis-
course we see in Croquis Bonaerenses sits apart from the other texts in
Zeballos’s bibliography because of its distinct focus on the city of Buenos
Aires as opposed to the lush Pampa of the countryside. The emphasis on
the horizon, on the vista and the colors, and on the language does not
change, however.
Consider, for example, a passage describing the Recova de la Carne,
a prototypical shopping mall that divided the Plaza de Mayo into two
separate plazas off the Paseo de Julio. From its construction in 1802 to
its demolition in 1883, the Recova served as an indoor market where
vendors could sell merchandise. Writing about the Paseo de Julio on a
“party day,” Arredondo describes the “immense human avalanche [that]
152 A.S. MADAN
fills the recoba” on the waterline, thereby integrating the Argentine sub-
ject into the cityscape.10 He populates the terrain and recognizes the
interrelations between human and environment, albeit a very different
one than addressed in the previous narratives I study. He writes:
La recoba, de gala, tiene un aspecto que encanta: filas de gallardetes, bom-

bas de colores, globos chinescos, faroles de fantasía, todo pendiente de
infinidad de hilos que se cruzan y se confunden imitando el complicado
cordaje de un gran navío.
Allá á distancia, sobre el azulado fondo del cielo, dibujando el extraño perfil
de sus siluetas y asomando por entre, un hacinamiento de cúpulas y torres
se pierden á la vista los primeros edificios de la metrópoli, que forman en
aquel desfile interminable una muralla gigantesca que mira al río y se alza
con las pretensiones de un colosal muro inaccesible.11 (10; emphases mine)
Arredondo intertwines his sequential descriptions of first the recoba, next

the blue horizon on the distance, and above that the giant skyscrap-
ers also inhabiting the city line. Gradually telescoping into the meat of
Argentine identity, he starts with detailed descriptions of the festivi-
ties—the rows of pennants, the colors and Chinese globes, the fantasy
lanterns, all hanging from threads that interlace and crisscross like ship’s
rigging (el complicado cordaje de un gran navío). With the metaphor
established, we set sail across the water and toward the crowded bank,
where we see the giant buildings of the metropolis, but not before being
enchanted and drawn into a literary language replete with devices that
charm and give form to the scene. Foremost, Arredondo hooks read-
ers with the assonated o (bombas, colores, globos, faroles, todo, compli-
cado, cordaje), a sound that continuously connects us to the place he
describes: the recoba. Then, we hear the assonated i emerging in the filas,
the infinidad de hilos, the imitando; the repetition enhances the sense of
infinity, of a never-ending thread connecting not only the décor but also
the people and the city. Like the hurried multitude of porteños bustling
about, the hanging rows crisscross frenetically along the Paseo de Julio, a
weaving that he emphasizes with the cacophonous alliterated c in cruzan,
confunden, complicado, and cordaje.
In the next paragraph, Arredondo transitions from delineating the
busy street to describing the vista from the Paseo de Julio. The dic-
tion immediately situates the reader at a distance, far from the city,
which appears on the blue horizon. The skyscrapers take on a gigantic
dimension, almost like people with profiles and silhouettes, and each
entity finds representation through a clause in the sentence, divided
from the next by a comma. This parade of giants creates an inacces-
sible wall staring out at the river, and that very impenetrability is given
form by the end of the sentence: no entry, since the sentence—and
the wall—are complete. The prosopoetic city comes to life with its
physicality (perfil, siluetas), its actions (mira), and its emotions (pre-
tensions). The urban space of Buenos Aires is alive, a corporeal entity
that sees and feels.
Arredondo’s text is unique in that it promptly incorporates the
human subject into the living, breathing land—there is no vast empti-
ness within the ancient structure of the Recova, only density and time
to be passed: “The ancient, historic recoba, supported on a series of
monstrous pillars, is the obligatory pastime of the Sunday crowds and
the theatre of its manifest predilections” (10). The “Sunday crowds”
actively contribute to the essence of the space. The populace is firmly
planted within—and an extension of—its spectacle, one in which per-
formance and theater are intricately wound. This double helix of space
and subject can be configured through Michel de Certeau’s concep-
tualization of the city, which itself becomes a “universal and anony-
mous subject” (de Certeau 159; emphasis in original). The metonymic
possibilities of the city as citizen unfold in Croquis Bonaerenses as
Arredondo’s manmade décor, skyscrapers, and urban geography take on
human attributes. Yet at the same time, he carefully places the subjects
within the space. Both city-as-subject and citizen-as-subject are uni-
versal and anonymous, since the giant buildings make of 1897 Buenos
Aires a place rather than a space, a capitalist utopia on the cusp of hemi-
spheric dominance. Arredondo’s human subjects exist on either side of
consumer industry, either buyers with their “manifest predilections” or
sellers lining the Paseo de Julio. He captures their assorted commodi-
ties and talents, ranging from foodstuffs to carnival fair games and on to
photographers and fortune-tellers:
Un cordón de comerciantes con sus canastos ó sus vitrinas apoyadas sobre

mostradores de mano, venden maní tostado, chorizos á la parrilla, pejer-
reyes fritos, castañas, concretas, buñuelos y el clásico fainá del tamaño de
una luna. Hay público en la casa de tiro á la pistola, de tiro á la argolla, en
el fonógrafo y en el kinetoscopio y se pasean fotógrafos ambulantes, adivi-
nos y adivinas […].12 (Arredondo 12)
154 A.S. MADAN
Arredondo gives form to the row of merchants, connecting each one

to the next by alliterating the hard c (cordón, comerciantes, canastos,
castañas, concretas, clásico) and the m (mostradores, mano, maní). Each
food item appears in quick succession to the next and contributes to the
frenzied fair-like energy. The description then slows down to conclude
with the biggest and the best item—the fainá, a sort of flatbread meta-
phorically represented as the size of the moon. If Argentina is the sun,
the center of the universe, then its most representative gastronomy is the
moon, a reflection of its citizenry.
Arredondo then populates the different arcade houses, using the ana-
phoric repetition of en to emphasize the different locales attracting visi-
tors. Just as the photographers and the fortune-tellers meander down
the paseo, so too does the public. Arredondo includes, on the one hand,
the consumers of fair games like the ring toss and, on the other, the
vendors hawking their photographic memories of the past and mystic
visions of the future. He exposes the economic exchange buttressing
and prompting geographical discourse, a genre that points to questions
of national security and financial prowess. He identifies the multiple
players at work within the city exchange; commerce is the dime upon
which the world spins. If we read into the specific subjects—the pho-
tographers documenting the present, the fortune-tellers predicting the
future, and the vendors selling their wares—then this literary geogra-
phy thus depicts its own history, one that confirmed to its contemporary
audiences that Argentina had advanced from a turbulent adolescence
into a more settled maturity. If we overlay “Argentina” onto Raymond
Craib’s observations on coeval Mexico, we see a discursive and imagistic
commitment spanning the continent wherein “[c]apitalist, productive,
and stable, with a rich history and an even richer geography, [Argentina]
appeared ripe for study, colonization, and exploitation,” for on endless
pages of text it had come “together as a world of exotic past and capital-
ist future” (Craib 183).
Ripe is the key word: civilization, here, is in the making vis-à-vis com-
merce and trade in a bustling city plaza adjacent to the venue of all civi-
lized venues, the original Teatro Colón. Civilization, here, is tantamount
to cultural production, both of which require time. In Zeballos’s estima-
tion of these matters, time keeps emerging as the essential component
for literary productivity, quite the opposite of journalistic urgency. Just as
fruit must mature to ripeness, he explains,
Literary labor requires rest, study, and time. The journalist certainly is not
in the most favorable conditions to carry it out successfully. He lives pre-
cipitously and provisionally, so to speak, waiting with infinite longing for
the day when the system of his life will be settled and ordered in favor of
fortune. (87)
Arredondo has time on his side insofar as he can continue to cultivate

his far-reaching talents, expand his limited vocabulary (a consequence of
“a lack of classical reading”), and hone his skills. The acts of writing and
reading are thus not mutually exclusive in the nation-building project.
That Zeballos writes about texts the Argentine citizenry ought to read—
creating his own national canon—is suggestive enough.
Limitations aside, Arredondo possesses enough literary talent to
be considered for Zeballos’s canon. Zeballos fixates on the literary ele-
ment of a narrative presumably dedicated to geographical snapshots
of the capital city—that is, Croquis Bonaerenses, croqui defined by the
Real Academia Española as a “light, estimated sketch of land, land-
scape, or military position that does not rely on geometric instruments.”
Arredondo sets out to create textual rather than visual sketches, and for
Zeballos textual description materializes as a form superior to and even
more precise than objective maps: “From a literary point of view the
Croquis are pictures of our streets and alleys. The precision of some of
the details is such that they allow us to recognize, without any effort
of the imagination, men and things” (87). The noun that Zeballos
employs—“precision”—is striking when thought of in terms of its rela-
tionship to cartographic terminology: the World Atlas dictionary explains
that precision refers to the “quality of the operation by which the result is
obtained.” If Arredondo’s operation is to create croquis or cuadros in the
standard sense, then he is far from precise. Yet I sense that Zeballos—
prefiguring his fellow Argentine Jorge Luis Borges by nearly half a
century—fears the scientific reductionism that accompanies cartographic
precision. He pinpoints, as such, a different variety of precision offered
by the “literary point of view.” In Borges’s famous tale of imperial
mapmakers, “On Exactitude in Science,” the discipline of cartography
destroys itself in its desperation for precision. Charged with rendering
a perfect map of the kingdom, the cartographers “struck a Map of the
Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point
for point with it” (trans. in Hurley 325). After subsequent generations
156 A.S. MADAN
deem the “Study of Cartography” useless, “Tattered ruins of that Map”

are all that remain (trans. in Hurley 325).
Borges’s satiric take on scientific excess illustrates well that the more
sophisticated the map, the more potential for eclipsing the motivation
behind its very existence. Similarly, Zeballos never loses sight of the why
behind Arredondo’s croquis, which are veritable literary maps: he lauds
them as a substantive contribution to Argentine epistemology, to advanc-
ing knowledge about “men and things.” If we consider Arredondo’s
literary croquis as exemplary of geographical discourse, then another
defining feature of the genre is its ability to overcome reductionism; that
is, to include the land’s plural subjectivities within its territorial descrip-
tion. Maps, Zeballos appears to believe, continue the discourse of empti-
ness so entrenched in colonial representations of the Americas.
Perhaps, then, we arrive at the heart of Zeballos’s criteria for evalu-
ation in his annotated bibliography: if geography purports to wrangle
the abstract national space into something a bit more wieldy, it does so
for—and via—the national citizenry. Cartography, in a sense, masks
power and political interests behind the façade of science, indeed a defin-
ing feature of the modern bourgeois state, following Poulantazas (1975)
and Lefebvre (1991). Unlike the necessarily Eurocentric lines of car-
tography—dissonant echoes of the mother maps serving the likes of the
neocolonial Millionth Map—textual lines of geographical discourse find
authorization in European models, but transculturate them in ways that
fold the Argentine subject into both letters and land. Lines of geogra-
phy in nineteenth-century Latin America reveal an aesthetics of domi-
nation, yet this was a moment in which officials deemed cartographic
aesthetics as lacking in science, in drawing “attention to the subjective
and interested reality of the map itself” should they include any flour-
ishes of painted images or cartouches on the border (Craib 186). If “[t]
he professed objectivity of a scientific map derived precisely from its pre-
sumed refusal to revel in the subjective world of art,” then “objectivity
has an aesthetic standard” (Craib 186). In short, the map is not objec-
tive, as Harvey, Harley, Hartshorne, and so forth have made clear. Within
cartography, then, the artifice of objectivity relies on the technical, even
though surveying and mapping were never mere technical procedures:
they were, and remain, profoundly social and political processes. At least
with the textual Zeballos embraces the explicit subjectivity of aestheti-
cized geographical discourse, and, ultimately, aestheticized revisions are
the texts that make the cut for his annotated bibliography, a canon whose
indexical capacity (Andermann 2007) provides another snapshot of a

particular moment in the capture of state power and capitalist relations.
Joaquín Costa, or Spain’s (Failed) Conquest

of Commerce
If Argentina climbed its way to the peak of hemispheric dominance in

the late 1890s, the inverse held true across the Atlantic. Spain came
crashing down as a global power upon losing its last colonies in 1898,
but its demise began long before. Indeed, Francisco Grandmontagne’s
1896 Introduction to Croquis Bonaerenses sheds light on the extent of
Spanish anxiety at the turn of the century. Let us thus take a chrono-
logical step backward to explore what was happening with Spain’s geo-
graphical practices concomitantly to the discipline’s institutionalization
in Latin America. As in the New World, Old World geographical prac-
tices worked toward compiling, cataloguing, and indexing territorial
possessions, but the different ways of achieving such tasks point to one
way of explaining why Argentina and Spain experienced such opposing
trajectories.
In its early days, the Spanish Empire proved an outlier within
European cartography: the Crown appeared to have no maps of its colo-
nies. How to account for this incongruous cartographic dearth given the
dialectic of knowledge and conquest governing geographical and imperial
practices? Explaining the relative scarcity of sixteenth-century Spanish
maps in modern archives, Ricardo Padrón (2004) contends that this chi-
mera of non-existence was a result of the Spanish Hapsburg’s explicit
prohibition of printed maps; they feared the inadvertent dissemination
of their geographical knowledge to rivals (Padrón 8–9). However, in
reality, the Crown was committed to rationalizing and gridding its new
territories. María Portuondo (2009) has observed that Spanish cosmog-
raphers wove the New World into Renaissance science, thereby challeng-
ing and changing not only its place within Spanish bureaucracy, but also
its entire conceptualization as a field. She traces the evolution of Spanish
cosmography’s epistemology and objectives, showing the ways in which
it morphed from a humanistic discipline grounded in holistic notions of
synthesis into a scientific and mathematic practice aimed, principally, at
navigation and cartography. In short, early Spanish geography became at
the same time more scientific and less humanistic.
158 A.S. MADAN
Like Padrón, Portuondo dedicates a great deal of her analysis to

Spain’s Casa de Contratación. Established in 1503, this institution,
together with its counterpart the Council of the Indies, regulated all
commerce and navigation to the New World or the Indies. It mediated
all mercantile matters related to Spain’s possessions in the New World,
including tax collection, judicial oversight, and regulation of travel to
the colonies. Mapping was essential to all these tasks for, as Portuondo
states, “a ship could not be sent to sail on an imagined ocean to an
imagined land” (4). Yet the monumental job of gathering informa-
tion (on geography, history, natural history, ethnography, and so forth)
did not necessarily lend itself to analysis, to making the data digestible.
Ultimately, the Casa de Contratación as well as the Council of the Indies
demanded statistical cartographic and geographical studies in lieu of
detailed textual descriptions. Numbers, lines, and charts proved more
amenable to “science with a mission, deployed solely for the benefit of
the state” than the “humanistic fountainhead that produced cosmogra-
phy during the late 15th century,” which was rooted in the two princi-
pal modes of Ptolemaic cartography and the descriptive cosmographical
opus (3). With pragmatism emblematic of the times, Spain thus pushed
away from the humanistic and toward the statistical. Arguably, this trend
continued even until the 1876 founding of the Sociedad Geográfica de
Madrid and onward.
If we extend the arc of Portuondo’s study to Spanish America, we
see quite the opposite. There the discipline largely came full circle and
returned to Strabo: to language, to poetics, to science as statecraft and
politics. We see this commitment to geography’s disciplinary origins
illuminated in Zeballos’s extensive body of writing, which—unlike the
canonical narratives I study in the abutting chapters—is more explicitly
“science with a mission” when compared to literary tomes retrospectively
cast as foundational to the budding nation-states. Still, notwithstanding
his underwhelming literary production and explicit focus on the reasons
undergirding his geographical practice, he unquestionably believes in lit-
erature as the optimal vehicle for earth-writing.
Yet whether in Spain or Argentina, the “mission” was shared even if
its execution was distinct: not only to chronicle territory in ways that
made it apt for conquest, but also to market that carefully choreo-
graphed representation to audiences both local and global. It was to
create that which one wished to project.
From the outset of the conquest of the Americas, Spain approached

this task in clandestine ways. The Crown sought better understand-
ing and control—what Portuondo deems a “secret science”—over the
colonies, and ultimately saw science as an administrative practice that
depended upon empirical data over and above philosophical speculation.
As I note in Chap. 1, a number of scholars (Capel 1994; Godlewska
1999; Benton 2009) have concluded that Spain lost its last colonies due
to a lack of geographical understanding or commitment. Yet perhaps we
can complicate these arguments: what if Spain’s focus was misplaced?
What if an excessive commitment to the practical and the statistical con-
tributed to its demise?
One fascinating point of entry into Spain’s privileging of empirical
data materializes in the writings of Zeballos’s contemporary, Joaquín
Costa (1846–1911), a Spanish politician, lawyer, economist, and histo-
rian who spearheaded the Spanish movement of “regeneración” [regen-
eration] by homing in on the particular relationship between geography
and commerce. Mirroring Zeballos, Costa was an extraordinarily influen-
tial and prolific member of the Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid (SGM).
Both men contributed heartily to the modernization efforts of their
respective nation-states, though of course to different ends given their
disparate loci of enunciation as colonized and colonizer. A transatlan-
tic dialogue between these two public intellectuals thus points to two
divergent modes of organizing, compiling, and defining geographical
discourse and production, each emblematic of its particular region and
colonial history. My sense is that if Zeballos is representative of Latin
America’s return to philosophical speculation and the original tenets of
geography, then Costa proves just the opposite in his quest to itemize
and inventory Spanish possessions in the New World by focusing on a
discourse of more: more geographers, statistics, numbers, and charts lend
themselves to more commerce. More commerce equals more progress.
We can read this pledge to commerce on the very first page of the
inaugural issue of Spain’s Revista de geografía comercial, edited and com-
piled by Costa:
[Geography] is like the wings with which commerce rises to flight; without
them, it will always lead to a meager existence. For this reason, in all the
centuries of history, the same in antiquity as in present times, the people
who have had the most geographers are also those who have had the most
commerce. (Costa 1)
160 A.S. MADAN
Such a grandiose declaration befits Costa’s trajectory: he came to fame

as director of expeditions of the Sociedad de Africanistas y Colonistas
(SAC), which he founded in 1884 after convening the first Congreso
de Geografía Colonial y Mercantil, which took place in Madrid in 1883.
Shortly after the SAC became the practicing branch of the SGM, the
society concluded that its objectives had evolved from matters of armed
conquest to those of commercial dominance, and thus its name too
changed in 1885 to the Sociedad de Geografía Comercial.13
This history of nomenclature illustrates the changing horizon of
geographical study on both sides of the Atlantic. With a progression
from general to specific, from conquest to commerce, we see an effort
to bridge the gaps and tighten the belt on this area of research essen-
tial to growth and prowess. Together with Secretary Rafael Campos
Torres, Costa openly acknowledged Spain’s geographical shortcom-
ings and sought to overcome them apropos a subdiscipline “that we
call Commercial Geography” (1). Their society discursively delineated
an alignment between geography and commerce in its expressive organ,
the Revista de geografía commercial (RGC), which included writings
primarily written by Costa.14 In production for 11 years (1885–1896)
and exceedingly difficult to consult until its recent digitization by the
Biblioteca Nacional Española, the RGC is a multigenre compilation of
158 volumes that combine traditional articles with newspaper excerpts,
topographic maps, travel narratives, cultural commentary, and statis-
tical data on Spain and its remaining colonies. Issues number 1 and 2
of the RGC best help advance a dialogue between Costa and Zeballos
because of their publication date and range of topics, namely regarding
the mutually informative projects of geographical knowledge and territo-
rial conquest.
Costa begins with an excerpt from one of his contemporaries, who
explains that England’s regional prowess cannot be considered mutually
exclusive of its geographical investment: “‘England, the practical nation
par excellence, is also the one that devotes more money, more time, and
more attention to geographic questions amongst all of those in Europe’”
(1). Yet in spite of money, time, and attention, England lacks a geo-
graphical institute dedicated to consecrating the “intimate relations of
kinship and reciprocity between Geography and Commerce” (1). Costa
thus underlines his primary objective: to increase the institutionalization
of geography as a discipline and to disseminate geographical findings
while identifying and commending those nation-states that are doing
just that (1). He punctuates his call to arms with points of comparison,
beginning with England but then moving on to the geographical power-
house of Germany:
from its hundreds of travelers, from its twelve Societies of Geography, from
its Geographic Institutes of Weimar and Gotha, from its illustrious cartog-
raphers, from Petterman and Kiepert, from their maps for a penny, from
their merchants and geographic commissioners, they have come to have a
commercial prowess that has had such a brilliant explosion in the last year,
and that is the terror of France and England. (2)
As Costa enumerates the sheer scope of German geographical travel-

ers, societies, institutes, cartographers, and commissioners, he reveals his
deep-seated belief in the relationship between quantity of geographical
investment (human, intellectual, monetary) and quality of mercantile
growth. He relegates Spain as an inferior counterpoint where the coasts
of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Guinea, and the island of Borneo all sub-
sist without commerce, abandoned by geographers and therefore politi-
cally lost as well, “seriously compromising the future and the existence
of Spain” (2). Costa’s premonitions regarding Spain’s imperial house
of cards—toppled, in fact, a little over a decade after he writes—segue
to his most painful exemplification of Spain’s geographical malaise, in
which he bemoans that even neighboring rival Portugal always paid heed
to the reciprocal relations between geography and commerce (2). With
multiple vested parties keeping a finger on its territorial and economic
pulse, Portugal even manages to win a turf war with England, keeping
control over a substantial slice of African territory. “If Spanish commerce
had imitated the procedures of foreign commerce,” Costa contends in
a nearly blasphemous comparison with Spain’s Iberian competitor, then
its import and export numbers would increase while its territorial losses
would decrease (2). With these layers of comparisons—between who
does geography better and who does it worse—Costa arrives at his cen-
tral thesis: “geographic culture, the breadth of commerce, and colonial
politics are always inseparable” (2).
That Costa holds his motherland in low regard has been well docu-
mented. Leopoldo Zea, for instance, brings Costa, Sarmiento, Buckle,
and Bolívar into conversation with one another under the armature of a
positivist reading wherein Spain—according to all these public intellec-
tuals, no matter their nationality—is the root of barbarism in both the
162 A.S. MADAN
center and the periphery. For Costa, it was a physical matter of physiog-
nomy that caused Spain to be the bastion of backwardness. In attempt-
ing to home in on the cause of this alleged inferiority, Costa lists a series
of theories: from Darwin, who locates Spanish decadence in “ecclesiasti-
cal celibacy and religious intolerance”; from Buckle, who finds it in “the
secular fight with the Muslims and in the dryness of the climate and its
natural consequence, hunger”; from Fouillée, who signals that Spanish
underperformance is due to “a lack of moral and intellectual elite, a nat-
ural aristocracy that could not form because of covenants, the conquest
of América, and the Holy Office” (qtd. in Zea 111–112). Yet Costa is
left wondering why these ills—shared to a certain degree by many other
countries—so plagued Spain. “I am inclined to think,” he explains, “that
the cause of our decadence is ethnic and that it has its roots in the deep-
est strata of the cortex of the brain” (qtd. in Zea 111–112).
So on the one hand, Costa locates Spanish decline in ethnicity, in
physiognomy. And on the other, he—like Zeballos—attributes the
national demise to “the dismemberments of the old Spanish empire”
(RGC 17). Let us note that the primary impetus for Zeballos’s intellec-
tual and military work was to ensure the integrity of the Argentine ter-
ritory. The most consistent thematic thread through the many years of
his writings is territorial paranoia. He understands Argentine history as a
series of territorial losses resulting in national dismemberment that works
against national consolidation; he longs for the days of the old Virreinato
del Río de la Plata, when Argentine territory consisted of lands far, wide,
and diverse.15 This perception of division prompts numerous territorial
disputes under Zeballos’s later leadership, particularly with Chile and
Brazil; I will return to these antagonistic affairs in the next section.
While Costa does not necessarily initiate a war of diplomacy and
rather seeks solutions to advance the regeneración, he hates the hatchet
taken to the Spanish Empire and points a finger at geographical igno-
rance: put plainly, the Crown does not know which territories it pos-
sesses due to a lack of discursive and iconographic documentation. Such
obliviousness means that
In less than two years, England has snatched from us 600 km of coast
on the isle of Boreno, and France and Germany 250 km. In the Gulf
of Guinea: but what does a lot mean if the nation had not realized that
such territories formed part of its patrimony (witness the geography
books that serve as texts in second grade), and not even the very scientific
corporations and officials (witness, among another hundred, the yearbook

of a certain directive center, which, in enumerating the stretches of coast
belonging to Spain in various parts of the world, stays silent about Guinea
and Borneo)? (17)
Here Costa incriminates a “certain directive center”—the Sociedad

Geográfica de Madrid—that carelessly excludes certain Spanish territo-
ries from the national inventory. He goes on to suggest that the Crown
is guilty of rendering these territories available for free by not staking a
discursive or iconic claim to them; at the very least, the territorial loss
should come as a financial gain. Costa goes on to list the many venues
that have been “object of a venture to purchase in recent times,” rang-
ing from Santa Cruz de Mar Pequeña (an offer of 15 million pesetas by
the Sultan of Fez), Fernando Póo (Germany and Portugal, the latter of
which proposed a trade for the island of Timor, “that is worth nothing
to Portugal and that is also worth nothing to Spain”), Cuba (an offer
of millions by the USA as well as by Germany), and the Philippines and
Joló (Germany and Great Britain) (18).
Costa attributes these claims and purchase offers to the geographi-
cal institutes of the countries listed, but deems them, for the most part,
rumors. Nevertheless, how would such government-sanctioned rumors
circulate throughout Europe? From where did these narratives of territo-
rial acquisition and loss stem?
Costa contends that they stem from Spain’s lack of commitment to
“the glories of militant Geography in our century”:
It would be useless for us to say that all of these rumors of sales are inex-
act, but they have, no doubt, some reason for existing: they are the logical
result of the voluntary isolation in which we have lived in recent times,
shunning the responsibilities and the glories of the militant geography of
our century. (18)
By skirting the essential responsibility to heed the relations between

knowledge and conquest, Spain finds its colonial interests scattered piece-
meal across Europe. Enter Costa: he must continuously emphasize the
alignment between geography, commerce, and politics to justify the need
for his institutional offshoot, the Sociedad de Geográfica Comercial, and
its corresponding journal, the Revista de Geografía Comercial. He must
continuously malign the work of the Sociedad Geográfia de Madrid as
164 A.S. MADAN
insufficient and as the cause of territorial dismemberment. He thus dou-

bles back to his introductory observations, underscoring that nothing
can ensure economic growth, prevent derailments, and accelerate circu-
lation like institutions: “it is necessary to construct centers of study that
collect all geographic, social, and economic date that interest the public
or relate to it” (2). By promoting continued institutionalization in Spain,
Costa joins the ranks of fin-de-siècle intellectuals across the globe com-
mitted to organizing and synthesizing information to bolster the colo-
nial apparatus. Yet even the Sociedad Geográfica Española—in an article
titled “La desconocida actividad geográfica de Joaquín Costa” [The
Unknown Geographic Activity of Joaquín Costa] (Rodríguez 2011)—
understates the connection between commerce and conquest, attribut-
ing the change of name from the Society of Africanists and Colonists to
the Society of Commercial Geography to a change of purpose, “because
the objective was not so much about conquering new lands as it was to
create a trend of commercial regeneration” (2). What goes unexamined
here is a new definition of conquest, wherein former hegemonic pow-
ers begin to design the intellectual architecture for commercial empires.
The SGC is the first example of acknowledging and cultivating geogra-
phy’s usefulness for commerce, but Costa’s campaign for Commercial
Museums offers evidence of a different sort—of overcoming the chal-
lenges of distance to foment territorial dominance vis-à-vis imports and
exports. It constitutes a variant of neocolonial violence achieved with
capitalist commerce rather than the conquest of canons.
The Commercial Museums are worth pausing over, because they
illuminate the ways in which the Spanish Crown forecasts its impend-
ing loss of hegemony, on the one hand, and, on the other, how it
seeks any avenue toward recapturing its continental and global domi-
nance. At the time of Costa’s writing—1885—Commercial Museums
had already begun to sprout across Europe, though Spain had yet to
join the trend. Costa finds these museums to be efficient conduits
between the two poles of his model for modernization, geography
and commerce, for they facilitate economic expansion overseas. The
museums serve as a venue wherein businesses might discover how to
conquer foreign markets by learning about their target consumers or
their target merchandise. How might the chasm between disparate
groups of vendors and consumers be bridged? Costa explains that the
Commercial Museums
gather collections of industrial products from different countries of the

globe, and of the materia prima beneficial for national industry that can
be obtained everywhere; they have merchants familiar with the commercial
needs of foreign countries […] who complete catalogue data and thereby
advance national commerce despite foreign competitors, opening new
markets and contributing greatly to increase transactions. (2)
Geography and commerce merge at the site of the museum insofar as

geography ceases to be an obstacle to commerce. The immense space
of “different countries of the globe” is reduced to one place—the
museum—where sellers and products no longer have to cross the seas
to crack new markets. Lagging behind its European counterparts, Spain
cannot surmount its inferior status because of little investment in geo-
graphical studies; the Commercial Museum is the way to climb the pro-
verbial totem pole. Indeed, at the June 6, 1885 meeting of the SGC’s
General Board, in which the process of self-definition and organization
begins, the leaders attempt to list the society’s primary objectives apro-
pos overcoming the nation’s many obstacles. The first objective is to
create the society itself, “of the sort that exist in all European nations
save Spain,” while the second is to publish the Revista, “eminently
practical” (25).
Here again, we note Spain’s complicity in its own retrogression along-
side faith in the power and practice of institutions and writing to reverse
such a decline; this faith is shared across both metropolis and periphery.
The third and fourth objectives include identifying a brick-and-mortar
building that might house both the Revista and meetings of the society.
And finally, the fifth objective, the one of concern to us at present: “to
create a Commercial Museum, which Madrid still lacks since the one the
Minister of Ultramar began to establish a few years ago never came to
solidify” (25).
The repeated message is one of a singular lack: Spain stands alone in
neglecting this discipline that has become the talisman of imperial suc-
cess or demise. Organizing the national inventory is paramount, and the
Commercial Museums achieve just that, as we read in a memorandum
read by the General Secretary Martín Ferreiro at a meeting of the Sociedad
Geográfica on May 12, 1885, which Costa reproduces in full in the vol-
ume at hand. He explains that the Commercial Museums “collect back-
ground, news, production figures and prices, archives and organize them
into well-classified packets, with multiple indexes” (qtd. in Costa 26).
166 A.S. MADAN
The mission is to normalize consumerism, to standardize and organize

colonial materia prima, and it has immediate success. Ferreiro notes that
within just a few months of its creation the Spanish Commercial Museum
boasts 5000 pieces, sparking hope for an eventual “complete inventory of
Spain’s riches” (26). This multigenre inventory includes economic maps
(“entirely lacking,” he says) and, complementarily, graphics assisted by
modern statistics and essayistic memoirs that would serve as textual com-
mentary “to the geographic-economic maps” (26).
Each of these efforts illustrates the ways in which turn-of-the-century
Spain, with Costa at the helm, sought an institutional manifestation of
the intellectual and cultural machination making its colonial enterprise
a possibility. The repository of the Commercial Museum showcases a
Foucauldian link between knowledge and power, as does Zeballos’s
annotated bibliography, which I would like to bring back into the con-
versation, because what we see juxtaposed are two different yet coeval
modes of organizing and institutionalizing geographical knowledge:
one is external and seeks to know its Others (Spain’s Commercial
Museum and Costa’s Sociedad de Geografía Comercial), while the other
is internal and seeks to know itself (Argentina’s Instituto de Geografía
Argentina and Zeballos’s “Anotaciones para una bibliografía argentina”)
and thereby eliminate its indigenous Others. The metropolis seeks to
know and catalogue the periphery to sustain its hegemony; the periphery
defensively seeks to know itself and, in fact, for others to know it.16 Spain
declines while Argentina thrives. How might we interpret these two dif-
ferent outcomes of similar approaches to increasing and inventorying
geographical knowledge?
These differing modes of organizing, compiling, and defining the
national territories—of science as statecraft—reveal new, geographically
inflected ways of interpreting Spain’s colonial demise and, with Argentina
as an illustration, the colonies’ incremental steps toward statehood and
consolidation. Late in the inaugural issue of the Revista de Geografía
Comercial, Costa paraphrases and agrees with the author of La guerra y
la geología (1871), Ángel Rodriguez de Quijano y Arroquia, who main-
tains that mathematical sciences anchor geography, thereby ensuring its
precision; mathematic representation of the land is “the most concrete
and explicit,” because “symbolic writing fixes and quickly makes per-
ceptible the descriptions that common writing would make vague and
interminable” (31). And here, synthesized in the most explicit of state-
ments, we see the Spanish privileging of empirical data over and above
philosophical speculation, which may take any number of forms but

which, in my argument regarding Latin America, is as vague and inter-
minable as the land it describes. Despite valuing mathematical symbols,
Costa remains convinced that his model of uniting geography and com-
merce brings humans into the foundational relationship of geography—
that is, the link between inhabitant and land, for,
Geography, after all, is not an abstract geodesy, attentive only to the study
of the astronomical and geometric elements of the planet; it also accounts
for the beings that populate every latitude, every island, every continent,
and therefore, its productions; it observes the character and the way of liv-
ing of races and peoples and, therefore, their necessities and the degree
and manner in which they are or can be satisfied, their capacity for con-
sumption, their markets and the ways they equate some products to others,
their media and transportation, etc.; engendering, as such, that economy
of the people, which we call Commercial Geography. (1)
Yet I would argue that Costa’s humans are reduced to producers and
consumers rather than subjects. This reduction goes hand in hand with
reducing geography to an accurate mathematical science. The Spaniards
are guilty of both of these charges, though with Costa and Arroquia as
their representatives they do not see them as such: in the RGC reduction
emerges as a positive synthesis, wherein science can “reduce to unitary law
the immense variety of earthly accidents to describe them with certainty
and even to guess them” (31). If we take Zeballos’s project as emblematic
of what was happening across the Americas with respect to the geographi-
cal, perhaps we can conclude that the colonies’ success in consolidating
their respective nation-states emerges from a commitment to the textual,
to the aesthetic, to the humanistic of philosophical speculation rather
than the mathematical of empirical data. On both sides of the Atlantic the
impulse to catalogue and inventory rears its head. The different manifesta-
tions suggest that transcending the dialectic between knowledge and power
might require something more than tables and charts filled with numbers.
Territorial Disputes
Mirroring Costa’s commitment to maintaining Spain’s colonial cohe-
siveness, Zeballos also repeatedly notes the need to ensure Argentina’s
territorial integrity. In “Colonization of Irrigated Lands,” an August
168 A.S. MADAN
1912 speech given to the House of Representatives and republished in

Atlántida, he echoes, nearly verbatim, Costa’s lamentations regarding
dismemberment of the national space, while similarly attributing said loss
to a lack of territorial knowledge:
We have lived under extraordinary ignorance, even scholars, with respect

to the true character of Argentine territory; we have spurned it. The
United States, over the course of a century, has increased its territory by
8,000,000 square kilometers; Brazil, in the same period, has increased
theirs by 1,200,000 square kilometers; the Argentine Republic has dimin-
ished its territory by 1,550,000 kilometers, which passed to other sover-
eign nations. (326)
While Zeballos’s take on immigration changes through the years—in this

particular speech he retakes the stance that “movements of immigration
and repatriation to the northeastern and northern provinces” are essen-
tial to national consolidation—he insists that geographical knowledge
about the terrain leads to economic growth and national security (326).
This impulse holds especially true with respect to relations between his
country and its neighboring nation-states. Brazil comes up again in the
same speech in which Old World intra-Iberian competition resurfaces
in the New World: much in the same way that Costa enviously praises
Portugal’s successes in both sustaining and expanding its colonial hold-
ings, Zeballos underscores Brazil’s number of European immigrants,
which goes from 67,000 in 1897 to 134,000 in 1911 (341).
However, he does not just focus on numbers. Rather, he also lists
motives, which include diplomatic agreements with Italy to offer subven-
tions to relocate Italians to Brazilian territory, and commercial contracts
with a German company, Nord Deutsche Lloyd, for 800,000 ha in the
south of Brazil “to colonize in the most advantageous of conditions”
(342). Zeballos concludes with resounding, if begrudging, praise: “That
policy of the Brazilian government deserves the most sincere applause
because it reveals the thinking of statesmen, who intend to enlarge their
country and enlarge it” (342).
Zeballos makes visible his interpretation of the Latin American states-
man’s job description: to make the country bigger, safer, and richer
than its neighboring countries. In this section I will thus focus on three
particular territorial disputes—with Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil—that
reveal the ways in which geography and geographers contribute to the
continent’s nation-building projects through this job description, which

depends on qualities both scientific and literary. The feuds shed light
on Zeballos’s unique brand of neurosis and even paranoia regarding
dismemberment of Argentina’s tremendous body of land; maintaining
intact parcels of land constitutes his life’s work, so much so that it leads
him down a path of falsifications, lies, and political dramas.17
Recall my reference in Part I to the Chilean Pablo Medina, a naturalist
who commits his monies and his time to rectifying narratives regarding
the origins of the Río de la Plata. Medina’s conclusion—that the origins
are Argentine—buys him a treasured spot in “Apuntaciones para una
bibliografía argentina,” a repository of fin-de-siècle cultural production
that Zeballos designates as “fact” or “fiction.” Medina attains a stamp of
approval and thus finds inclusion in Zeballos’s canon because he discur-
sively advances the Argentine cause onto paper and, as such, into poster-
ity, this despite his country of origin: Chile.
For Zeballos, Chile is the arch nemesis because it laid claim to the
very River Plate region that Medina signals as rightful Argentine terri-
tory. In a surprising move given the argument I have laid out—that
Zeballos values descriptive geography over the imagistic—late in his
career Zeballos deems the word incapable of conferring final power upon
his vision of Argentine territory. Medina had textually confirmed that
the Río de la Plata originated in Argentina and, with that, that Chilean
claims to the territory south of Bío Bío were unfounded. Yet with the
border demarcation still up for debate, in 1901 Zeballos fashions a map
that designates the area as belonging to the old Virreinato del Río de la
Plata—the last and most short-lived Viceroyalty of the Spanish Empire,
lasting from 1776 to 1814—of which Buenos Aires was the capital and
therefore natural heir (Fig. 4.2).
This map, as Pablo Lacoste and Adriana Arpini (2002) argue, has
become a sort of national icon for the Argentine historiographical tradi-
tion. Tracing its cartographic genealogy from inception to the current
day, they explain that, around 1960, the map began to circulate widely.
By the 1970s it had been standardized as bipartisan truth by both the
Argentine left and right. The map reached the pinnacle of canonization
when, in the year 2000, academics from the University of Buenos Aires
upheld Zeballos’s demarcations in the multivolume tome titled Nueva
Historia Argentina (Editorial Sudamericana), thereby ushering the map
into the new millennium. In Lacoste and Arpini’s words, “this stand-
ardization of anti-Chilean thought” spread across Argentina through
170 A.S. MADAN
Fig. 4.2 Estanislao Zeballos’s Map of Argentina, presented at the “Conferencia

inaugural de la Liga Patriótica Nacional” in the Politeama Argentino de Buenos
Aires on December 19, 1901 and published in Revista de Derecho, Historia y
Letras 4.11 (1902): 413–456
the reproduction of the map in school manuals, leading to millions of

Argentine children being indoctrinated with the belief that “‘Chilean
expansionists had stripped Argentina of hundreds of thousands of square
kilometers’” (qtd. in Lacoste and Arpini 134).
Here again, we return to the notion of the didactic geography wherein
nationalism’s threads are woven together, however loosely, around an
imaginary of fictitious boundary conflicts. So, entrenched in the aes-
thetic, Zeballos’s cartographic fiction becomes the official truth, one
stranger than most literary fiction. Its layers of inaccuracies—proven to
be such by a bi-national commission dedicated to increasing camarade-
rie between Argentine and Chile, which, incidentally, possesses its own
fictitious variant of the border demarcation—nevertheless inform the
paradigmatic Argentine truth through the continued circulation and

institutionalization of the map.18
Why does Zeballos transition from the textual space of geographical
discourse into the imagistic of cartography? I offer that it goes back to
the people, to the inhabitants of the land. The Argentine human sub-
ject depicted and doomed to be subjugated vis-à-vis Zeballos’s discur-
sive practice was a necessary element to explain the national identity. Yet
the indigenous populations are erased in the visual; the objectivity of the
map relies on its clean lines, on its established plots and definitive bor-
ders. My reading of Zeballos’s inclusion of peoples stands apart from the
traditional interpretation of Latin American nature represented as meta-
phorically empty, an argument most uniquely espoused, in recent criti-
cism, by Jens Andermann (2007), who notes that “Patagonian nature, as
exposed to the gaze in maps, photographs, and museum exhibits, visual-
ized state power as imposed on an inert, empty land, replacing the his-
torical process of state formation with a founding myth from which the
people were absent altogether” (208). Notice, however, the exclusion of
the discursive in Andermann’s statement, thus only the visual is wholly
complicit in the erasure of human subjects.
I contend that the textual allows entry of the human, a quality ame-
nable to Zeballos with respect to Argentina but not, as his 1901 map
suggests, in relation to neighboring Chile. As the de facto leader of the
rioplatense intellectual elite, his contradictory task was also theirs: how
to build a distinct nation-state that belonged, at the same time, to the
global civilizing project. Ultimately this double bind leads them to the
contradictory task of subsuming both peoples and territories into a “civi-
lizing” national narrative wherein gridlines and bylines contain the pueblo
and the pampa, making both fit for capitalistic appropriation. Yet in the
end, only text brings to bear upon the uneasy relationship that Zeballos
has with exterminating that which makes Argentine unique, that which is
autochthonous to his territory: its original inhabitants.
On the other hand, might we postulate that the Chilean body con-
cerns Zeballos less than the intactness of the body of Argentine territory,
both human and environment? He believes, after all, that humankind
originated from the very soil of the Pampa. Or is it, rather, that some
sort of visual permanence was necessary for a state fixation, to use
Raymond Craib’s suggestive term?
In the Mexican context, Craib (2004) argues that settlement was
essential to settling down the consolidated state as a permanent fixation,
172 A.S. MADAN
for it prompted cultivation not only of the land but of modernization.

Similarly, Yujnovsky (2008) demonstrates the ways in which the photo-
graph El valle de Namuncurá in Zeballos’s Viaje al país de los araucanos
(1881) works to defend the contested territory from potential Chilean
occupation. With its illustration of pueblos, houses, military command-
ers, and Argentine flags blowing in the wind, the image, in the face of
foreign claims, was a way to demonstrate that Argentine settlement
“was already a fact” (Yujnovsky 111). In this sense Zeballos’s maps and
photographs reveal themselves as both instrumental and iconographic,
a representation not only of the past but a confirmation of the present
and a premonition of the future. What becomes essential to overcom-
ing the region’s impenetrability is to chart and document—and paint
and photograph—its contours in ways that stand the test of time. We see
neither film negative nor erasure marks nor smudges; we see no altera-
tions. The images thus conceal the social process of their own produc-
tion, thereby lending them a finality that pinballs to the process itself.
The very sovereignty of the land assumes an inevitability that it did not
have in practice. In short, it was always already Argentine territory.
A similar narrative unfolds in Uruguay. Zeballos maintains a stead-
fast commitment to planting the Argentine flag in any bordering terri-
tory, attending foremost to the River Plate region. Rivers, in the end,
determine the flow of regional mobility and economic progress. Forming
part of the border between Argentina and Uruguay and with major
ports in the capital cities of, respectively, Buenos Aires and Montevideo,
the salt wedge estuary has prompted numerous disputes and even wars
over navigation rights, including two extra-regional blockades by the
French (1883–1840) and an Anglo-French joint force (1845–1850).
Zeballos adds to this list of feuds. Taking an increasingly inimical stance
during his reign as Minister of Foreign Relations in the administration
of President José Figueroa Alcorta (1906–1910), Zeballos declares
Argentina’s exclusive dominion over the Río de la Plata. The name for
“that repugnant vomit of regional relations”—in José Otero Menéndez’s
(2006) words—is nothing short of the “Zeballos Doctrine” (377).
According to the Zeballos Doctrine, Uruguay held negative jurisdic-
tion and therefore had no right to use the Río de Plata, except at high
tide. This audacious pronouncement further alienated Uruguay from the
imaginary collective known as the United Provinces of the River Plate,
which had supplanted the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata after the
May 25, 1810 May Revolution. Although the Uruguayans (los orientales)
had been independent since 1828, they still considered themselves a

“province” separate to the unity because of Brazilian diplomacy or, bet-
ter yet, Brazilian exertion of influence; Uruguay, it was understood, was
the lesser of the neighboring nation-states, absorbable even. In a 1914
issue of the Annals of the American Academy, American political sci-
entist Charles M. Pepper describes what was known in the USA as the
ABC Doctrine—ABC representing an alliance of the Latin American
superpowers of the early twentieth century, Argentina–Brazil–Chile—
which had begun to prompt “fear in some countries of absorption by
their neighbors” (114). Zeballos’s audacity thus catalyzes a border con-
flict with Uruguay that, in turn, contributes to the consolidation of
Uruguayan identity as an Other in relation to neighboring Argentina and
Brazil. Uruguayans existed outside of ABC and chose to define them-
selves in contradistinction to the alliance, thus further showcasing the
ways in which border feuds and alliances fueled projects of unification.
With this incident as one of many igniters, Argentina–Uruguay tensions
sizzled throughout the twentieth century, remaining unresolved until the
1973 River Plate Treaty.
The Argentina–Brazil–Chile alliance, Pepper informs us, “has one
drawback. Other Latin-American countries are very jealous of their ter-
ritorial integrity and of their independence. It may not be an independ-
ence, it may not be a sovereignty […], but they prize it” (Pepper 114).
Indicting the emerging superpowers for having, of late, a “big head,” he
remarks with disbelief that Zeballos, in a convocation for ex-President
Roosevelt at the University of Buenos Aires, “set forth what he claimed
was the Argentine view, henceforth to be known as the Zeballos–
Roosevelt protocol, and predicted it would supersede the Monroe
Doctrine” (115). This megalomania is one more example of the ways in
which Zeballos’s tactics reach new heights by the early twentieth century,
expanding, even (and especially) to Brazil, thereby undermining Pepper’s
belief in a strategic alliance.
While the conflicts with Chile and Uruguay shed light on longstand-
ing battles both diplomatic and bellicose, with Brazil we see Zeballos’s
particular nexus of concerns reflected in a potentially more war-prompt-
ing scandal now known as the “Case of Telegram No. 9.” The case is,
in some ways, as juvenile as its Nancy Drew-esque name; it was even
quickly satirized in a film that premiered in early 1909, Zé Bolas e o
famoso telegrama número nove.19 In what follows, I will try to unravel its
tangled threads.
174 A.S. MADAN
On June 17, 1908, Brazilian Foreign Minister José Maria da Silva

Paranhos Júnior, more commonly known by his title as the Baron of
Rio Branco, dispatched a coded telegram to the Brazilian Legation in
Santiago. The communiqué, now infamously known as Telegram No. 9,
nearly ignited a war between Argentina and Brazil. Intended for Brazilian
diplomats Henrique Lisboa and Domício de Gama, the message was
instead intercepted by Zeballos, who was Foreign Minister until precisely
one day before the telegram’s discovery.
Under congressional scrutiny, Zeballos had resigned from the Foreign
Minister post embroiled in scandal on June 16, 1908. The Argentine
press had leaked his plans to mobilize troops to Rio de Janeiro’s marina,
where, he claimed, Rio Branco was preparing to attack Argentina. On
June 16, Zeballos insisted that Argentina was under imminent siege. On
June 17, he maintained that he could prove as much with a telegram
found, essentially, in his back pocket.
After concluding that the decoded telegram revealed Brazil’s hostile
stance toward Argentina, Zeballos disseminated his interpretation of its
contents. His decoding was subsequently read at a congressional hear-
ing by the new Foreign Minister, Victorino de la Plaza, and published
in the columns of Diario del comercio 4 months later, on October 30,
1908. The telegram was declared indisputable proof of Brazil’s intended
aggression toward Argentina, fueling transatlantic reproach of Brazil
(Heinsfeld 2004; Alvares Lobo 63–71). A 1950 edition of the Revista
de Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo recounts the regional
disquiet prompted by the bellicose episode, noting that the “Zeballos
offensive would acquire such momentum that it clouded skies across the
continent, and it unleashed upon the figure of Rio Branco, who was fin-
gered as the grand instigator of this discord” (Alvares Lobo 66).
The Argentine government paid heed to Zeballos’s discovery despite
its suspicious timing. After all, the moment was one of extreme ten-
sion and heightened nerves. In addition to facilitating Brazil’s territorial
growth, Rio Branco had just purchased three powerful dreadnoughts for
the Brazilian Navy. The Argentine government had, moreover, reason to
suspect a Brazilian–Chilean alliance.
Yet in a surprising turn of events, Rio Branco emerged not as perpe-
trator but rather as perpetrated: Zeballos had forged the telegram. In a
war of words on a battlefield of newspapers, Rio Branco published the
original telegram, the secret cipher, and Zeballos’s falsified decoding in
the Jornal do Comércio on November 15, 1908, proving that while it
did indeed include “the order number of the telegram, the declared day
of week and month, the number of paragraphs in which it was divided,
and the mentioned points,” it included neither threat nor plans for attack
(qtd. in Alvares Lobo 68).
What I find most interesting about the scandal is its motive, which is
nothing less than a revenge story threaded through a narrative of territo-
rial expansion, international arbitration, and border demarcation. It is a
tale of statesmen, of geography and geographers, of literature, and of the
ways in which these elements intertwined in an effort to ensure national
security.
Zeballos’s “Case of Telegram No. 9” is, further, a tangible fulcrum
connecting Sarmiento and Euclides, two writers compared for centuries,
but primarily at the site of their most famous narratives, Facundo and
Os Sertões. As a military engineer and land surveyor, Euclides da Cunha
conducted Amazonian border missions for Rio Branco when the Baron
wrote the telegram. The resulting altercation came to be a direct bout
between Zeballos and Euclides.20 The confrontation finds explicit detail
in Euclides’s letters, in which he describes Zeballos as “the wicked rascal
who tried to entangle me in his web of fraud, and transform me into a
Captain Dreyfus of the Ministry of the Exterior,” and accuses the geog-
rapher of “waging war with imaginary antagonists, in flagrant contrast
with Brazilian and Argentine national harmony” (Correspondência de
Euclides da Cunha 387–388). O caso do telegrama número nove illumi-
nates geography and geographers’ pivotal roles in constructing a dis-
course of nationalism while attempting to protect sovereign interests.
Territorial knowledge and a mission to protect the nation drive both
Euclides and Zeballos, and prove to be a toxic mix when combined with
personal ambition. For Sarmiento, on the contrary, Zeballos amounts
to less poison and more patriotism. Zeballos, he insists, deserves “great
praise” for such richly detailed contributions to Argentine geography (El
Nacional, October 8, 1878).
Twenty years later—and 10 years after Sarmiento’s 1888 death—
Zeballos writes a similarly superlative-filled ode to Sarmiento commend-
ing his crazed commitment to “Argentina’s territorial integrity”; he
observes that “Sarmiento’s insanity was, in fact, a civilizing delirium”
(“Nota a Sarmiento” 215). Zeballos’s statement supports his belief that
any measure or action is justified under the civilizing mission so long as it
is “patriotic, persistent, and permanent” (215). To an extent, his defense
of Sarmiento sounds like a self-defense, almost a premonition of what
176 A.S. MADAN
is to come in his political descent. (The caricature with which I began

this chapter even parodies Zeballos’s perspective on Sarmiento and Mitre
as “inferior to him” [“Siluetas políticas” 502]. In such a formula, then,
Zeballos would be more patriotic and therefore more crazed.) Defending
Sarmiento as a self-made man lacking formal training in any of his
numerous areas of expertise as doctor of philosophy, general, orator,
intellectual, journalist, and statesman, Zeballos spotlights the qualities he
appreciates as embodied in the man he emulates, a Hegelian world his-
torical man for whom the Argentine Republic was but “a modest pedes-
tal,” insufficient now but when
she is the colossus of the South […], Americans and Europeans will
remove the dust of the past to study her heroic and civil origins; and her
founders, heretofore unknown in the world, will be inscribed in the golden
book of human glories. Universal History will thus carry out Sarmiento’s
apotheosis […]. (212)
Zeballos’s unencumbered repackaging of Sarmiento’s flaws is remark-

able for its ability to cast a positive light on the Sarmentine shadow-
filled legacy—his oft-criticized misquotations (done by memory and a
testament to his brilliance, says Ze), his dearth of friends and surplus of
enemies, alongside his “authoritarian violence” and irascible personality,
replete with qualities such as “impetuous, aggressive, violent, implacable
and undisciplined” (all necessary to complete the hard work of “national
discipline”), his “errors and tempests” (natural excesses that allow
Sarmiento “the madman” to diagnose “the key to Argentina’s disgraces”
(213–215)—that is, a lack of education for the popular masses).
I am less interested in Zeballos’s recasting of pejorative Sarmentine
traits than in his sustained belief in Sarmiento’s words, which are twice
aligned with metaphors of primitive weaponry, “sling stones” and “the
wide sword of a Roman gladiator” (213). For Zeballos, Sarmiento’s
words are offensive, rather than defensive, and “his most efficient
shield” is his very singular character “without heart and without skin”
(213). Sarmiento, here, is prehistoric, a caveman with a slingshot, a
Roman gladiator, and his writings, especially Recuerdos de Provincia
and Facundo, are beautiful and therefore (in)imitable in their primitiv-
ity, because of their “style whose vigor and novelty shock [and] break
with the rules of conventional art, seduce with their beauty, whose
brilliance vanquishes all defects; they are the point of departure for a
genuinely Argentine literature, the fruit of its grandiose nature” (213).

Zeballos reads (and arguably imitates) the Sarmentine corpus as genuine
Argentine literature insofar as it is an outgrowth of the land, the fruit
of its grandiose nature, which necessarily means that it too is grandiose,
large, and “not always coherent,” a notion he repeats again in a lengthier
passage:
El pensador vertió en páginas exuberantes, a veces incoherentes y turbu-

lentas como los torrentes tornasolados que se despeñan de las altas quebradas,
un caudal copiosísimo de ideas magistrales, de observaciones profundas, de
agresiones apasionadas y de secretos institucionales, arrancados a nuestros
orígenes étnicos, a los fastos coloniales, al carácter argentino y a las con-
mociones sangrientas de la vía crucis nacional.21 (213; emphases mine)
Here we see Sarmiento through Zeballos’s lens, which is in turn filtered

through the Sarmentine prism wherein form and content unite: in order
to write about Argentina’s bloody coming of age into a consolidated
nation-state, the “vía crucis nacional,” Sarmiento’s pages, in Zeballos’s
estimation, are as incoherent and turbulent as the iridescent rapids tum-
bling down its high gorges (los torrentes tornasolados que se despeñan de
las altas quebradas). Zeballos thus writes Sarmiento just as Sarmiento
would have written the land—that is to say, as transculturated geographi-
cal discourse that is copious, profound, passionate, and anchored on that
which is authentic and, indeed, mixed: “our ethnic origins” and “the
colonial chronicles.” Zeballos might well be a page out of Sarmiento
with his numerous clauses and commas, with his trifecta of alliterated
couplets (torrentes tornasolados, caudal copiosísimo, agresiones apasiona-
das), with his alignment between the nation-state itself and Sarmiento, a
Christ-like figure who disciplines his people and himself on a self-emol-
lient path to state formation.
Zeballos’s high regard for Sarmiento manifests itself as imitation, or
so I have attempted to show. Yet that imitation falls short, such that the
qualities he admires in Sarmiento—zealousness, passion, incoherence,
lunacy, patriotism, poetry—devolve into Zeballos’s anticlimactic resigna-
tion from his post as Foreign Minister (1908) and his mockery in multi-
ple media, including the caricature with which I began that foresaw both
his never-to-be seat as President of the Republic and his lack of canoniza-
tion. Zeballos would never be read as a poet, nor would he ever be presi-
dent, and it was Euclides da Cunha who, on the other side of the border,
178 A.S. MADAN
upbraided Ze’s spurious attention to detail and tendencies toward fic-

tion, toward imaginary antagonists, as lies of an individual who falsifies
telegrams to tunes reminiscent of the Dreyfus Affair and who was, there-
fore, nothing more than a “wicked rascal.” However, Zeballos is the per-
fect intermezzo for the ways in which he is unlike the other figures of
this study. Despite never being president or canonical author or national
celebrity, he sheds light on the interior movements of a discipline in for-
mation, of the ways in which states and empires rely on information as
much as force. His essential role in using the lines of geography to dis-
cipline the nation both didactically and institutionally make visible this
intersection that, gradually, gave shape to an entire genre of writing
across the Americas, including our next stop: Euclides da Cunha’s Brazil.
Notes
1. “En la vanguardia de un ejército que recorre paises salvajes debe ir el
geógrafo, que es el batidor de la civilizacion, sobre las comarcas ine-
sploradas” (349). Though I will not include the Spanish original for all
translated quotations, I include this one to illustrate the ways in which
Zeballos adheres to Sarmiento’s orthographic rules, which signal the ways
in which transculturated geographical discourse continues to break free
from European models not only discursively, but also orthographically.
2. Jens Andermann (2010) has described Zeballos as “perhaps the most
notorious and striking example of the self-effacing narrator, not least
because of his complete lack of literary talent”—this in reference to La
conquista de quince mil leguas (“Conquering Times” 152–153). Similarly,
Fermín Rodríguez (2005) contends that Zeballos is “without talent”
and La conquista a text with “rudimentary prose [that] advances with-
out too many narrative scruples,” while Daniel Balderston argues that,
although Zeballos’s historical novels are interesting for their nostalgia of a
past obliterated by none other than Zeballos himself, they “may be lack-
ing as works of literature and as history” (324). Balderston even foot-
notes Daniel Granada’s 1947 praise for Zeballos’s aesthetic merit, but
only to designate it “an overly generous estimate of the artistic value
of the Zeballos novels” (327). Pedro Navarro Floría (2005) digs his
spurs into the formal and literary qualities of Episodios en los territorios
del sur (1879), maligning them as little more than Zeballos’s patchwork
attempts to distract from and dissimulate a lack of concrete geographical
knowledge. While I too do not find great appeal in Zeballos’s prose, I
think he was governed by a certain aesthetic that is too often dismissed as
singularly bad rather than read for its aesthetic failures.
3. Beatriz S. Díez (2011) puts forth a compelling accusation of plagiarism

of the worst sort, noting line-by-line similarities between Zeballos’s tril-
ogy and Santiago Avendaño’s two narratives Memorias del ex cautivo
Santiago Avendaño and Usos y costumbres de los indios de la pampa, except
that Zeballos’s upends Avendaño’s sympathetic casting of the Ranqueles.
While Avendaño gives the subaltern a voice, Díez illuminates the ways
in which Zeballos appropriates the original manuscripts to contradictorily
invisibilize the same subjects.
4. If Sarmiento can be credited for the classic pathological diagnosis of vast-
ness as the primary ailment afflicting Argentina, then Zeballos expands on
this corporeal and medical metaphor with his “autopsy” of the Pampa,
which he determines to be a diseased and contagious body, something
that produces “death upon contact” (La conquista 245). See Andermann
(2010) and Rodríguez (2005) for compelling readings of this discursive
grounding in medical epidemiology, which, Andermann maintains, is the
metaphor nourishing Zeballos’s entire corpus—“the task of the desert
geographer is to cut through a dead space-body, exposing its ‘infernal
organisation’ of contagious agents that had until then ‘rejected civiliza-
tion’” (“Conquering Time” 153–154).
5. The impulse to compile a national bibliography stemmed, in part, from
a requirement proposed at the Fifth International Geographic Congress
(IGC), which took place in Berne, Switzerland in 1891. Emerging from
an imminent need to standardize knowledge production, two propos-
als were put forth at the IGC: firstly, that member nations contribute to
the regular publication of a universal geographical bibliography; and sec-
ondly, that they collaborate in creating an International Map of the World
(IMW). Conceived by German geographer Albrecht Penck, the idea to
map the world afresh ultimately amounted in a 1:1 million scale Map of
Hispanic America, often called the Millionth Map of Hispanic America,
which was completed in 1946.
6. The pendulum swings again by 1915, the year Zeballos publishes what
amounts to the most positivist and determinist piece of his corpus and,
lamentably, the one that might be most categorically subsumed under the
notion of a didactic geography—a text titled El tesoro de la juventud that
functions something like an encyclopedia to be distributed to school-age
children across Argentina and neighboring countries. And still, a century
after its publication, the text continues to appear as reference material
in libraries and schools, this despite advancing a racially charged thesis.
In the chapter titled “Suma geográfica argentina,” for instance, Zeballos
explains that “The character of this population is entirely European, so,
as we said, the white race has made disappear, by absorption, the Indians,
reduced and submitted to work, and there exist probably no more than
180 A.S. MADAN
1000 Negros. This homogeneity of population gives to the Argentine

people their intelligent and virile character, of intense and quick imagi-
nation, and enterprising in all branches of human progress. Thus is
explained how the Republic has developed its advances, until arriving at
the enviable state of prosperity and wealth in which it finds itself today”
(qtd. in Lacoste and Arpini 131).
7. Pearson and Heffernan note that the AGS, with Bowman at the helm,
finds inspiration in the Royal Geographic Society’s maps of the Middle
East and Europe, produced during the First World War and subsequently
used in post-war peace negotiations at the Paris Peace Conferences.
Bowman and company believed that the Hispanic America map series
might similarly allay future border disputes between Latin American
states (218–219).
8. In their essay on Aldao’s series of translations of English-language
travel writing—so-called “cheap books” published between 1915 and
1921—Patricio Fontana and Claudia Roman (2009) note that Aldao
was less interested in a direct translation and more in “a nationaliza-
tion—and even a Creolization—of these texts” (1). Aldao, they con-
clude, considers extra-Argentine writings as essential to understanding
Argentina’s “brilliant future” as preordained, as Manifest Destiny. As
early as 1897, Zeballos, it would thus seem, identifies Aldao as doing
something quite akin to transculturating geographical discourse, but
perhaps taking it to the next level: translation rather than revision or
rectification.
9. Zeballos directed and edited the Argentine section of El tesoro de la juven-
tud (1920) and invited Unamuno to write its prologue. Yet Zeballos’s
esteem for Unamuno can be seen years prior in, for instance, a 1906 let-
ter to the Spaniard in which he enumerates the ways in which their ideas
coincide, particularly in an issue of the Revista de derecho, historia y let-
ras that Zeballos sends along with the letter. See http://gredos.usal.es/
jspui/bitstream/10366/21048/1/cmu_Zeballos_E1.pdf.
10. Zeballos varies between the traditional spelling with a v and the uniquely
Argentine orthography with a b.
11. “The recova, in full gala, has a look that enchants: rows of pennants,
explosions of colors, Chinese balloons, fantasy lanterns, all hanging from
an infinity of threads that crisscross and confusingly imitate the com-
plicated rigging of a great ship. There in the distance, upon the bluish
background of the sky, drawing the strange profile of its silhouettes and
peeking out from above, a crowd of domes and towers are lost in the
view of the first buildings of the metropolis, which form a gigantic ram-
part in an interminable parade that overlooks the river and rises with the
pretensions of a colossal, inaccessible wall.”
12. “A string of merchants with their baskets or their showcases resting on

hand-held countertops sell roasted peanuts, grilled sausages, fried fish,
chestnuts, fritters, and the classic moon-sized fainá. There are people in
the gun-shooting house, in the ring-tossing house, in the phonograph
and the kinescope, and traveling photographers, soothsayers, and for-
tune-tellers stroll about […].”
13. Horacio Capel has an excellent chronology of the Sociedad Geográfica de
Madrid’s founding in 1876 and the ways it influenced Spain’s evolving
colonial mentality. His essay, “The Imperial Dream: Geography and the
Spanish Empire in the Nineteenth Century,” paints this scene in broad
strokes, whereas I aim to focus on the specificities of Joaquín Costa’s
influence within the SGM.
14. Once the Sociedad Española de Geografía Comercial was incorporated
into the Sociedad de Geografía Comercial (in 1896), the journal became
known as the Revista de Geografía Colonial y Mercantil from 1897–1924.
The return to the word colonial exposes the renewed interest in matters
of conquest. By 1924 the journal became known by its current name,
Boletín de la Real Sociedad Geográfica.
15. Zeballos was not mistaken to think that Argentina had lost vast sectors
of land over the course of the nineteenth century. He sums up these
losses quite well in a 1900 issue of Revista de Derecho, Historia y Letras
(RDHL), noting that “national dismemberment, from 1810 to 1852, is
signaled by the segregation of a large part of Misiones from both sides of
Uruguay, from the eastern Republic and Bolivia, with the Pacific territory
of Atacama from the Salado de Copiapó to the Loa in Perú and with the
erection of the Chilean province to the east of the Andes in Magallanes.
From 1852 to 1900, a long period of uncertainty and civil war, of pros-
titution of adopted institutions in 1853, of great moral and material
advances and insatiable mercantilism, without fear and without scruples,
the territorial dismemberment has continued. The Chaco to the north
of Pilcomayo, the territories at the 52nd parallel south in Patagonia, and
a part of eastern Atacama between the 22nd and 23rd parallels passed
to foreign owners; their enlargement increases future dangers for the
Argentine Republic” (RDHL 302–303).
16. This impulse to market the national landscape appears in many texts, but
explicitly in Sarmiento’s Facundo and, as I hope to have illuminated,
across Zeballos’s corpus. Yet dissemination goes beyond the textual. In
the Argentine context, we see a commitment to disseminating Argentine
cultural production in precisely the European Commercial Museums
that Spain strives to emulate. In a collection of reports compiled by
D. Santiago Alcorta in 1890 regarding Argentina’s presence at the
Universal Expo in Paris, for example, we learn that 42 collections
182 A.S. MADAN
of varying importance, but including “photographic views, maps, and other

things,” were gathered and submitted to a number of entities, including
the Commercial Museums of Turin, Lille, Vienna, Ambères, Stuttgart,
Milan, Amsterdam, and Trieste, “to interest visitors and help them know
the country” (52–53). A difference in objectives becomes clear: Spain seeks
to gather the production of its colonies into one place, whereas the colonies
aim to disperse knowledge of their lands and peoples across the seas.
17. Describing Zeballos as a “sort of Buffalo Bill of the Argentine south,”
Daniel Balderston calls into question Zeballos’s “best-known find”—
“a cache of documents supposedly left by Calfucurá’s captive scribes,”
which, “authentic or not” allowed Zeballos to proclaim himself a reliable
narrator and his text rigorous and exact (323–324). Balderston delineates
the ways in which the style and diction of the supposedly discovered doc-
uments are uncannily similar to that of the rest of the work. Put plainly,
Zeballos has, over time, been shown to be hyperbolic and even untruth-
ful, this in service of fashioning a very particular image of the Argentine
nation-state that will endure into posterity. Yet his project is also about
constructing—as Balderston (1991) and Navarro (2005–2006) have
noted—an image of himself as celebrity; it is about personal and des-
potic desire, something we see in an 1875 letter directed to Francisco
Moreno, in which he again exhibits flair best left to Hollywood Westerns
to encourage Moreno’s impending excursion to the Nahuel Huapi—
“Go Ahead. And upon your return celebrity and your friends’ arms will
effusively receive you in your country” (qtd. in Rodríguez 4). As I try
to show in Chap. 1, this desire for personal celebrity and praise becomes
something quite different in millennial cultural production, which brings
the focus back on the subjects portrayed instead of the portrayer himself.
18. In another Lacoste piece (2002), we learn that Argentine predilections
toward staking unfounded claims upon territory and proclaiming neigh-
borly wrongdoings is matched, nearly to the tee, by Chile, which con-
structs its own archive of text and image to support its take on border
demarcation. Both nations, the study finds, are misguided in their beliefs:
an external study that put aside Chilean and Argentine historiographical
tradition in order to create an objective assessment of the border deter-
mined that “contrary to the myth sustained by all the books, maps, and
images that currently dominate the press, schools, and quarters of the
Southern Cone, neither Argentina has robbed one square centimeter of
territory from Chile, nor has Chile robbed one square centimeter of terri-
tory from Argentina” (80).
19. Beyond his own penchant for dramatizing himself, Zeballos finds him-
self satirized on more than one occasion. Adolfo Prieto (1980) notes
that Manuel Gálvez satirizes Zeballos in the novel El mal metafísico
(1900) as the law professor Dr. Zavala, in no small part for “his han-
dling of Argentina’s foreign policy” (69). More than a decade later and
in response to Zeballos’s announcement of his presidential candidacy, an
unnamed author in La Nota writes the brief caricature of Zeballos with
which I began. The satiric piece illustrates Zeballos’s faith in his rendition
of his personal narrative, this even when multiple vested and unvested
parties suggest other accounts.
20. While a handful of recent studies have delved into the singular case of
Telegram No. 9, there has been less attention paid to the ways in which
the entanglement proves to be a dispute between Euclides and Zeballos.
Both Putnam (Rebellion in the Backlands xvii, 1944) and Hecht (The
Scramble for the Amazon 457, 2013) allude to the tension in the context
of Euclides’s predilection to quarrels late in his life, as he lay tubercular
and in a turbulent state of both body and mind. Balderston (1991) cites
Putman in referencing Zeballos’s representation of Argentina in bound-
ary disputes with Brazil. However, to my knowledge, their connection
has largely been overlooked, whereas I find it to be exemplary of hemi-
spheric statesmen committed to both literature and geography in this
tumultuous period of nation-state consolidation.
21. “The thinker spilled forth onto exuberant pages, sometimes as incoher-
ent and turbulent as the iridescent rapids tumbling down its high gorges,
a copious treasure of magisterial ideas, of profound ideas, of passionate
aggressions and institutional secrets, anchored to our ethnic origins, to
colonial chronicles, to the Argentine character and the bloody emotions
of the national vía crucis.”
References
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Brazil. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2007.
———. “Conquering Times: Mapmaking, Narrative and National Initiation.”
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Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 15.2 (1991): 323–327.
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the Nineteenth Century.” Geography and Empire. Eds. Anne Godlewska and
Neil Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994: 58–73.
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Díez, Beatriz S. “La Trilogía de Estanislao Zeballos, historia de una apropiación

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versitaria de 1918.” Revista UNIVERSUM 17, 2002: 125–146.
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Costa.” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica Española 40 (2011): 20–25.
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CHAPTER 5
Euclides da Cunha’s Literary Map,

or Including Os Sertões
Our natural history still stammers in six or seven foreign languages, and our
physical geography is an unpublished book.1
—Euclides da Cunha, “Plano de uma cruzada” (1907)
In October 1905, Euclides da Cunha composed two reports after

traveling with a bi-national Peruvian–Brazilian delegation to map the
until then nominally surveyed Amazonian region. Called the Joint
Commission for the Reconnaissance of the Upper Purús, its first
report is the official diplomatic account, written by da Cunha and his
co-leader, the Peruvian Navy Captain Alexandre Buenaño. The sec-
ond report, a hastily realized letter destined only for the eyes of sitting
Brazilian Foreign Minister Baron Rio Branco, recounts the unofficial
tale of the mission and its cartographic deliverable; Baron Rio Branco’s
main objective, as two-time Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Lafer
would describe it a century later, was “to bequeath to Brazil a peace-
fully obtained map of continental proportions” (215). In contrast to
the objective tone of the public document, da Cunha’s private epistle
is apologetic from the outset: “The map that travels with this missive
will diverge little from the definitive one. Unfortunately, as much as
we tried, we could not extend it to Lábrea without undermining the
overall quality of the work. It is at a scale of 1:100,000 and very useful
for addressing your main concerns” (trans. in Hecht 311). Da Cunha’s

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55140-1_5
188 A.S. MADAN
expedition and dispatch illuminate the quiet making and unmaking of

geography, of an attempt to “extend” Brazil’s claims just south of the
Purús River and thereby defy the basic principle of uti posseditis. His
confidential words underscore the mapmaker’s creative license while
exposing but one Brazilian bid to expand real territory through the sim-
ulacrum of cartography.
This creative license extends to and even requires the discursive. As
Susana B. Hecht (2013) has shown, Rio Branco knew exactly what he
was doing by deploying Brazil’s “most powerful writer” to geolocate the
Purús well inside Brazilian boundaries while commissioning not only a
non-partisan, bi-national, and therefore legitimate map, but also a trove
of “framing” materials that “would become the sinews of spatial history
and narrative of the ‘Brazilianness’ (as opposed to Peruvianness) of the
Amazon” (351). With da Cunha at the helm, it is as if diplomatic texts
and negotiations somehow drive geological shifts, the future already
etched into the earth as Brazil’s confirmed past. The act of writing the
earth becomes regulated practice, when in reality it was technical and
discursive at the same time.
Of perhaps all fin-de-siècle transculturated geographical discourse in
Latin America, Euclides da Cunha’s oeuvre best illustrates this merging
of technical skill and discursive aptitude—more so, in fact, than both
Sarmiento’s and Zeballos’s. As military engineer and land surveyor (and
therefore the state incarnate), he was also a moonlighting news reporter
and canonical writer residing in the high towers of Brazil’s elite cultural
institutions, including the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro
and the Academia Brasileira de Letras. Through these appointments he
stitched together Brazil’s official story—one torn between social justice
and grandiose exceptionalism. While da Cunha’s late-career obsession
with the Amazon has been well documented by Hecht, who explores the
ways in which he recast this nationalist narrative “in an Amazonian reg-
ister that coupled it to and echoed the rest of the nation” (351), in this
chapter I tackle the first incarnation of the Euclidean project of mixing
literature, geography, and politics: Os sertões (1902).2 If statecraft in the
Amazon is about controlling rubber territory via inter-regional colonial-
ism, his magnum opus emerges as a literary contestation to years of exter-
nal colonialism.
Appearing 3 years prior to da Cunha’s Amazonian expedition and
making him a household name, Os sertões is a literary, journalistic, and
geographical treatise that details the conflicts between the allegedly
5 EUCLIDES DA CUNHA’S LITERARY MAP … 189
civilized Republican troops and the millenarian Catholic folk com-

munity of the sertão, the Brazilian outback nestled in the dry north-
east region. His national portrait is a tragic one, painting a society
that effectively banishes a third of its population to its most remote
and inhospitable territory where they are geographically condemned,
“isolated in space and time” (96). These outcasts, equally referred
to as jagunços or sertanejos, unite under messianic leader Antonio
Conselheiro in the backlands settlement of Canudos, where the War
of Canudos (October 1896–1897) unfolds as one of Latin America’s
bloodiest battles.
As da Cunha’s hybrid text traverses one year, four expeditions, and
countless lost lives, it chronicles the failures of government and society to
see their subaltern citizens, both in the realm of the literal and the figura-
tive.3 The “civilized” Republican troops undergo a slow but evident met-
amorphosis: through the hardship of incessant physical and psychological
warfare, all amid the unmerciful landscape of the sertão, the troops trans-
form and become the “barbarous” jagunços—in their vengeance, in their
attire, in their fighting. Their brutality even comes to surpass that of the
jagunços. To exterminate religious fanaticism from the national sphere,
the troops themselves transform into fanatics as they eradicate what they
perceive to be vermin destined to spread.
Given the sertanejos’ literal banishment to the sertão (a 1701 royal
charter prohibited and punished any communication or trade between
seaboard and sertão), and given their symbolic banishment (exclusion
from Brazilian national maps), they construct what amounts to a back-
lands nationalism. Euclides da Cunha blames the jagunços’ barbarism
on a state-sponsored insularity that originates with the white oligarchy,
which in turn causes a divided and thereby weakened nation. How to
overcome such division and, at the same time, model consolidation?
Da Cunha, I will show, composes Os sertões as a cartographic
narrative—a literary map, as it were—that creates the illusion of national
integrity by including the formerly excluded. He relocates Canudos from
periphery to center by overwriting the work of previous non-Brazilian
land treatises, which, for years on end, denied the northeastern hamlet
entry into the national geography. By allowing Canudos onto his literary
map, by acknowledging rather than ignoring differences between north
and south, da Cunha mimetically simulates consolidation. Metaphor
reigns supreme here as da Cunha literarily connects disparate elements
in a throwback to the Vichean primitive man, thereby elevating the
190 A.S. MADAN
so-called barbarism of the Brazilian land. His literary devices construct

a large map in relief of Brazilian topography, upon which he occasion-
ally zooms into highlight the land’s minor, yet defining, details. I intend
to demonstrate that his stylized correctives supplant the divisive strate-
gies normalized during colonial rule and continued during the neoco-
lonial Republican years. This overcoming division also entails escaping
the shadows of occidental thought. Extending the arc of geographical
discourse from Sarmiento’s revision and Zeballos’s review, da Cunha’s
stylized writing rectifies the geographical works of illustrious foreigners,
especially Humboldt but also Henry Thomas Buckle, Wilhelm Ludwig
von Eschwege, Orville Derby, and Carl Friedrich Philip von Martius.
By correcting their Eurocentric, and error-laden, representations and
nomenclatures, he reclaims both Brazilian land and letters while sub-
mitting a softer rendition of the national man and land into world
geography; indeed, into universal history.
This chapter sketches in broad strokes Euclides da Cunha’s role
in delineating Brazil’s borders, both on soil with a sextant and on
paper with a pen. In Part I, I situate his technical and discursive work
in its historical context, one marked by Rio Branco’s vast expansion of
Brazilian territory and a series of international arbitrations to contest
that very growth. I look closely at da Cunha’s troubled relationship with
Positivism, in particular its relationship to geography and literature, and
the ways in which he contributed to the institutionalization of Brazilian
geography. In Part II, I focus on his attempts to complete Brazil’s hith-
erto incomplete maps, this by visually affirming hamlets like Canudos
and Uauá, which were previously denied entry into national cartogra-
phy. If the first half of this chapter historicizes the geographical, Parts
III (Eschewege, Derby, Martius, Buckle) and IV (Humboldt, Hegel)
unearth the literary. I engage in a close formal analysis of da Cunha and
his predecessors, illuminating the ways in which he transculturates their
geographical discourse. I show that Os sertões, like Rio Branco’s diplo-
macy, reappropriates Brazilian territory by rectifying past geographi-
cal lines, ones crafted by non-Brazilian writers and naturalists. This act,
though meant to be corrective, falls squarely into Zeballos’s parameters
for geographical discourse: it cannot help but be complicit in reproduc-
ing internal and regional colonialism. I thus put da Cunha’s masterpiece
into conversation with its interlocutors, revealing the ways in which
he frees Brazil from colonial and neocolonial errors while mimetically
replicating them.
Expanding Frontiers
In the span of 16 years, the Baron of Rio Branco acquired through
diplomacy almost as much land as Brazil’s notorious bandeirantes-—
those seventeenth- and eighteenth-century slave-hunting groups who,
over the course of two violent centuries, expanded Portuguese territory
with the threat of the harquebus.4 From 1893 to 1909 he redefined the
borders of Brazil by inching into large tracts that had been demarcated
by the Treaty of Tordesillas but disputed thereafter. The newly acquired
land—a little from Bolivia, a bit from Uruguay and Peru, still more from
Argentina—increased the Brazilian territory by an area the size of Texas.
Although the conquest relied on words rather than wars, Brazil’s expan-
sion was understandably litigious and often required external arbitration.
In 1895, sitting US President Grover Cleveland mediated the “Question
of Misiones,” a border dispute between Argentina and Brazil rooted in
colonial-era rivalries between Spain and Portugal and presented for arbi-
tration by none other than Baron of Rio Branco and Estanislao Zeballos.
With a title as bloated as its contents, Zeballos’s first volume on the
matter—Arbitration upon a Part of the National Territory of Misiones
Disputed by the United States of Brazil: Argentine Evidence Laid Before
the President of the United States of America (1893)—begins with the
Bull of Pope Alexander VI (1493) on the discoveries of the Portuguese
and Spanish, continues to the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), and then sys-
tematically traces for 700-plus pages the reasons why Misiones belongs
to Argentina. (The fight over Misiones can be summed up in two
words: Iguazú Falls.) Cleveland ruled in favor of Brazil, thereby unwit-
tingly lending his name to the litigated area, known from then on as
Clevelândia, and provoking Zeballos’s relentless pursuit of vengeance
against the Baron. This revenge-seeking ultimately led to the Case of
Telegram No. 9 that I explored in Chap. 3.
The Argentina–Brazil feud extended beyond mere revenge, since
preserving the state’s territory was directly linked to national security.
Alongside Rio Branco’s sudden expansion of the Brazilian Navy, his
gradually increasing frontier unsettled nerves across the region. Chile
and Argentina vetoed Navy-limiting pacts of 1902–1903 and joined the
arms race in 1906; each sought to further ensure regional supremacy by
solidifying their alliances. The allies they selected were as much about
securing as maintaining the land. In a 1907 land dispute between Peru
and Bolivia arbitrated by the Argentine government, Brazil—led by Rio
192 A.S. MADAN
Branco—had to defend Bolivian rights in the case, for if Bolivia were to

lose, then Brazil would lose territory to Peru in the northwestern state
of Acre.
We learn about this dispute in Euclides da Cunha’s assessment (trans-
lated into Spanish) called La cuestión de límites entre Bolivia y el Perú.
Commissioned by the Comissão de História and approved by the
Instituto Geográfico e Histórico Brasileiro (IGHB), the 150-page report
is described as “a vigorous and gallant exposition of international law”
in which “the erudite author [da Cunha] defends Bolivia’s rights against
the pretensions of Peru, which aims to possess an enormous territo-
rial zone within which is a vast area belonging to Brazil in the region
of Acré” (3).
These words appear in the first pages of the introduction, written
by Lafayette Caetano da Silva, the secretary of the IGHB. Doubly sur-
prising, then, are da Silva’s closing words in praise of the report: “the
new work of Doctor Euclydes da Cunha is instructive, luminous, and
indirectly patriotic. […] Its pages are reason for founded pride for the
Institute, which holds near its breast such a notable, impartial, and
laborious polemicist” (4).
The contradictory sentiment begs the question: how can an “impar-
tial” author also compose a “patriotic” report? After all, da Cunha
defended Bolivian rights to protect the Brazilian state of Acre, which,
incidentally, later named its capital after Rio Branco. Yet to buttress
his stance of impartiality, da Cunha grounds his argument on an 1894
Argentine map depicting territory acquired by Brazil and composed
for Washington by none other than Estanislao Zeballos, who “pre-
sented all of the expanse disputed today by Peru as subject to Bolivian
sovereignty,” this during the USA’s arbitration over Misiones (4).
By recounting these episodes of expansion-related arbitration, I aim
to situate Euclides da Cunha within a moment characterized by heated
exchanges regarding border demarcation.5 Brazil had been on the win-
ning side of territorial feuds from the bandeirantes onward. Yet with
Misiones only marginally won in 1895 and Acre nearly lost in 1907, the
precarious nature of imaginary lines inscribed in shifting sands could only
be overcome by writing concrete delineations into posterity. With a land
surveyor’s technical expertise and a poet’s penchant for prose, da Cunha
attracted diverse audiences. His complexity occasionally vexed read-
ers, but that same technical savvy was also seen as artistic prowess, for
example in Secretary da Silva’s comments on da Cunha’s Bolivia–Peru
arbitration, which sought “greater simplicity since we are dealing with

a book destined to circulate in foreign lands and to be translated into
a language distinct from ours; but by doing so it would lose the artis-
tic character that softens the dry technicality” (da Silva 4). Within da
Silva’s minor criticism we see couched the twofold value afforded to geo-
graphical discourse: on the one hand, da Cunha ought to have simpli-
fied his study, which can corroborate Brazil’s borders only inasmuch as it
reaches international and multilingual audiences; but on the other, geo-
graphical discourse’s defining quality—what da Silva refers to as “artistic
character”—can hardly be abridged or streamlined. Rather, that quality is
precisely what makes its dry technicality palatable, even pleasant.
Such is da Silva’s commentary in 1907, 5 years after the fanfare
spawned by the publication of Os sertões. The book was an immediate
critical and commercial success, in no small part due to its straddling
of genres. For the intelligentsia, da Cunha had composed the exem-
plar national narrative, one that finally made sense of Brazilian identity.
The book appeared at a moment in which the Latin American elite were
seeking order through all viable avenues, most prominent among them
Positivism.
Eager to counter what they regarded as philosophical movements
imposed upon them by the colony—particularly that of scholasticism—
nineteenth-century Latin Americans, and in particular Brazilians, looked
to European philosophical thought in search of contestation. Some of
those currents, used to debunk the authority of Roman Catholic phi-
losophies, included Cartesianism, sensualism, the Enlightenment,
eclecticism, and utilitarianism. However, as Leopoldo Zea notes in The
Latin-American Mind (1963), none of these currents achieved the level
of importance ultimately bestowed upon Positivism (26). He recounts:
By following positivism, the Mexicans thought that they could put an end
to the almost perpetual anarchy which kept them in turmoil. In Argentina,
positivism was considered a good instrument for eliminating the absolut-
ist and tyrannical mentalities which had scourged them. The Chileans con-
sidered positivism an effective means of converting the ideals of liberalism
into reality. (28)
For Zea, the Spanish American denial of history and simultaneous quest
to shed their Hispanic nature in favor of a new scientific culture was a
revolutionary, albeit futile, stance, one which deified Hegel’s admonition
194 A.S. MADAN
that a nation’s possible futures depend on acknowledging its national

past. Herein, according to Zea, lies the essential difference between the
two approaches to the philosophy: whereas Spanish Americans opted for
a revolutionary Positivism, Brazilians instead chose an evolutionary one:
Positivism was in every case a radical remedy which Hispanic America

attempted to use to break away from a past that was overwhelming it. The
Brazilians, in contrast, adopted only those aspects of positivism which their
reality required. It was reality itself which demanded this doctrine, and not
the doctrine which sought to impose itself on reality. (29)
Because Brazilians at least nominally accepted their turbulent past, they

“looked upon positivism as the doctrine most suitable for bringing into
focus new realities which arose in their natural evolution” (27).
What was this “reality” to which Zea alludes in the most ominous of
tones? João Cruz Costa (1956) reminds us that the second half of the
Brazilian nineteenth century was a tumultuous period of radical social
and political change. With the mid-century expansion of the national
economy, the new urban elite came to the political and economic fore
as an emergent middle class, thereby unsettling the control of the land-
owning aristocracy. This heretofore static bourgeoisie, upon having
their interests dismissed, sought reform of traditional policy and prac-
tice. Chief among these reformers were the Positivists. Moving first as
a slight breeze across Brazil’s coastal cities in the 1850s, Positivism soon
swept across the distressed nation as a gale-sized wind promising a path
to progress through order. Its adherents, for the most part, followed the
French Positivism inaugurated by Auguste Comte in the early 1820s,
when he coined the word “positive” to mean non-speculative or prov-
able knowledge (Cruz Costa 82–83). This usage of the word grounded
his philosophical system, which relied on verifiable facts as opposed to
metaphysical abstractions. A vehement critic of the Enlightenment
(for its lack of strategies to replace former, now-destroyed social values
with a new morality), the monarchy, and the Roman Catholic Church,
Comte demanded contemporary equivalents to these institutions. He
expected these counterparts to emerge not from theological or meta-
physical concepts—the first two of his Law of Three Stages—but rather
from rational and empirical (positive) principles. Always working from
the simple to the complex, Comte believed that humankind’s attempts
to define our relationship to nature progressed toward a higher and more
comprehensive level of knowledge. Positivism was equated to the final

stage of intellectual evolution in his progressive history of (European)
humanity.
To arrive at this final positive stage, one based on a certain progress,
Comte insisted upon the creation of order. Only with order would pro-
gress be able to follow the natural laws of evolution. Order could come
from the constructive application of science and technology to human
activities. To this end, Comte fashioned a hierarchy of the sciences to
serve as the foundation for a discipline that he called “sociology,” which
would meld together the various aspects of science to discover therein
the laws of society. This first “sociologist” pushed for analysis, synthesis,
and the relativity of knowledge, and, with his Law of Three Stages and
Hierarchy of Sciences, he initiated a “counter-reformation” that would
anchor the social scaffolding of the Middle Ages to the stabilizing beams
of modern science. Scientific knowledge was not to be the ultimate des-
tination, but rather a means to deal with society’s problems (Simon 25).
Returning to the Brazilian context, we can understand Comtean
Positivism as a means to resolve evolving national and social problems.
And there were problems galore in such tumultuous times, social insta-
bility that included—this is not an exhaustive list—the Brazilian aboli-
tion of slavery in 1888, the overthrow of Dom Pedro II/the Empire
and the consequent establishment of the Republic in 1889, the military
dictatorships of Deodoro Fonseca and Floriano Peixoto and subsequent
counter-revolutionary revolts in 1893–1894, and, finally, matters of land
demarcation and distribution—regarding, in particular, Misiones—from
1893 to 1895.
Although Frederic Armory maintains that Brazilian obsession and
complete rapture with Positivism “will always remain something of
a puzzle,” other scholars suggest a plausible reason: the philosophy
uniquely germinated in both secular and spiritual arenas of Brazilian
national culture (87). It acquired momentum in the secular sphere when,
in 1873, military officer, educator, and devoted disciple of Comte’s
teachings Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães was hired as pro-
fessor of mathematics at the Military School in Rio. Not only was he
responsible for indoctrinating an entire generation of young men with
the Positivist goals of science and reform, he also founded a Positivist
society dedicated to the study of Comte’s philosophy. It quickly
branched from secular to spiritual in 1881 when the “Apostolate”—
Miguel Lemos and Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, a two-person mutiny
196 A.S. MADAN
from Benjamin Constant’s society—transformed the society into the

Positivist Church of Brazil. Though within 15 years this pseudo-religious
Positivism would wane in popularity, between 1889 and 1890 it held
immense control over the establishment of the Republican government,
even contributing to the drafting of Brazil’s constitution. Whether the
symbolism of the Brazilian flag or the national motto inscribed upon it
(“Ordem e Progresso”), or the approbation of civil marriage and separa-
tion between church and state, we see concrete evidence of Positivism’s
influence upon the Republic (Cruz Costa 83–108).
Pausing on the essence of “order and progress,” I offer that
Positivism cannot be thought of independently of the discipline of
geography: there was no better way to achieve national progress than
through spatiojuridical order. As Raymond Craib explains with respect
to the Mexican Porfiriato—among the most Positivist of nineteenth-
century Latin American governments—“social order and capitalist pro-
gress rested on the imposition of a new spatial order with its own moral,
political, and economic modalities” (Craib 166). “Spatial subjugation,”
he continues, “would be rigorously rational” (167).
This rationalism is precisely what attracted Euclides da Cunha to
Positivism. Considering the philosophy’s influential power over the
Republic in this moment of Brazilian history, it should come as little
surprise that da Cunha—born in 1866 and coming of age in a cha-
otic period of nation-building—should, as a military student, find his
way to the tenets of a geographically inflected Positivism. He studied
mathematics and Positivism under Benjamin Constant as he completed
a liberal arts course at the Colégio Aquino, whereupon he entered
the Polytechnic School in 1884 and, from there, Military School. His
geographical instruction began during his engineering career thanks
to several formative relationships. A friend at a military construc-
tion site in Minas Gerais gave the young da Cunha Climats, géologie,
faune et géographie botanique du Brésil (1872), Emmanuel Liais’s trea-
tise on the Brazilian terrain. As a civil engineer in São Paulo, further-
more, he befriended the Bahian geographer and Indianist Teodoro
Sampaio, whose texts O Tupi na Geografia Nacional (1901) and O
Rio de São Francisco e a Chapada Diamantina (1905) proved crucial
to his knowledge of the lands and people of interior Bahia (precisely
where the Canudos rebellion was quietly brewing). Using the knowl-
edge provided by these geographers as a point of departure, da
Cunha embarked on a mission of self-education. Manuals described as
“aide-mémoires or engineer’s pocketbooks” supplemented the hands-

on interaction with the Brazilian terrain required by his profession as
an engineer (Armory 91).
This training afforded da Cunha practical entry into Positivism’s theo-
retical concerns. Yet this is not to say that he was happy about leaving
behind his beloved works of abstract Positivist philosophical erudition.
Rather, his every intellectual move evolved in lockstep with what he
deemed best for the nation. In an 1895 letter to João Luís Alves, a miner
who eventually became Minister of Justice in Minas Gerais, da Cunha
writes:
you can already see how my intellectual activity converges upon practical
books now—temporarily putting aside the philosophers, the Comte, the
Spencer, the Huxley, etc.—all magnificent friends for sure but ones who,
at the end, cannot help us effectively navigate this life full of vicissitudes
and dominated almost wholly by an ironclad empiricism. That is the unfor-
tunate truth: the rough pages of the Aide-Mémoires or the Engineer’s
Pocket Books are more eloquent, at this turn of the century, than the most
enlightened page of our most admired thinker. Imagine, if you can, the
immense sadness that I feel upon writing this. (Correspondência de Euclides
da Cunha 84–85)
Though deeply saddened by the thought of temporarily leaving behind

his “magnificent friends” of Positivist theory, da Cunha finds an on-the-
ground approach better for the ailments of fin-de-siècle Brazil. This belief
reaches its pinnacle in a diary entry made en route to Canudos, in which
he pointedly criticizes “the uselessness of the theoretical wonders with
which we deluded ourselves in academic times” (Obra Completa 531).
Da Cunha reveals a marked disenchantment with theory, which becomes
divorced from practice in his conceptualization of Positivism. Theory
belongs in the ivory towers of philosophers; practice unfolds in the field
alongside geographers.
Despite evidence that da Cunha distanced himself from Positivism
even prior to writing the first words of Os sertões, critics have long under-
stood the text’s “artistic character”—to invoke Secretary de Silva’s
description of da Cunha’s writing—as a sign of da Cunha’s resistance to
Positivist thought. The poetic or literary factor, they allege, irrupts into
the scientific text to compensate for Positivism’s shortcomings—its inad-
equacy to account for the many contradictions encountered in the clash
of the “two Brazils,” its inconsistencies and complications in explaining
198 A.S. MADAN
something as complex as Brazil’s national sphere. Raúl C. Gouveia

Fernandes (2006), for instance, explains that
The fictionalization of history and lyrical ecstasy rescue the author when the
adopted theoretical parameters cannot explain observed phenomena. Indeed,
for Euclides, the only possible way to make the “impossible” known—that is,
the inexplicable, the mysterious, that excess of reality that causes admiration
yet does fit the strict molds of science—that is literature. (56)6
Yet the literary register of da Cunha’s text cannot be said to occur grad-
ually over the course of the narrative, simply when theory does not
suffice. Rather, his style constantly anchors itself to the earth, begin-
ning with the work’s first paragraphs, with adjectives that accentuate
the land’s discontinuity (“jutting,” “rocky,” “disjointed,” “studded,”
“corroded,” “indented,” “broken,” “naked” appear in a mere five lines).
This journalistic style of setting a concrete scene makes sense given his
initial career as a moonlighting news reporter. By 1895 da Cunha was
working as an engineer in the Department of Public Works and intermit-
tently for the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo; in 1898, while writing
Os sertões by night, he also was working as lead engineer to reconstruct
a metallic bridge (Santana 80–98). Sousa Andrade highlights his dedi-
cation to both professions: “Even though he would spend a good part
of the night writing, Euclides rose with the sun to work on the bridge”
(196). For da Cunha, the discursive and the technical cannot but be
mutually constitutive.
Da Cunha’s tendencies toward the aesthetic were deep-rooted. His
first forays into literature occurred at the Colégio Aquino, where he
helped found O Democrata, a journal residing somewhere between the
literary and the political. His first published pieces were lyric poems, 84
of which have been collected in a volume entitled Ondas (Putnam xii).
Given that he writes Os sertões a decade after these poems, we can con-
clude that da Cunha’s inclinations toward the poetic had not faded. If
anything, they matured along with his age and experience. Let us not
forget: above all da Cunha sought to advance the Brazilian nation-state.
This commitment amounts to what appears, at least on the surface, as
vacillation between philosophical and empirical approaches. Yet I pro-
pose that we conceive of it as intellectual sacrifice: da Cunha privileges
the pragmatics of spatial order above the abstract pleasure of the theo-
retical. He harnesses aesthetics in the service of accessibility.
Da Cunha’s appeal to literature dovetails neatly with Brazilian intel-

lectual tradition. As Antonio Candido explains, literature was always the
primary mode to affirm Brazilian nationality and to reflect upon Brazilian
identity. Since the days of independence, the most significant attempts to
interpret Brazil—by da Cunha himself, Gilberto Freyre, Sérgio Buarque de
Holanda—have occurred within the literary sphere. And this even more so
in the realm of geography, for the Brazilian land requires aesthetics, or so
da Cunha insists in his introduction to Alberto Rangel’s memoirs of the
Amazon, Inferno Verde (1908). “Rangel has the perfect appearance of a
poet but is too exuberant for the discipline of meter and rhyme. He is an
engineer skilled in the most objective and calculating technical processes,”
he explains (O Paraíso Perdido 202; trans. in Hecht 2004). Toying with
notions of reality and art, da Cunha portrays Rangel as a dreamer wafting
in the hazy, beautiful space between the discursive and the technical:
The surprising reality came to his eyes through the lens of a theodolite. He
organizes his fantastic scenarios through the coordinates of triangulations.
The dreamer aligned his way on compass coordinates. His most moving
insights were corrected with the azimuth […]. He inverted, without wish-
ing to, the vulgar canons of art. His is a temperament seen through a new
nature. He altered nothing. He merely copied and described. It is from
this that emerged his surprises […]. Because what is fantastic and incom-
prehensible is not the author, but Amazonia. (O Paraíso Perdido 202;
trans. in Hecht 2004)
To order the real space of the region, calculation is of course necessary.

To that end Rangel has the surveyor’s tools in his back pocket, the the-
odolite and the compass with its azimuth. Yet objective precision aside,
Rangel inverts “the vulgar canons of art” by simply copying and describ-
ing the territory, which is “fantastic and incomprehensible” and there-
fore lends these very qualities to the language of the author; indeed, to
his geographical discourse.
Similarly, the literary language of Os sertões stems not from mere dis-
enchantment with the theory of Positivism, but rather as a concrete out-
growth of its space-ordering subdiscipline: geography. Of course, our
understanding of da Cunha’s aspirations to order Brazilian space cannot
ignore his role as the local Eurocentric, necessarily different from the
European and North American writers he imbibed daily, but nevertheless
committed to notions of settlement already imposed during the colony.
200 A.S. MADAN
To ensure individual and national growth through spatial subjugation,

nineteenth-century Brazil welcomed the formation of several geographi-
cal institutes. The 1838 inauguration of the IHGB occurred concomi-
tantly with other continent-wide efforts to institutionalize—and thereby
nationalize—geography.7 For da Cunha, who played a pivotal role in the
IHGB—the locus of intellectual activity focalized in São Paulo. In this
southern city just west of Rio de Janeiro, the author found an atmos-
phere buzzing with innovation and scholars engrossed in work that he
found fascinating. Several institutions subsidized their studies, including
the Comissão Geográfica e Geológica de São Paulo (1886), the Instituto
Agronômico de Campinas (1887), the Instituto Bacteriológico de São
Paulo (1892), and the Escola Politécnica de São Paulo (1892). With the
1894 inauguration of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo
(IHGSP), deliberate geographical study officially planted itself in São
Paulo’s intellectual circles.
Structured around the model of the original chapter in Rio de Janeiro
(IHGB), the IHGSP emphasized territorial knowledge as an immediately
patriotic duty, yet it also catered to the specific issues affecting only São
Paulo. According to Lilia Schwarcz, the majority of the institute’s pub-
lished works between 1895 and 1930 branched from the discipline of
history (45%), while another part (22%) included biographies, a mere
smattering (15%) addressed matters of geography and geology, and a
small slice (11%) spoke to topics categorized as anthropology or ethnol-
ogy (126–127). Those articles subsumed under geography/geology, she
explains, often revealed a “modernizing” attempt best attributed to the
influence of “specialized professionals that directed a ‘modernizing’ pro-
ject for the State” (Schwarcz 140).
Da Cunha quickly gained entry into this modernizing project.
His name surfaced for potential membership to the institute when
the group’s founders, Albert Loefgren, Orville Derby, and Teodoro
Sampaio, nominated him after reading his rave review of Loefgren’s
work (Santana 84).8 Admitted to the group in 1897, da Cunha then
joined, in rapid succession, the Comissão de História e Estatística de São
Paulo (1898) and the Centro de Ciências, Letras e Artes de Campinas
(1901). With these memberships, his respective relationships with
geography and literature literally converged. Because the institutions
actively promoted scholarship and provided a vehicle through which to
share that work, da Cunha’s writing found inquisitive eyes and ears, a
crucial motivation for him to document his observations on Canudos.
On February 5, 1898, the Brazilian author presented the first piece that
would later be included in Os sertões, a conference presentation titled
“Climatology of the Bahia Backlands” [Climatologia dos Sertões da
Bahia].
Publication and dissemination thus coalesced with the institutionali-
zation of geography and created a national forum in which to address
issues of territory, of border demarcation, of distribution, each item part
and parcel of the modernizing project. For Brazil to assume the status of
a modern nation, it had to be written into modernity in terms of both
history and geography. Euclides da Cunha was arguably the first to rec-
ognize the necessity of the literary, and on his heels followed Alberto
Rangel (1908) and later, in 1950, the honorary president of the IGHB,
Dr. Afonso de E. Taunay, who was honored for “more than five dec-
ades of fecund historical and literary production,” multiple volumes of
historiography but also fiction and history of literature, science, and art
in Brazil (Alvares Lobo 9). Like da Cunha, Taunay’s institutional links
were multifarious, ranging from his leadership of the IHGB to member-
ship of the Academia Brasileira de Letras and the Academia Paulista de
Letras. Da Cunha is thus something of a forebear to those who follow in
his interdisciplinary footsteps.
Manoel Luis Lima Salgado Guimarães (1988) contends that the origi-
nal geographical institute, the IHGB in Rio, garnered such acclaim and
spawned such offshoots because of its ability to respond to widespread
anxiety regarding the nation’s state of affairs; Brazilians demanded
an organization prepared to delineate the nation’s profile and fash-
ion its unique identity, which, in turn, would allow entry into mod-
ern Occidental civilization (10). Under the supervision of the German
explorer and botanist Carl Friedrich Phillip von Martius, the organiza-
tion achieved such a feat, albeit outside the parameters of geography—
an identity based on a symbolic system of race relations rather than sole
scientific observation. This system, explained in the piece “How We
Ought to Write Brazil’s History” and published in the Revista of the
IHGB in January 1845, imagines the synthesis and harmonious inte-
gration of three races: the European white, the African black, and the
indigenous brown. Martius attributes this ideal mixture to divine provi-
dence: “We can never doubt that the will of providence predestined this
mix for Brazil” (85). This symbolic system does not embrace the ideal of
the modern nation-state, characterized by shifting and impersonal inter-
actions between free citizens; instead, it unfolds as a hierarchical family
202 A.S. MADAN
dominated by the white minority and characterized by fixed and personal

interrelations between members. Ultimately shaping the trajectory of the
national project, this warped rendition of the nation-state informs efforts
to demarcate the national territory through a race-based hierarchy.
Some scholars—Ilmar Rohloff de Mattos in his study O Tempo
Saquarema: A formação do estado imperial (1994), for instance—even
liken the IHGB to a church, something like a site of congregation and
devotion where the white elite membership gathers to discuss and doc-
ument knowledge of, and control over, the national territory. Control
over land dictates control over agriculture. To protect the consistency,
stability, and hegemony of their agricultural exports—to reaffirm the
colonial legacy, in other words—the elite begin to venerate the tenets of
liberalism. Mattos insists that the imperial powers espouse such a philos-
ophy to a specific end: a monopoly over territorial control. Still, only via
a process of geographical description and delineation can the monopoly
come to fruition. In their ambition to possess and control the Brazilian
land, the elite accumulate a vast collection of cartographic and statistical
volumes designed to facilitate state action. From these emerge the eco-
nomic exploitation of natural resources (Mattos 199).
Enter Euclides da Cunha. Contrary to the liberal elite’s motives
of monetary gain, da Cunha’s inclinations toward territorial knowl-
edge are far more benign: geographical advances, he believes, can close
the nation-threatening distance between the Brazilian seaboard and
sertão. To know Brazil is to know all of Brazil, including that stretch
of the barren northeast designated as the site of state-imposed isola-
tion. Emphasizing history’s vicissitudes being his forte, da Cunha wryly
instructs in Os Sertões: “Let us not play sophists with history. There were
very powerful causes which led to the isolation and conservation of the
autochthonous stock” (69; trans. in Putnam 82). To begin, he casts the
blame for the “isolation and conservation of the autochthonous stock”
upon the large land grants that essentially recreate a semi-feudalistic
society, “with no boundary lines” and complete with vassals and serfs
(69; trans. in Putnam 82). Without boundary lines to demarcate them,
the latifúndios relegate the sertanejos to an effective no-man’s-land,
where they, “being entirely cut off from the inhabitants to the south
and the intensive colonization activities of the seaboard, proceeded to
follow their own path of evolution, acquiring thereby a highly original
physiognomy, like that of residents of another country” (69; trans. in
Putnam 82). Recalling Humboldt’s emphasis on “physiognomy” as well
as his warnings to the Spanish Crown, da Cunha diagnoses the ailment as

geographical: without the imaginary of an officially delineated national
territory—without a national map—the nation and its citizens stand at
the brink of civil war, quite literally divided into north and south.
This national divorce extended the state’s royal charter of February
7, 1701, which prohibited and penalized “any communication what-
soever between this part of the backlands and the south, the São Paulo
mines. Not even commercial relations were tolerated, the simplest
exchange of products being forbidden” (Os sertões 69; trans. in Putnam
82). Condemned to their backland corner where, bereft of land or trade
or communication, they subsist, the sertanejos give rise to a way of life
devoid of “order and progress”; indeed, that Positivist motto embla-
zoned across the Brazilian flag. With a third of Brazil falling outside of
the descriptive parameters of the national motto, the nation lacks coher-
ence, a precariousness that da Cunha blames on “a geographic fiction”
(338; trans. in Putnam 405). This “geographic fiction,” a concept that
da Cunha unpacks with tones of disappointment and disdain, alludes
to the nation’s fractured state, in which a railway line marks the “point
where two societies meet, each one wholly alien to the other,” where the
soldiers participate in “an invasion of foreign territory” (338; trans. in
Putnam 406). Split in half, the nation cannot possibly achieve unity:
Here was an absolute and radical break between the coastal cities and the
clay huts of the interior, one that so disturbed the rhythm of our evolu-
tionary development and which was so deplorable a stumbling-block to
national unity. They were in a strange country now, with other customs,
other scenes, a different kind of people. Another language even, spoken
with an original and picturesque drawl. They had, precisely, the feeling of
going to war in another land. They felt that they were outside Brazil. A
complete social separation expanded the geographic distance, giving rise
to the nostalgic sensation of being very far from home. (338; trans. in
Putnam 405)
Da Cunha diagnoses the national discord as a symptom of exclusion

that necessarily favors the privileged elite who demarcate and distrib-
ute land. Laden with an excess of control from their posh repose on the
Rua de Ouvidor, the commercial oligarchy unfairly oversees the mate-
rial needs of all Brazilian citizens. Da Cunha’s keen eye correctly locates
the nation’s obstacles in the uneven spread; to equalize the factions and
thereby achieve modernization he seeks inclusion.
204 A.S. MADAN
Yet how does da Cunha outline the parameters of an inclusive national

community? He appreciates that monetary gain for one group limits the
nation’s progress, whereas consolidation of all groups advances it. He
therefore departs from elite thinking by turning his arsenal of classify-
ing devices away from the urban centers of the seaboard and toward the
caatingas of the sertão. By detailing and disseminating the minutiae of
this terrain, da Cunha strives to save the rural northeast from the vicis-
situdes of state-imposed isolation. His narrative stitches the fractured
nation together, creating a whole that exists at least in the textual imagi-
nary. His literary cartography provides a continuous and largely homog-
enous history, a geographical simulation of coherency. As a properly
demarcated, unified, and modern nation, Brazil can gain entry into the
annals of world geography and, with that, into Occidental thinking.
Incomplete Maps
Euclides da Cunha constructs the literary cartography of Os sertões to
break free from and contest inaccuracy-laden non-Brazilian land treatises.
His first plan of action is to critique the national maps already in exist-
ence.9 Da Cunha rewrites the colonial rendition of the land, which lam-
entably dominates his contemporaries’ territorial knowledge.10 Consider
his tone upon describing the backlands hamlet of Uauá:
This settlement—consisting of two streets that meet in an irregular-shaped

praça—is the most animated point in the entire section. Like the majority
of those hamlets whose names are pompously inscribed on our maps, it
was a sort of cross between an Indian camp and a village, consisting of an
ugly-looking cluster of around a hundred ill-made houses and dilapidated
shanties whose appearance was extremely mournful and depressing. (146;
trans. in Putnam 183–184)
On first reading, the villagers seem guilty of assuming entry onto the
national maps. Yet da Cunha’s harsh description of the hamlets augments
this sense of culpability. Superficially, he criticizes the locale itself—for
its irregularly shaped plaza, for its lack of definition as it sits in limbo
between an Indian camp and a village, for its poorly made houses and
dilapidated shanties that fail to inspire in their mournful state. Below
the surface, however, his ambiguous language belies his original criti-
cism. I situate da Cunha’s ambiguity in the curiously placed adverb
“pompously,” which appears in a passive structure and thereby leaves the

agent to be decided. Who is it that pompously inscribes the names of the
villages “on our maps”? The villagers themselves? Or those individuals—
non-Brazilians, surely—charged with constructing our maps?
Through literary subterfuge, da Cunha directs his critique toward
the colonial powers (and their neocolonial continuation in Republican
Brazil) responsible for wreaking such havoc on the Brazilian terrain.
Prior to the arrival of the Portuguese, these lands needed no demarca-
tion due to their communal distribution. However, the Global North’s
epistemology deemed communal lands unproductive and therefore
indicative of the Indians’ veritable “state of nature” (Craib 97).11 Craib
explains, too, that the state benefited through revenues from the pri-
vatization of such lands.12 In their haste to “civilize” (which is to say,
“tax”) the Indians and pretend productivity, the colonial rulers leave the
land irregular in form, depressing in ambiance, and in a constant state
of dilapidated transition. By using the passive voice, da Cunha avoids
explicit incrimination of the state that he represents. He directs the
adverb “pompously” at “those” who he avoids naming, “those” who
name the locale and then place it on a map with little regard to its future
development. This village and others like it thus maintain their status as
“a sort of cross between an Indian camp and a village.”13
Da Cunha’s description hearks forward to the well-documented phe-
nomenon of entre-lugar, Silviano Santiago’s useful designation of Brazil
and, by extension, all of Latin America as in-between—and often caught
between—spatial, cultural, and temporal forces. Though this inbetween-
ness shapes seaboard and sertão, it tints the former with approbation and
the latter, particularly its neglected villages like Uauá, with condemna-
tion. However, whereas Uauá’s limbo status puts it on the rocky path to
modernity, the state relegates other hamlets—Canudos, for instance—to
what da Cunha ruefully describes as “centuries-old semidarkness,” a kind
of history prior to even the starting point on the spectrum of moder-
nity (Putnam 161). For the sake of contrast, da Cunha juxtaposes Uauá
(at least a faded speck on the national map) against the utter wasteland
of Canudos (no X marks this spot). The conselheiristas’ foothold thus
flounders outside of the nation both materially and symbolically. For da
Cunha, cartographic inclusion prefigures national incorporation. As the
state denies Canudos a position on the national map, it effectively stamps
the village with the seal of foreign, exterior, fora. Given this exclusion,
he observes, the government should not be surprised by the jagunços’
206 A.S. MADAN
hostile reaction: “The surprising thing is the surprise occasioned by

such a fact. Canudos was a miserable weed patch, not even shown on
our maps, lost in the desert and as indecipherable as a page torn from
the book of our numberless national traditions” (238; trans. in Putnam
280). This extra-national leitmotiv surfaces several times. Da Cunha con-
tends that the jagunços appear “like that of residents of another country”
(69; trans. in Putnam 82) and explains that the Republican soldiers “felt
that they were outside Brazil” (338; trans. in Putnam 405). In this for-
eign territory, the Republican troops unfurl the national colors, suggest-
ing that the sertanejos fight under the auspices of another country (259).
Da Cunha’s observations, together with his criticisms of the incom-
plete maps, reveal a nation on the cusp of territorial division; indeed, at
the verge of civil strife. His narrative illustrates that symbolic inclusion—
rewriting the national cartography to include Canudos and the sertão—
necessarily precedes the material benefits of such inclusion: national
consolidation. Of course, he knows that a national map cannot in itself
diffuse Brazil’s volatile political climate. Still, it can elide dissolution by
implying integration. To reiterate Craib, “a national map had as much
iconographic as it did instrumental power” (23). Da Cunha, however,
transcends mere suggestion as he imbues Os Sertões with these powers.
His literary cartography integrates the neglected sertão and its hamlets
into Brazilian (and in turn, universal) history. Whereas in Mexico the
cartographic impetus aims to “visually affirm what supposedly already
existed,” with da Cunha the impulse rests in the textual affirmation of
a unified nation (Craib 23). His rewrite thus negates the exclusion and
incompletion of European-made maps of Brazil, which diminish not only
the expanse but also the structural integrity of the national space. Da
Cunha reappropriates these spaces—and their peoples—into his literary
cartography, thereby strengthening the nation against both interior and
exterior forces.
For da Cunha, Brazilian maps must include Canudos, a paradig-
matic, mythical space from where to affirm the national consciousness.
Its high vantage point—the aerial view from Mount Favella—exposes
the distant opulence of the coast, an illusion, he believes. Yet illusion
and mirage emerge as a primary characteristic not of the seaboard but
of the sertão. As the currents of hot air waft and sway across the dry
land, they combine with the magnified sunlight and effectively blind all
souls in the surrounding area.14 This very real ailment—hemeralopia—
blinds because of over exposure to light, because of too much sight:
“This pseudo-blindness is due, paradoxically, to a reaction to the light; it

is born of bright, hot days, gleaming skies, and the lively swaying of the
currents of heated air above the barren earth. It is due to a plethora of
sight” (88; trans. in Putnam 108). Da Cunha underscores this disorder
for the sake of contrast: another variety of blindness ails the Republican
troops, who fail to see the jagunços or Canudos for their true colors. The
land’s mirages drape a heavy curtain across the troops’ eyes, inhibit all
sight, and thereby prove detrimental to their inglorious battle. In con-
trast, the same mirages train the jagunços to survive in such inhospitable
climes; they train the jagunço to see beyond the superficies of life. In one
of many examples of the land as ally, the mirages force the sertanejos to
depend on illusions of strength, of satiety. Rather than getting knocked
down by a challenge, they simply—blindly—refuse to acknowledge it
as such. This strategy serves them well. In a self-fulfilling prophecy, the
sertanejos come to believe in their satisfied bellies and quenched thirst.
The illusion of satiety transforms the tender stocks of plants and the truf-
fles of wild bromeliads into adequate nourishment: “he affords himself
the illustions of satiety” (89; trans. in Putnam 108). Similarly, the settle-
ment of Canudos replicates the caatingas. Though it is easy to enter, one
quickly becomes entangled in the mess and struggles to exit: “It was easy
to attack it, overcome it, conquer it, knock it down, send it hurtling;
the difficult thing was to leave it” (219; trans. in Putnam 260). These
fortitudes compete even with European modes of protection of, say, a
polygonal citadel of armored walls:
Canudos, less than a couple of yards from the square, became a hopeless
maze of alleys, winding and crossing in all directions. With its mud-built
huts, the town may have given the impression of fragility, but this was an
illusion; it was in reality more formidable than a polygonal citadel or one
protected by strong armored walls. (219; trans. in Putnam 259–260)
As the Canudos of Os sertões defies occidental norms, it exposes what

appears to be a soft underbelly—easy to attack, kill, and gut. Yet the gut-
ted underbelly reveals itself as nothing more than an illusion of fragility,
for the settlement’s entrails twist around and entrap all intruders. In this
sense, the jagunços abide by the land’s primary tenet: what you see is not
what you get. The tenet equally applies to the land’s letters.
The mirages that characterize Latin American land—be it sertão,
pampa, or llano—beget the region’s literary obsession with illusion, a
208 A.S. MADAN
dominant theme that finds its first seeds in Columbus, flourishes in the
likes of Euclides da Cunha, and fully blossoms in the grand master of
literary subterfuge, Jorge Luis Borges. In the face of constant and often
insurmountable obstacles, Latin Americans have explained or resolved
the region’s issues through a tenacious, death-defying illusion of a sort
similar to the jagunços’. Like the illusion of satiety and, at the same
time, like the illusion of fragility, Latin America cannot be taken at face
value. Da Cunha, too, learns and executes this lesson. In Os sertões, he
employs the cartographic narrative to write Canudos into the nation,
thereby creating the illusion of consolidation. By foretelling wholeness
and integrity through his inclusion of the sertão, Cunha writes the model
for the nation.
To do so, he begins at the top.15 Much like a large map in relief, Os
Sertões unfolds at micro and macro levels simultaneously, with preci-
sion and generalization at once. Rhetorical finesse coalesces with figura-
tive language to paint a textual geography with strokes so precise yet,
simultaneously, so broad and expansive. In modern terminology, we
might say that he provides readers with the option to zoom in or to
zoom out from his textual map, which, in turn, leads to a clearer, more
potent image. Akin to his movement from the generality of science to
the particularity of geography, da Cunha’s prose tends to begin with the
bird’s-eye, aerial shot that, within paragraphs or even lines, homes in on
a particular scene.
This tendency emerges in the very first lines of Os sertões:
The central plateau of Brazil descends, along the southern coast, in the
unbroken slopes, high and steep, overlooking the sea; it takes the form
of hilly uplands level with the peaks of the coastal mountain ranges that
extend from the Rio Grande to Minas. To the north, however, it gradu-
ally diminishes in altitude, dropping eastward to the shore in a series of
natural terraces which deprive it of its primitive magnitude, throwing it
back for a considerable distance in the direction of the interior. (5; trans.
in Putnam 3)
Da Cunha begins at the top of Brazil’s central plateau and descends

slowly, comma by comma. Yet the slow, lengthy descent is interrupted:
upon reaching the edge of the plateau—an overlook—the sentence, too,
concludes with an abrupt period. Da Cunha, it would seem, prevents
readers from falling over the precipice. Slowly, we peek over the mount
with the assistance of a semi-colon, and then our gaze extends out over
the north. The descent begins. The altitude gradually diminishes as we
approach the end of the paragraph, and we drop down to the east and see
the land’s “primitive magnitude.” Reminiscent of Humboldt, Sarmiento,
and Zeballos, this emphasis on expanse treads the whole of Os sertões,
from its lengthy prose (at the level of sentence as well as structure) to its
cinematic representation of the vast terrain and endless horizons.
Whereas the narrative’s first paragraph includes a gradual descent, a
continuous view, and a steady rhythm, the second immediately erects a
signpost to indicate not only “notable changes in landscape relief,” but
also notable changes in language:
De sorte que quem o contorna, seguindo para o norte, observa notáveis

mudanças de relevos: a principio o traço continuo e dominante das mon-
tanhas, precintando-o, com destaque saliente, sobre a linha projetante
das praias; depois, no segmento de orla marítima entre o Rio de Janeiro e
o Espírito santo, um aparelho litoral revolto, feito de envergadura desar-
ticulada das serras, riçado de cumeadas e corroído de angras, e escance-
lando-se em baias, repartindo-se em ilhas, e desagregando-se em recifes
desnudos, à maneira de escombros do conflito secular que ali se trava entre
os mares e a terra […].16 (5, emphases mine)
The unobtrusive diction and style that start da Cunha’s narrative

quickly turn choppy, more jagged, more protruding. As he zooms in
on the landscape—the diction alludes to its discontinuity: “destaque”
[jutting], “projetante” [projecting], “desarticulada” [disjointed],
“riçado” [studded], “corroído” [corroded], “escancelando-se” [indented],
“desagregando-se” [breaking apart]—each adjective and gerund draw
attention to the sense of brokenness. This sensation remains through
the mountain descriptions and until da Cunha leads readers to the
coast of Bahia: there, finally, he frees our gaze from the ramparts that
have repelled. Alongside the smooth contours of the Bahian coast,
the language lengthens and calms, where one “se dilata em cheio para
o occidente, mergulhando no âmago da terra amplíssima lentamente
emergindo num ondear longínquo de chapadas” [may wander at will
to the west, plunging into the heart of the broad-sweeping land that slowly
emerges in a distant roll of highland plains] (5; trans. in Putnam 3).
Da Cunha continues this pattern of ascent and descent with a cadence
reminiscent of waves that undulate with the tide. Like Humboldt and
210 A.S. MADAN
Sarmiento, the Brazilian author contends that the land was once sea,
thus his language, too, mimics the waters that once covered the national
soil. A few scant pages after introducing this swelling style, he again pre-
sents the terrain from the bird’s-eye perspective, this time from the top
of Favela:
It was to the top of Favella that this particular traveler climbed, letting his
gaze wander to take in at one sweep the entire region round about. What
he saw was nothing like the scenes he had previously contemplated. Here
before him was the antithesis of all that. Here were the same features,
the same plain down below with the same essential ruggedness, beneath
its crude covering of stony bogs and striped caatingas… But the combi-
nation of so many harsh and irregular lines—the roving cracks that show
where the pits and caverns are, the furrows that mark the precipices—cre-
ated for him perspectives that were entirely new; and he almost began to
understand how the credulous woodsmen, gifted with a naive imagina-
tion, should have come to believe that “this was heaven…”. (18; trans. in
Putnam 19–20)
This aerial view renders visible first a vague scene from the mountain-
top. Just as from far away facial wrinkles fade, so too do the cracks and
furrows of the landscape. He quickly closes in on the individual details,
revealing “the roving cracks that show where the pits and caverns
are, the furrows that mark the precipices” and the “crude covering of
stony bogs and striped caatingas.” While the solitary characteristics—
the cracks and pits and furrows—keep one at bay, their combination,
da Cunha notes, “created for him perspectives that were entirely new.”
Seeing the big picture through the eyes of those “credulous woodsmen”
allows him to empathize with them, to understand their perception of
this place as heaven, to respect their “naive imagination.”
Like Vico’s giants, like those first humans immersed in the logic of
the imagination, the irrational, and the concrete, da Cunha’s credulous
woodsmen find peace on the mountaintop, a peace comparable to that of
an imagined heaven. Vico contends that modern man resides in a liminal
space far from such peace: “We are likewise incapable of entering into the
vast imaginative powers of the earliest people,” he writes in New Science,
continuing, “Their minds were in no way abstract, refined, or intellec-
tualized; rather, they were completely sunk in their senses, numbed by
their passions, and buried in their bodies” (147). Vico deems this space
impenetrable for the modern human; da Cunha, on the other hand,

beckons—even lures—the modern subject toward this imaginary heaven
by describing it in such a way that it becomes irresistible. No one wants
to miss this path to enlightenment. Da Cunha refers to Favela again later
in the narrative, explaining that “Its interesting topography in the eyes of
these simple folk made it appear as the first broad step of the stairway to
heaven” (117; trans. in Putnam 142).
For da Cunha, these simple folk see the big picture instead of harp-
ing on the miniscule details. While part necessarily precedes any under-
standing of whole, only the whole provides perspective. To be sure, both
part and whole bear on any interpretation of Brazil; Brazilian nationality
might thus be gleaned from a combination of metonymy and synecdo-
che. Brazil is rendered meaningless without Canudos. Canudos, simi-
larly, is rendered meaningless without Brazil. Each ascent and descent in
Os sertões simulates the waves constituting the oceanic Brazilian terrain.
As da Cunha, in Humboldtian fashion, guides the lone traveler up and
down each crest, he builds upon the previous one and, in so doing, fash-
ions an intricate and cumulative national story. In fact, he concludes this
story best in the last pages of his magnum opus, comparing it, not casu-
ally, to climbing a very high mountain:
We shall spare ourselves the task of describing the last moments. We could
not describe them. This tale we are telling remained a deeply stirring and a
tragic one to the very end, but we must close it falteringly and with no dis-
play of brilliancy. We are like one who has ascended a very high mountain.
On the summit, new and wide perspectives unfold before him, but along
with them comes dizziness… (400; trans. in Putnam 475)
A better perspective, indeed, to see inhabitant and land.

Yet despite a grand view, there was no concise cartographic over-
view of the sertão in 1896. And an overview would allow for conquest.
Indeed, as Henri Lefebvre (1992) reminds us, war is the condition of
possibility for the production of capitalist space. Da Cunha sheds light
on the other side of this axiom: geography is the condition of possi-
bility for the War of Canudos. According to him, much of what goes
awry in the sertão results from the Republican troops’ lack of territorial
knowledge. For all their grandeur and for all the perspective they might
provide, the backlands were relatively uncharted and, at least to the
Republican soldiers, unknown. The troops attempt to save their “nation”
212 A.S. MADAN
from the backlanders, but they face a grave problem: their uncharted
nation—marked by nothing save a sparse tree and nary a river—proves
treacherous to cross. Given only enough time to create a semblance of
a map, the military engineers lead the troops into danger: “The mili-
tary engineers, Domingos Alves Leite and Alfredo do Nascimento of the
headquarters general staff, who had been assigned to the brigade, had
exactly one week in which to reconnoiter a most difficult terrain with
which they were utterly unfamiliar” (198; trans. in Putnam 235–236).
One week allows them only an intimate awareness of the land’s lack, suf-
ficient to open their eyes to its role in protecting the jagunços, whose
most effective and resilient armament is the caatinga.
Irritated with the pomp and prestige of European scientists, da Cunha
mocks their utter disregard for the caatinga’s prowess:
Those doctors of the art of killing who today in Europe are scandalously
invading the domain of science, disturbing its calm with an insolent jin-
gling of spurs as they formulate the laws of war and the equations of battle,
have well defined the role of forests as a tactical factor, both in offensive
and in defensive action. And those wise old field marshals—warriors from
whose hands the heroic francisca has fallen, to be replaced by the pencil of
the strategist—would certainly have laughed had anyone tried to tell them
that our impoverished caatingas have a more clearly defined and impor-
tant function in a military campaign than do the great virgin forests. (152;
trans. in Putnam 190–191)
These “killing doctors” favor, above all, the strategic positioning of the
forest as an offensive tactic of war. But they are wrong. They underesti-
mate the power of a prickly plant indigenous to the sertão. In spite of the
knowledge of their wise men—and despite the fact that they scandalously
invade the domain of science—these Europeans struggle to put aside
their continental arrogance even momentarily. The known of the forest
thus outdoes, for them, the unknown of the caatinga. For this very rea-
son, da Cunha merges the two categories of known and unknown.
As the first non-indigenous Brazilian geographer, da Cunha constructs
his magnum opus not only as a national map but also as a corrective to
supplant European-led misconceptions. He regards geographical knowl-
edge as the necessary precondition for modernization in two important
ways: first, the practice of geography reduces concentrated land owner-
ship and thereby promotes equality; and second, geography promotes
national sovereignty both aesthetically and politically.
Let us pause on this second point. Whereas Sarmiento seeks inter-

nal and external national defense through geography, da Cunha—like
his arch nemesis Zeballos—perseverates on the potential for interna-
tional encroachment on Brazilian territory. To “know” the country is,
to his mind, to “conquer” the country. The knowledge/conquest dic-
tum emerges implicitly in several of da Cunha’s writings, but explicitly
in his essay “Plano de uma cruzada,” in which he bristles at the gov-
ernment’s constant recruitment of non-Brazilian scientists and travelers
to chart the national terrain—“strangers” writing Brazil for Brazilians.
An avid admirer of several of these scientists, geographers, and geolo-
gists (particularly the American-born Orville Derby, who provides him
with great technical support during their time at the Serviço Geológico e
Mineralógico do Brasil [Freyre 1987]), he nevertheless hopes to retrieve
these disciplines from the grips of Europeans and North Americans.
Derby, for example, studies in Brazil for 40 years and even achieves the
status of first director of the Comissão Geográfica e Geológica de São
Paulo, a position he holds from the institute’s inauguration in 1886 until
1905. Derby’s astounding work in Brazil garners international acco-
lades for its originality and depth. Although da Cunha commends the
North American’s innovation and advances, he wishes for Brazilians
to earn such international recognition.17 Yet his concern about fame is
only a small part of his resistance to these “strangers.” In “Plano…,” he
questions foreign scientists’ commitment to Brazil, describing with dis-
dain what he considers their disinterested stance. Marking their works as
necessarily estranged from the Brazilian point of view, da Cunha laments
that, until now, this foreign perspective has situated the ways in which his
Brazil understands its lands and peoples (73–99).
Da Cunha’s skepticism in “Plano de uma cruzada” stems from the
potentially—and historically—imperialist drive of geographers. Consider,
for example, Thomas P. Bigg-Wither and James W. Wells, both of whom
Gilberto Freyre describes as less than committed to Brazilian interests. In
Os sertões, that same skepticism materializes as doubt regarding practical
abilities.18 Da Cunha thus chooses to rectify these writings through the
whole of his magnum opus. In the remainder of this chapter, I intend
to explicate his transculturated geographical discourse as a correction
that sheds lights on a primary difference between him and Sarmiento:
whereas the Argentine aims to be Tocqueville, to be Humboldt, to
be Wappäus, and thereby write the land through his national lens, the
Brazilian—trained as he is—strives to correct these “strangers” who claim
214 A.S. MADAN
to write Latin America. This rewrite effectively garners the Brazilian

sertão a self-fashioned entry into the encyclopedia of world geography.
Reappropriation Through Rectification

Euclides de Cunha begins his rewrite of non-Brazilians in the very first
pages of Os sertões. As he describes the rolling hills that rise to the peaks of
the “serra do Espinhaço”—the “range of ridges”—he subtly introduces a
corrective with regard to the name: “and this latter, notwithstanding the
suggestive term employed by Eschwege, hardly stands out among those
tablelands which go to determine the dominant characteristic of the land-
scape” (6; trans. in Putnam 5). With uncustomary brevity, da Cunha disa-
grees with Wilhelm von Eschwege’s designation of the hills and indicates,
instead, that the minimal protrusion does not coincide with the maximiz-
ing effect of the name. The corrective is benign, understated even, on first
glance. When taking into consideration Eschwege’s stature in Brazil, how-
ever, the passing slight takes on more meaning. Sent to Brazil via Portugal
and upon the invitation of Don Jõao VI, the German engineer and mine
director spends nearly 15 years traversing and documenting the Brazilian
land, particularly in the state of Minas Gerais. Orville Derby—Brazil’s
preeminent naturalist and a man of international standing—reveres
Eschwege’s research, contending “there is very little that is absolutely new
or that was not anticipated by the illustrious German” (Derby 9). Yet this
illustrious German leaves no mark on da Cunha, who includes him not to
cite a primary and authority-imbuing source, but rather to demonstrate
his disagreement with such texts (and to illustrate the depth of his biblio-
graphic knowledge, particularly of European texts). The corrective signals
da Cunha’s mistrust of the ways in which Brazil had been textually repre-
sented before his portrayal in Os sertões.
Yet what to make of European scientists’ extended years in Brazil?
What to make of Eschwege’s 15 years, of Derby’s 40 years? Da Cunha
contends that the sertão, a ruthless and uncomfortable region, repels so
thoroughly that no scientist—Brazilian or otherwise—has yet to endure
its discomforts in order to compose a definitive study:
No scientific pioneer has as yet endured the discomforts of this corner of

the hinterland for a sufficiently long time to enable him to make a defini-
tive study of it. Von Martius came this way, with the prime objective of
observing the meteorite which fell on the banks of Bendegó and which was
already, from 1810 on, known to European academies through the writ-
ings of F. Mornay and Wollaston. Making his way through this wild tract,
the desertus austral, as he christened it, he paid little attention to the earth
and the extravagant flora that covered it—silva horrida, in his alarmed
Latin terminology. Those who preceded him and those who came after
him, stung by the dog-day heat, made the same rapid tracks that he did in
fleeing this region. As a consequence, this section of the backlands, always
avoided, is to this day unknown and is likely to remain so for a long time
to come. (21, emphases in original; trans. in Putnam 21)
After rejecting the scholarly opinions of Eschwege and Derby, da Cunha

takes offense with the work of German explorer and naturalist Martius—
incidentally, the non-Brazilian founder of the IHGB and the individual
who first articulates the Brazilian symbolic system of miscegenation. Da
Cunha’s rhetoric does not simply reject but oozes with extended judg-
ment. Martius, he contends, pays negligible attention to “the extrava-
gant flora” of the sertão, and, like his compatriot Eschwege, employs
dubious language—“alarmed Latin”—to describe the land. Both
Germans, according to da Cunha, flee Brazil as quickly as they descend
upon it, yet their damage lingers: they have inaccurately named the flora,
and the misnomers warrant at least attention if not correction. Why,
he wonders, are Germans naming all of Brazil? Why are Brazilians not
naming Brazil? Recall Foucault’s emphasis on the power of naming:
first Columbus and then Humboldt name Latin America (as if for the
first time, insists González Echevarría), a narrative to which Sarmiento
provides the counternarrative in Facundo. In the context of consolida-
tion and nationalism, da Cunha’s zest essentially to rename the German-
named territory strikes one as fitting and even normal.19
Despite da Cunha’s goals for Brazilian-invented accuracy, he devotes an
inordinate amount of textual space to disclaimers regarding his own geo-
graphical work. Recall my original claim: whereas Sarmiento rewrites by
revamping, da Cunha rewrites by rectification. His transculturation is not
only discursive; it is technical because he is a trained surveyor, geographer,
and military engineer. Yet within lines of critiquing the work of Martius,
da Cunha inserts several excuses for shortcomings in his own geographical
findings, a move that minimizes the vindicating impact of his correction.
First, the Brazilian explains that he crossed the already inhospitable region
at its worst, “the beginning of a hot summer,” and, as such, “what we
write here will have the disadvantage of an isolated impression, rendered all
216 A.S. MADAN
the more unfavorable by surroundings which, disturbed by the emotions of

war, did not make for peace of mind” (21; trans. in Putnam 21). His hesi-
tant language fails to convince with diction such as “defeituoso” [defective],
“isolada” [isolated], and “desfavorecida” [unfavorable]. To further compli-
cate the trying situation, he then contends that the limited (and potentially
faulty) equipment prevents any modicum of certainty in the field:
In addition, the data afforded by a single thermometer and a suspect aner-

oid, constituting the wretched scientific equipment with which we had to
work, will fail to convey even a vague idea of a climate that varies with
the slightest change in the earth’s surface, showing pronounced variations
within the confines of a given tract. (21; trans. in Putnam 21)
Initially, da Cunha’s qualifications seem like something of an excuse to

counter any statistical inaccuracies, particularly for the sake of posterity.
Within paragraphs, though, his tone suggests pride in the Brazilian ability
to surmount obstacles through innovation, the stamp of originality that can
enter Brazil into world geography. Da Cunha thus revamps and rewrites by
departing, due to circumstance and lack of equipment, from classic meth-
odology. He invents a uniquely Brazilian mode of investigation. Instead of
resenting or excusing his potentially shoddy work, he defends its originality.
This defense surfaces with concision and rhetorical force in the subsection
“Singular Hygrometers”: “Our observations were not made in accordance
with rigorous classic procedure; if we were able to make them at all, this
was owing to hygrometers of an unlooked-for and bizarre kind” (23; trans.
in Putnam 23). Indebted to these unimagined and bizarre pieces of equip-
ment, da Cunha fashions a Brazilian geography that must reside outside
the European grasp of conventional (read: Occidental) machinery. And this
first incursion contributes to his status as one of the nation’s best geogra-
phers, according to the April 1940 issue of Revista Brasileira de Geográfia:
Owner of an unparalleled style in our literature, with love and an affection-

ate attachment to the land, armed with rare scientific culture, “the son of
the land, hopelessly in love with her,” as he has been nicknamed, Euclides
da Cunha, could not but be a great geographer, among the best in Brazil.
(“Vultos da geografia de Brasil”, 240)
Perhaps partially due to his unadulterated love for the Brazilian land,
da Cunha criticizes foreign geographers’ sweeping generalizations,
claiming that they paint an unfair picture of the nation. As a proper

patriot, he must defend Brazil and its people against the inexactitudes and
even outright lies concocted by Europeans and North Americans. In line
with his common strategic use of the passive voice, on occasion da Cunha
shies from direct incrimination and instead employs the only mildly
cauldron-stirring pronoun “those.” Peeved at “those” who have unsuc-
cessfully attempted to characterize the Brazilian climate, for instance,
he contends that “contrary to the opinion of those who would assign
[demarcam] to the hot countries an expanse of thirty degrees in latitude,
Brazil is far from answering to such a description” (50; trans. in Putnam
54). The ambiguous third-person “demarcam” applies to scholars who
climatically pigeonhole Brazil without considering that the country falls
outside the norms of science—“the fact of the matter is, the climate here,
entirely subordinated to geography, violates the general laws that ordinar-
ily govern it […]. It is, abnormally, defined by longitude” (50; trans. in
Putnam 55).20 Lacking modern classifying devices, da Cunha nevertheless
extrapolates his geographical observations from what he already possesses:
the tools of innovation in addition to acquired knowledge of national pat-
terns. The geographer documents the climatic periodicity in Brazil and
illustrates that certain aspects of weather are the norm rather than the
exception; they follow a lilt and flow evident to the long-time inhabit-
ants of the region. Foreign researchers, however, neglect this pattern and
fabricate an overarching generalization for the whole of Brazil: “Whence
the mistake is made by those who, in studying our national physiology,
fall into generalizations with regard to the particular effect of a tropical
climate” (54; trans. in Putnam 60). Yet rather than being applicable to
the entire nation, this “sui generis pathology” only exists “throughout the
whole of the northern coastal strip and a good part of the corresponding
states, as far as Mato Grosso” (54; trans. in Putnam 60).
Why does da Cunha wish to contain this negativity to the northeast?
Why does he insist that “[t]his does not occur in a good part of cen-
tral Brazil and throughout the southern regions” (55; trans. in Putnam
61)? He differentiates between north and south to repudiate the claims
of “those” who generalize [generalizam], “those” who, with one fell
swoop, condemn both regions to similar fates and ascribe to them anal-
ogous characteristics. Focused on detailing the regional differences, he
matter-of-factly points to “an essential difference between the south and
the north, two regions that are absolutely distinct as regards meteorolog-
ical conditions, the lay of the land, and the varying transitions between
218 A.S. MADAN
the inland and the coast” (51; trans. in Putnam 56). That European and
North American scientists have neglected this basic distinction between
sertão and seaboard occupies a large part of his critical commentary.
Da Cunha cites non-Brazilian scholars almost exclusively to disagree
with them; thus any agreement catches the eye. In what follows, I will
spend time on one such agreement—with Englishman Henry Thomas
Buckle—to illuminate how da Cunha’s pastiche defamiliarizes the known
for two different populations (Brazilians and non-Brazilians), thereby
creating an alignment between the local and the global. In short, he
shows that neither Canudos nor Brazil is all that different; he un-Others
both by rewriting Buckle’s Othering narrative. Still, he does so subtly.
In Os sertões, da Cunha uncharacteristically underscores the veracity
of Buckle’s observations regarding Mato Grosso which appear in History
of Civilization of England (1862). Although the praise includes a trace
line of insult regarding Buckle’s tendency to exaggerate, Mato Grosso,
according to da Cunha, demands hyperbole:
Indeed, it may be said that Nature in Mato Grosso lives up to Buckle’s

exaggerations. It is quite exceptional, unique; there is nothing like it any-
where. All the wild grandeur, all the inconceivable exuberance, along
with a maximum of brutality on the part of the elements—qualities which
the eminent thinker, in a hasty generalization, ascribed to Brazil as a
whole—exist here in reality and are manifested in astounding landscapes.
Beholding these landscapes, even with the cool eye of the naturalist who
is not given to rhetorical descriptions, one realizes that this anomalous cli-
mate is one that affords the most significant example of the wide variations
of environment to be found in Brazil.21 (52; trans. in Putnam 57)
Buckle, despite the laudatory parenthetical descriptor “the eminent

thinker,” does not escape da Cunha’s overarching criticism of non-Bra-
zilian thinkers: the Englishman, too, commits the mortal sin of gener-
alization by ascribing the characteristics of Matto Grosso to the entire
nation. This is where Buckle gets it wrong. He gets it right with his
exaggerations, however, a position that da Cunha is slow to concede.
Da Cunha initially downplays his literary register—in a move that
recalls Sarmiento—and establishes a critical difference between Buckle
and himself. Whereas the Englishman is given to flowery descriptions,
the Brazilian’s normally “cool” scientific eye lends itself to more cred-
ible observations. Yet frigid language is a futile effort in Matto Grosso’s
surroundings. Da Cunha concedes that only hyperbolic language suf-

fices to portray Matto Grosso. His concession surfaces in exaggerated
language with words and phrases such as “exceptional,” “unique,” “wild
grandeur,” “inconceivable exuberance,” “maximum of brutality.” As he
exhibits the ways in which self-perception differs from self-projection, da
Cunha maintains that this language is a necessary byproduct of engaging
with the land, that even the “cool eye of the naturalist who is not given
to rhetorical descriptions” cannot prevent highly stylized writing.
The land cannot but heat da Cunha’s pen and electrify his stylistic
energy, such that, despite the one-line disclaimer paragraph that fol-
lows it (“It is difficult to describe them, but we shall endeavor to give a
sketch”), he composes a passage worthy of the highest canons of litera-
ture (52; trans. in Putnam 57):
Nenhum se lhe equipara no jogar das antíteses. A sua feição aparente é

a de benignidade extrema: – a terra afeiçoada à vida; a natureza fecunda
erguida na apoteose triunfal dos dias deslumbrantes e calmos; e o solo
abrolhando em vegetação fantástica – farto, irrigado de rios que irradiam
pelos quatro pontos cardeais. Mas esta placidez opulenta esconde, para-
doxalmente, germens de cataclismos, que irrompendo, sempre com um
ritmo inquebrável, no estio, traindo-se nos mesmos prenúncios infalíveis,
ali tombam com a finalidade irrestível de uma lei.22 (52, emphases mine)
Da Cunha successfully emphasizes the Hegelian antitheses of the region

by creating a rhythmic contrast between the positive and the negative:
to describe the “extreme benignity” of Matto Grosso, he crafts lengthy
clauses separated by semi-colons and dashes and thereby lends a fluid
cadence to his description. By giving form to continuity, da Cunha con-
tributes to the context of life (vida), of fecundity (natureza fecunda), of
blossoming and birth (abrolhando), of abundance and fertility (farto).
However, he immediately slaps readers with the back of that same hand,
the other side of the “opulent placidity”: brusque and cacophonous,
all that follows “Mas” [But] appears as either one word or fragmented
phrases separated by six commas within one sentence. An allusion to the
climate’s aforementioned periodicity, “an unalterable rhythm” makes
the language pop and burst with the alliterated p and the enclosed
irrompendo [bursting forth], both of which sound as though they are try-
ing to escape from the sentence; commas nevertheless hold them in. Da
Cunha’s halting strategy punctuates and therefore interrupts the reader’s
220 A.S. MADAN
visual and auditory image. By ending each thought before it takes root
in the mind, the Brazilian author enhances the sense of violent death
and disease (germens de cataclismos), of apocalyptic endings (prenún-
cios infalíveis), and of inevitable finality (finalidade), which appears, not
coincidentally, at the sentence’s end. Dialectically speaking, death must
connect with life, for within the antithetical inheres synthesis. To this
end, da Cunha unites dark and light through the alliterated “irr,” which
appears twice before the dividing line of “Mas” (irrigado, irradiam) and
twice after (irrompendo, irrestível).
As da Cunhas’s punctuation and rhythmic variabilities give the land’s
periodicity form, he reveals a personal style, a sort of writing that he might
later describe in O Paraíso Perdido as a pride-producing “idiomatic lan-
guage,” one so distinct from formal Portuguese that it winds up “con-
founding their translations”; it is an emancipatory language, for, as he says
in a call to arms, “it is time we emancipated ourselves” (qtd. in Hecht 22).
Yet in Os sertões da Cunha denies any predisposition to the literary, and
instead relegates Buckle and his exaggerations to that category, but not
before concurring that Mato Grosso requires such language. Why does da
Cunha, thus far critical toward non-Brazilian scientists, grant Buckle the
credibility he normally withholds? Why, moreover, does he emulate the
very strategies Buckle uses in History of Civilization in England?
**********
Just as with Zeballos on Arredondo, I believe that we can better

understand the nuance behind da Cunha’s praise, his criticism, and his
corrective rewrite if we turn to Buckle’s passages on Brazilian geography.
Like da Cunha, the Englishman draws attention to the land’s antithetical
properties, but whereas da Cunha’s register exudes a respect warranted by
the aesthetic sublime, Buckle’s tone oozes with contemptuous fear. If the
emulated elements are similar pieces of furniture comprising the whole of
the narrative house, then da Cunha reupholsters each piece with a newer,
more appealing textual fabric. A close reading demonstrates that even the
land’s great beauty cannot disabuse Buckle of his unease in the face of the
unknown. This trepidation undercuts even the explicitly positive:
Brazil, which is nearly as large as the whole of Europe, is covered with a

vegetation of incredible profusion. Indeed, so rank and luxurious is the
growth, that Nature seems to riot in the very wantonness of power.
A great part of the immense country is filled with dense and tangled for-
ests, whose noble trees, blossoming in unrivalled beauty, and exquisite with
a thousand hues, throw out their produce in endless prodigality. On their
summit are perched birds of gorgeous plumage, which nestle in their dark
and lofty recesses. Below, their base and trunks are crowded with brush-
wood, creeping plants, innumerable parasites, all swarming with life.
There, too, are myriads of insects of every variety; reptiles of strange
and singular form; serpents and lizards, spotted with deadly beauty: all
of which find means of existence in the vast workshop and repository of
Nature. (Buckle 74, emphases mine)
Following the now-established pattern of juxtaposing known to

unknown, Buckle provides readers not with a measurement of square
meters, but rather with a comparison between Brazil and Europe; he
aims to foster a welcoming familiarity. Yet I argue—and contend that da
Cunha perceives—that
while Buckle’s hyperbolic observations (thousand hues, endless prodigal-
ity, innumerable parasites, myriads of insects) and mesmerized descriptions
often convey a positive message, they equally show his revulsion. He recoils
from the flora’s indomitable immensity; indeed, from its very source of
human-debilitating power. Bolded above, his diction reveals dread for the
potentially lethal disorder; the sibilance augments the tactile imagery by
giving lyrical form to the sensation of skin-crawling flora and fauna. In this
sense, Buckle transmits distaste for the terrain via his narrative’s undertones.
Within paragraphs, Buckle foregoes subtlety for explicit condemnation
of Brazilian barbarity, which he locates, like Hegel, in the land’s physical-
ity: “The whole of Brazil, notwithstanding its immense apparent advan-
tages, has always remained entirely uncivilized; its inhabitants wandering
savages, incompetent to resist those obstacles which the very bounty of
Nature had put in their way” (75). The obstacles so hinder social progress
that during more than three hundred years the resources of European
knowledge have been vainly employed in endeavouring to get rid of them.
Along the coast of Brazil, there has been introduced from Europe a certain
amount of that civilization, which the natives by their own efforts could
never have reached. But such civilization is itself very imperfect, has never
penetrated the recesses of the country; and in the interior there is still
found a state of things similar to that which has always existed. The peo-
ple, ignorant, and therefore brutal, practising no restraint, and recognizing
no law, continue to live on in their old and inveterate barbarism. (75)
222 A.S. MADAN
Da Cunha writes from said “recesses of the country,” the sertão where
floods waterlog the soil and where droughts suck all moisture from the
earth’s top layers; according to Buckle, these fluctuations inhibit civiliza-
tion’s ability to establish a foothold. In addition to its variability, Brazil’s
sheer expanse sabotages any forward momentum:
The progress of agriculture is stopped by impassable forests, and the har-

vests are destroyed by innumerable insects. The mountains are too high
to scale, the rivers are too wide to bridge; every thing is contrived to keep
back the human mind, and repress its rising ambition. It is thus that the
energies of Nature have hampered the spirit of Man. (76)23
For Buckle, Brazil remains a lost cause despite—and because of—its

extremes: too high, too wide, too big, too many. His fear impels him
to criticize the national land and subject, the former through implicit
undertones and the latter through explicit overtones. No wonder, then,
that da Cunha—“‘the son of the land, hopelessly in love with her’”—
staunchly defends his motherland against false praise tinged with harsh
criticism (Revista Brasileira de Geografia 240). Buckle makes Brazil
out to be a doomed nation destined to fail, except, of course, on its
European-influenced coast.
Compelled to contest this ominous prediction, da Cunha must rewrite
the Brazilian geography through a lens that can advance the national
agenda. In light of this, though he outwardly downplays his literary
aptitude, he rewrites Buckle’s tone more than his content. If we con-
tinue with the domestic metaphor, then da Cunha reupholsters Buckle’s
scratchy sofas with silk, thereby softening and eliminating any lasting
discomfort. Herein appears the contradiction that surfaces in, say, famil-
ial situations: as her native-born son, da Cunha can complain about the
motherland; Buckle, an outsider to the national family, is not privy to the
same critical license.
Da Cunha rewrites the Englishman’s technically accurate but tonally
charged comments regarding Brazilian geography; he attempts to sof-
ten and reenter that national image into the world’s archives, this time,
however, from the Brazilian perspective. Though he criticizes European
scientists’ tendency to generalize the entire span of the Brazilian nation,
da Cunha does not presume to foster discord as he stresses regional dif-
ference. Rather, he seeks first cognizance of that difference and then uni-
fication despite it—yet another example of his pioneering ability to think
beyond effacement and/or incorporation. Afflicted by a sort of tunnel

vision, da Cunha locates in geographical unification the inevitable seeds
of national consolidation. He articulates this thought by drawing atten-
tion to the “four points of the compass” (52).
I would like to spend some time making meaning of the com-
pass as leitmotiv, since its unifying and orienting capacities show quali-
ties inherent to national consolidation. Though da Cunha employs
several different expressions to communicate the idea of “four points”
[os quadrantes], his destination remains the same: to underscore the dis-
tinctions between north and south while pointing, at the same time, to
the subject/land characteristics that cross the whole of the nation, char-
acteristics that connect, in other words, the cardinal directions. In the
quotation above, for example, he emphasizes the “irrigated rivers that
spread out to the four corners of the compass,” as though the national
land (and therefore the national subject) is naturally linked via the rivers
that meander in every direction (52). A few pages later, these waterways
transform into human waves lapping across the country:
Wave after wave of them came, with the untiring fatality of a natural law;
and, indeed, they did represent a vast potential, these great warrior cara-
vans, these human waves let loose on the four corners of the compass,
stamping over their country at every point, discovering it after the dis-
covery, laying bare the gleaming bosom of its mines. (emphasis mine, 58;
trans. in Putnam 65)
The human waves then turn into a solitary soldier capable of connecting
north, south, east, and west by killing men in all directions:
The truth is, while there were not the winding lanes to contend with, as
down below, these scattered houses nonetheless, by the nature of their
distribution which was vaguely reminiscent of a chessboard, afforded an
extraordinarily good opportunity for cross-fire, so that a single marksman
might command all four points of the compass without leaving his own
small square. (emphasis mine, 222; trans. in Putnam 264)
And lastly, whereas in Buckle the Brazilian mountain chains hinder pro-
gress and unification because “they are too high to scale,” in da Cunha
the same mountains promote unification as they majestically frame, on all
four sides, the national mise-en-scène:
224 A.S. MADAN
A river without water, winding about the town, was turned into a long and
dusty highway. And in the distance, dominating the four corners of the
compass, an undulating row of mountains, likewise deserted, and standing
out sharply against the brightness of the horizon, like the giant frame of
this strange picture. (emphasis mine, 287–288; trans. in Putnam 346)
This last quotation comments directly upon the landscape of Canudos.

As da Cunha meticulously details each corner of this “strange picture,”
he literarily weaves Canudos into the four-sided textual, and almost tex-
tile, map composing the national scene. Yet perhaps more importantly,
the Brazilian author employs the metaphorical relation between known
and unknown in order to enter Canudos—and Brazil—into the his-
tory of Western civilization. Canudos, here, appears as a “Babylon weed
patch” with its “biblical landscape, against the infinite melancholy of
its barren hills, where no trees grew” (287; trans. in Putnam 346). By
invoking Canudos’s similarity with the known biblical lands, da Cunha
fosters a sympathetic reaction to the unknown, which only has one,
rather malignant description floating around: that of the European sci-
entists (Buckle, in particular) whom he strives to rewrite. Da Cunha also
imbues the picture with a certain timelessness, as though explaining to
readers that the events occurring in Canudos have happened time and
time again—in Babylon, in Jerusalem, in Idumea, in Yemen—and should
therefore not be judged:
The view was an impressive one, filled with connotations. It was as if cer-
tain earth-old dramas were being repeated here. There was something
about the scene that put one in mind of some remote nook in Idumea,
that legendary region south of the Dead Sea, lying sterile forever beneath
the prophets’ curse and as a result of the drought that comes from the
burning plains of Yemen… (288; trans. in Putnam 346)
As he defamiliarizes the known—Canudos to Brazilians and Brazil to

non-Brazilians—da Cunha constructs geographical comparisons that
integrate his nation into the cycles of world history, into the cycles of
“earth-old dramas.” He diffuses the original impulse that propels his
attack against those guilty of excessive generalization between north
and south; he moves from contending complete difference between
north and south to admitting telluric difference alongside similarity
between people and events. This inclusive stance—which, it ought to
be mentioned, appears late in the narrative—demonstrates a progressive

weaving of both Canudos and Brazil into the fabric of world history.
Such representation does not come easy, however. Da Cunha insin-
uates that Buckle fails to adequately represent Brazil, yet he faults not
the Englishman but the Brazilian land. Because of the geographical
antitheses, he explains, any representation proves challenging: “There
is nothing like it, when it comes to a play of antitheses” (52; trans. in
Putnam 57). Immediately before and after this declaration, da Cunha’s
“cool eye” not only overcomes the land’s dichotomies, but also gives
them form. Under a section subtitled “Variability of the Physical
Environment,” for example, da Cunha portrays a storm literarily blow-
ing onto his textual page. His language mimics the variability—the
binary opposites—between rain and sun, between floods and droughts.
Winds provide the storm’s onset as they fan across the section from
every cardinal direction:
We have seen, in the previous pages, that the southeast wind is the pre-
dominant regulator of the climate along the eastern seaboard but that it is
replaced in the southern states by the northwest wind and in the far north
by the northeaster. But these winds in their turn disappear in the heart of
the plateaus before the southwest wind, which, like a mighty whiff of the
pampeiros, rushes down on Mato Grosso, occasioning thermometric vari-
ations that are out of all proportion, adding to the instability of the main-
land climate, and subjecting the central regions to an extremely harsh set
of conditions, differing from those that we have rapidly outlined above.
(52; trans. in Putnam 56–57)
The culprit for the land’s geographical instability, the “hot, moist
squalls” of the northeasterners “have blown for some days” at which
point “the atmosphere becomes motionless, stagnant” (52; trans. in
Putnam 57). Da Cunha articulates the region’s oscillations between the
heightened movement of the wind and the motionless, stifling stagnancy
of the humid air—in other words, this antithetical pairing that collides
in an abrupt change of atmospheric pressure.24 As with most change, an
explosion ensues: da Cunha’s storm reaches land with hyperbolic energy
and cacophonous devastation. This storm, like Sarmiento’s, interrupts
both the textual and the telluric space without forewarning, what the
Brazilian author describes as “a sudden assault” (52). Not even a cloud
floats across the blue sky:
226 A.S. MADAN
When, however, one looks up at the sky, there is not a cloud in sight! The
limpid-arching blue is lighted still by a sun that is darkened, as if in eclipse.
The atmospheric pressure, meanwhile, slowly but constantly drops, stifling
all life [afogando a vida] as it does so. (52; trans. in Putnam 57)
Within seconds—and within lines—however, the sky darkens and the

winds howl:
Por momentos um cumulus compacto, de bordas acobreado-escuras,

negreja no horizonte, ao sul. Deste ponto sopra, logo depois, uma viração,
cuja velocidade cresce rápida, em ventanias fortes. A temperatura cai em
minutos e, minutos depois, os tufões sacodem violentamente a terra.
Fulguram relâmpagos; estrugem trovoadas nos cues já de todo bruscos e
um aguaceiro torrencial desce logo sobre aquelas vastas superfícies, apa-
gando, numa inundação única, o divortium aquarum indeciso que as
atravessa, adunando todas as nascentes dos rios e embaralhando-lhes os lei-
tos em alagados indefinidos… (52 italics in original, emphases mine)25
I believe that the most poetic of paragraphs in Os sertões end in ellip-

ses. In my reading, the ellipses enhance the never-ending monstrosity
of the Brazilian sertão, the overwhelming vastness of the flora that takes
over it, and the burdening awareness that no language will suffice to fully
explain this enigmatic land.26 Hyperbole—the literary device of which da
Cunha modestly claims to be incapable—suggests the same impossibil-
ity. In Buckle’s footsteps, he perseverates on unquantifiable magnitude
as he speaks of the atmospheric pressure that kills (afogando a vida), the
earth-shaking hurricanes (os tufões sacodem violentamente a terra), the
plains that never end (vastas superficies), the solitary wave that washes all
away (numa inundação única), and the limitless overflow of the floods
(alagados indefinidos). Save the numeration of one wave, da Cunha
focuses on the impossibility of quantification to stress the land’s expanse
and, again, the futility of attempting to represent it.27 Yet in this alleged
futility inheres a contradiction: da Cunha successfully represents the
land’s oscillations, in particular through sounds. The hard alliterated and
consonant c provides the soundtrack for the storm’s touchdown, giving
form to its thunder. Da Cunha follows the initial ruckus with the alliter-
ated a, which, departing from “aguaceiro,” produces the softer sound of
the water rushing and the streams overflowing.
The impossibility of representation thus supplanted by his propensity
toward literary language, da Cunha continues to give form to the land’s
antitheses. In the same way that his rains fall and waters rise with little
warning, their cesation is equally abrupt. Just as the skies darken within
a mere few lines, they quickly brighten as the sun explodes on the scene
with a capital S and an exclamation point:
E uma hora depois o Sol irradia triunfalmente no céu puríssimo! A pas-

sarada irrequieta descanta pelas frondes gotejantes; suavizam os ares
virações suaves – e o homem, deixando os refúgios a que se acolhera
trêmulo, contempla os estragos entre a revivescência universal da vida. Os
troncos e galhos das árvores rachadas pelos raios, estorcidas pelos ventos;
as choupanas estruídas, colmos por terra; as últimas ondas barrentas dos
ribeirões, transbordantes; a erva acamada pelos campos, como se sobre eles
passassem búfalos em tropel – mal relembram a investida fulminante do
flagelo. (52–53, emphases mine)28
Da Cunha has already transitioned from the consonantal cacophony to

flowing alliteration within the storm itself. He continues to emphasize
the climatic triumph with a softly alliterated s sound, which stresses the
repetition of “suavizam” and of “suaves.” Instead of the lyrical brutal-
ity of the storm, we now have its opposite: the chirping of restless birds
(A passarada irrequieta descanta pelas frondes gotejantes) and the rustle of
gentle breezes (suavizam os ares virações suaves). The softened tones can-
not disguise the damage, however. Evidence abounds: the bent boughs
of trees, the devastated and now roofless cottages, and the flooded fields
are “sorry reminders, all, of the tempest and its fulminating onslaught”
(trans. in Putnam 58). However, rather than saddened relief in the face
of destruction now passed, the inhabitants know the cycles of their land;
they never expected it to leave them in peace. To no one’s surprise, then,
[d]ias depois, os ventos rodam outra vez, vagarosamente, para leste; e a

temperatura começa a subir de novo; a pressão a pouco e pouco diminui;
e cresce continuamente o mal-estar, até que se reate nos ares imobilizados
a componente formidável do pampeiro e ressurja, estrugidora, a tormenta,
em rodeos turbilhonantes, enquadrada pelo mesmo cenário lúgubre, reviv-
endo o mesmo ciclo, o mesmo círculo vicioso de catástrofe. (53, italics in
original, emphases mine)29
Indeed, the land maintains no constancy save its lack of constancy, which
in itself forms a vicious cycle nearly impossible to survive. Da Cunha
gives form to this cycle by returning to the wind that initiated the storm
228 A.S. MADAN
sequence. With the winds then leading to “ares imbolizandos”—in other

words, stagnancy—da Cunha completes the cycle of alternation between
the pleasance of the wind’s flow, the suffocation of the humidity that fol-
lows, and the collision of the two, which produces the storm.
By literarily representing the land’s antitheses, the Brazilian author
subtly negates his original defense of Buckle. Recall that I argue for his
initial rewriting as a softening and reupholstering of Buckle’s already
accurate claims. Here, however, I believe that da Cunha attempts to
displace Buckle’s authority with his own. By first pointing to the land’s
challenging antithetical disposition and Buckle’s inability to overcome it,
da Cunha sets the stage for a Brazilian—preferably himself—to explain
the nearly inexplicable. And only through the formal qualities of lan-
guage can he represent the nuances of Brazilian geography.
Hegel and Humboldt: From the Local to the Global

Thus far I have demonstrated da Cunha’s rebuttal to “those” who gen-
eralize, “those” who claim knowledge of Brazilian territory without
adequate information regarding the different territories. His primary cri-
tique: that these unnamed scholars employ allegedly modern scientific
methodology to support their claims of one Brazilian ethnicity, common
across the 3.3 million square miles of national territory. Yet these non-
Brazilian scholars commit a grave error, da Cunha insists. Their subjec-
tive leanings have tarnished their objective data—“[t]here is no such
thing as a Brazilian anthropological type” (59; trans. in Putnam 67).
Da Cunha’s determinism informs his belief that variation in land begets
variation in habitant. “We do not possess unity of race,” he explains
and, furthermore, “it is possible we shall never possess it” (49; trans.
in Putnam 54). He thus overwrites the master narrative of similarity by
stressing the nation’s geographical differences. In da Cunha’s rendition
of Brazil’s tale, the nation can resist the foreign categorizations imposed
upon it. He literally theorizes from within America: Brazil enters uni-
versal history because “we are predestined to form a historic race in
the future, providing the autonomy of our national life endures long
enough to permit it. In this respect we are inverting the natural order
of events” (50; trans. in Putnam 54). Reminiscent of Hegel’s infant
America as the future of Western civilization, da Cunha’s declaration
attempts to write Brazil into universal history as the historic race of the
future. An anomaly, an abnormality, an inversion of the natural order,
Brazil is the future because it forms part of the world’s center: “America
as a center of creation wholly apart from the great Central Asiatic cradle-
land. There arises, autonomous among the races, the Homo americanus”
(47; trans. in Putnam 50). Da Cunha’s theory of an autochthonous
American race surfaces in stark contrast to the standard (European) the-
ories, which argued that Asian migration into the Americas occurred via
the Bering Strait.
Here we might note just how well Fernando Ortiz’s notion of
transculturation maps onto geographical discourse, for in the end it
attends to racial formations. In the same way that Ortiz maintained that
traditional (and Eurocentric) anthropological terms like Malinowski’s
acculturation did not do justice to the complexities of the Cuban expe-
rience—especially its Afro-Cuban elements—so too does da Cunha cor-
rect foreign scientists by appealing to race. In fact, a paradox emerges in
da Cunha’s thinking: though he renounces European thinkers’ percep-
tion of a single ethnic group populating a homogenous land; though he
steadfastly maintains that Brazil consists of multiple ethnicities distrib-
uted across varied lands; and though he delineates a concrete distinc-
tion between the civilized south and the barbaric north, he contends
that the mixed-race Brazilian—the miscegenation between the south
and the north, in other words—will lead (1) Brazil, (2) the Americas,
and (3) the world into the future. Da Cunha simultaneously vener-
ates and berates this unique race of the future in the first sections of Os
sertões, but by the narrative’s end he focuses on elevating Brazil’s origi-
nal inhabitants to the level of the Cossack, to the level of the Persian.
He ruminates on the abstract and the concrete, penning a tale of
Shakespearean proportion.30 Upon pondering the glorification of com-
bat and fear, for example, he proudly writes the Brazilian jagunço into
military history:
Military history, which is so dramatic in texture and at times so embroi-

dered over with strange antitheses, is filled with instances of the glorifica-
tion of fear. The fury of the pursuing Persian resulted in exalting the heroic
resignation of the “ten thousand”; the brutality of the Cossacks immortal-
ized Marshal Ney… We must now add to all this a stirring chapter, one
which fits in perfectly with the others, even though the events with which
it deals are on a lesser scale—for it was the ferocious tenacity of the jag-
unço that fashioned the halo for General Arthur Oscar’s battered battal-
ions. (277; trans. in Putnam 331)
230 A.S. MADAN
Like Sarmiento, moreover, da Cunha employs metaphor to align the

known (European/North American) with the unknown (Brazilian)
and thereby make the latter more comprehensible. He reaps a twofold
reward: first, he inserts Brazil into the canons of world literature and
geography; and second, he simulates equivalence through the known/
unknown dichotomy. By creating symbolic equality, da Cunha takes
the first steps toward material independence. Late in the narrative, for
instance, he Brazilianizes a European adage—prefiguring Osvaldo de
Andrade’s notion of antropofagia by decades—and thereby firmly plants
the stamp of ownership on the national land: “He had changed a word
in the old Roman’s classic phrase: I came, I saw, I remained” (286; trans.
in Putnam 344). Here, as da Cunha descends upon Canudos, he unpacks
General Arthur Oscar’s military strategy: to exhaust the enemy by never
conceding, by never retreating. The commander does not need to con-
quer, then. He came; he saw; he stayed. Both the General and da Cunha
fit previously executed modes—of strategy and adage, respectively—to
the Brazilian context, taking care to avoid mere superimposition, a move
that predates yet another revered Brazilian critic, Roberto Schwarz and
his “Misplaced Ideas.” Yet the move also perfectly illustrates Fernando
Ortiz’s original definition of transculturation, wherein subordinate
groups use great discretion and innovation to absorb the metropolis’s
knowledge.
Da Cunha’s alteration of the Roman dictum metonymically relates
to his alteration of Humboldtian geography, to which I now turn. He
alters through explicit, and even condescending, correction as opposed
to any sort of subterfuge or subtlety. This is not to deny that da Cunha
emulates and seeks authority in certain Humboldtian strategies. Like the
German naturalist, he presents first the national land and then its inhab-
itants. This chronology brings to mind Cosmos (1850), in which the
Baron systematically outlines physical geography but concludes his study
with a section on man. Like Humboldt—the primordial Eurocentric
man—da Cunha views America as materia prima. Unlike the European
(Humboldt), however, the local Eurocentric (da Cunha) aims to theo-
rize that materia prima from his local Brazilian sphere to the universal.
Da Cunha attempts to localize—that is, nationalize—Humboldt, thereby
provincializing universal philosophy.
Beyond his dialogue with Humboldt, this attempt appears explic-
itly in da Cunha’s comments on Hegel as well as implicitly in his poetic
register. Something interesting occurs in the history of Latin American
exceptionalism when da Cunha casually slips Hegel into his narrative.

With da Cunha, the tone is of slight, of correction, contrary to the una-
pologetic agreement often seen with regard to Hegel. The first corrective
appears early in the narrative under the subsection “A geographical cate-
gory that Hegel does not mention” (37). This dry, almost critical, heading
suggests that despite (or because of) Hegel’s exclusion of the sertão from
his Philosophy of History, da Cunha not only demands but also enacts its
inclusion. In other words, he attempts to make the excessively local—the
remote, ahistorical Brazilian backlands—into something universal. This
unique terrain “rejoices in a play of antithesis,” he explains. “And these
antitheses accordingly call for a special division in the Hegelian scheme,
the most interesting and significant of them all, one in between the over-
fertile valleys and the most arid of the steppes” (38; trans. in Putnam 41).
None other than Alexander von Humboldt breaks down this Brazilian
geographical nuance, although, as da Cunha contends, “This explanation
of Humboldt’s, put forth as barely more than a brilliant hypothesis, has,
however, a deeper significance” (38; trans. in Putnam 41).
This intrigue with, but simultaneous need to rewrite, Baron
Humboldt exposes another instance of the Brazilian author’s torn rela-
tionship with occidental thinkers. That da Cunha appropriates—indeed,
nationalizes—Humboldtian geographical discourse indicates two contra-
dictory ideas. First, he sees the Baron as a source of authorization; but
second, he sees the Baron as a deficient source needing revision through
a Brazilian lens. This rectification, contrary to what he does with Buckle,
occurs more in the realm of content than tone. Da Cunha’s correctives
thus begin at the structural level. Recall that like Humboldt, da Cunha
organizes his narrative into three parts, which are further subdivided into
synecdochic subsections that function as a microcosm of the narrative as
a whole. One representative sliver appears within the section titled “A
Terra,” a part called “As Caatingas.” As he details this brutal terrain’s
strengths and weaknesses, its resilience and its obstacles, readers compre-
hend the binaries dwelling at the core of his Brazilian reality. His precise
diction, halting punctuation, and literary devices lead us through a land-
scape of language in which the vicious caatinga, first deprecated for the
horrific repulsion it provokes, becomes admirable for its ability to prevail
despite inhospitable conditions.
This transformation evokes da Cunha’s representation of the jagunços,
thus the caatinga—unique to Brazil, we learn—becomes a metaphor for
this human species particular to the sertão. In this Darwinian throwback,
232 A.S. MADAN
da Cunha employs metaphor to coalesce land with society. The mediat-

ing code between these otherwise incongruent spheres is national con-
solidation. In other words, the narrative pursues comprehension of the
national sphere via a national literature, one in which the same aesthetic
material nourishes both subject and land. Form and content join to write
the Brazilian nation, to explore its nuances, to reveal its dichotomies.
Taking the Humboldtian tripartite model as my lead, I chose three
paragraphs that allow me to illustrate this observation. Recall that, in
my reading, da Cunha’s most poetic passages end in ellipses; I maintain
that the sense of incompletion intensifies the land’s enigmatic qualities
in addition to its exuberance, its endlessness, its grandeur. Each of these
qualities pervades the selected paragraphs, the first of which appears at
the start of “As Caatingas.” It reads:
Ao passo que a caatinga o afoga; abrevia-lhe o olhar; agride-o e estonteia-

o; enlaça-o na trama espinescente e não o atrai; repulsa-o com as folhas
urticantes, com o espinho, com os gravetos estalados em lanças; e desdo-
bra-se-lhe na frente léguas e léguas, imutável no aspecto desolado: árvores
sem folhas, de galhos estorcidos e secos, revoltos, entrecruzados, apontando
rijamente no espaço ou estirando-se flexuosos pelo solo, lembrando um
bracejar imenso, de tortura, da flora agonizante… (28, emphases mine)31
The figurative language, much like the caatinga itself, pierces readers
immediately. Da Cunha personifies the land, thereby integrating it into
the social sphere and transforming it into the inhabitant’s equal. This
equality resonates with distinct tones as the narrative advances, for the
caatinga viciously attacks the Republican troops assigned to fight in the
sertão. Here, however, the man is a lone traveler navigating the harsh
Brazilian terrain. As the caatinga stifles the traveler, hinders his sight,
strikes and stuns him, enmeshes and repels him, the land displays its
immense power. The land enters all relationships armed—the caatinga
is its constant companion, its weapon, with “twigs sharp as lances.” This
allusion to war is the first of many.
The land’s power inheres in its enormity. Long and winding, the two-
sentence paragraph mimics the endless quality of this terrain, as do the
polysyllabic words ending the passage: “apontando rijamente” [standing
rigidly], “estirando-se flexuosos” [spreading out sinuously], “de tortura,
da flora agonizante” [agonized struggles]. The caatinga’s power addition-
ally intensifies because of the narrative’s rhythm. Da Cunha’s short clauses
consisting of little more than a verb and a direct object pronoun punch
readers before drawing back with a semi-colon; this pattern includes five
semi-colons in the first lines. The halting punctuation and the series of
prepositional phrases create a staccato that traps readers in the same way
as the caatinga. Similarly, da Cunha demonstrates his mastery of repetition
with the anaphoric “com.” Just as the land is unchanging (“imutável”), so
is his language. That is, he repeats words (“léguas e léguas”) and sounds
(the alliterated/assonated “a”; the alliterated “es”; the end-rhyme with the
gerund “-ando” and the ending “-os”) to heighten the sense of monot-
ony that he then translates to melancholy through a pain-filled diction:
“desolado” [desolate], “secos, revoltos, entrecruzados” [dried and twisted
boughs], “tortura” [torture], “agonizante” [agonizing]. The language also
makes the land appear unnatural, replete with leafless trees accompanied
by “dried and twisted boughs.” Such is the caatinga’s lack of normalcy
that Humboldt, da Cunha tells us, fails to include one of its plants—no less
than the canudos-de-pito—in his chart of Brazilian social plants. This exclu-
sion will soon bring to bear on the caatinga as a metaphor for the jagunço.
Da Cunha’s word choice repels readers through the cacophony of
hard consonants: “espinescente,” “urticante,” “espinho,” and “estor-
cido” are each spiny, thorny, prickly, and twisted words. Yet, simultane-
ously, his language beckons us, intrigues us, demands that we read and
therefore “see” this Brazilian landscape that he textually paints. Poetic
language employed to depict that which is negative, violent, and abhor-
rent suggests an intrinsic respect for said negativity: if the caatinga and
the jagunço are one and the same, does da Cunha in fact respect the
primitive prowess of the Brazilian land and subject?
In the first paragraph, his respect for the caatinga’s sublime beauty
only bubbles to the surface by means of the poetic devices. In the second
paragraph, this respect renders itself visible immediately:
Ora, quando, ao revés das anteriores as espécies não se mostram tão bem
armadas para a reação vitoriosa, observam-se dispositivos porventura mais
interessantes: unem-se, intimamente abraçadas, transmudando-se em plan-
tas sociais. Não podendo revidar isoladas, disciplinam-se, congregam-se,
arregimentam-se. São deste número todas as cesalpinas e as catingueiras,
constituindo, nos trechos em que aparecem, sessenta por cento das caat-
ingas; os alecrins-dos-tabuleiros, e os canudos-de-pito, heliotrópicos arbus-
tivos de caule oco, pintalgado de branco e flores em espigas, destinados a
emprestar o nome ao mais lendário dos vilarejos… (30, emphases mine)32
234 A.S. MADAN
Upon explaining that certain species of the caatinga are not suited to
the harsh terrain, da Cunha, whose tenor now shifts from aversion to
attraction, indicates that these plants nevertheless surmount their obsta-
cles. They do so by uniting in what amounts to battle formation. In the
several paragraphs separating the first two that I have chosen, da Cunha
speaks of “the struggle for life,” “the enemy,” “combat,” and “battle.”
The Darwinian language has transformed into one of war. The various
species of the caatinga, now personified as soldiers—as jagunços—find
themselves not “well equipped for a victorious reaction.” As such, they
appropriate the force of the collective—an unnatural quality—to survive:
they are united, “they discipline themselves, become gregarious and regi-
mented.” Da Cunha transposes discipline and regiment, words of war,
onto the context of the caatinga; this implicit metaphor alludes to the
land’s constant struggle. Furthermore, the successive repetition of the
aforementioned verbs and the lack of conjunctions enhance the sense of
unification. The species must become “social plants”; they must disre-
gard the individual and focus on the whole in order to survive.
That one of these species—the canudos-de-pito—lends its name to the
Canudos settlement reveals a rather Barthesian attempt to propel the
narrative from answer to question, to advance the text’s progression via a
lexia that might well be in the hermeneutic code. Da Cunha allows us an
initial glimpse of his enigma, of his connection between land and man,
between the canudos-de-pito and the jagunços of Canudos. As he personi-
fies the caatinga and bestows upon it the tacit qualities of a warrior, da
Cunha suggests that the canudos-de-pito is a metaphor for the jagunço.
Despite their initial grotesqueness—their repellant barbarism—they merit
commendation for their civilized ability to solve problems, to surmount
obstacles in dire contexts. Both flora and fauna must embrace the man-
tra of power by numbers; both most unite and become disciplined; both
must create a network that may be unnatural but is nevertheless indis-
pensable to survival.
This network entangles readers in the third paragraph that I have
selected. Da Cunha continues his description of the canudos-de-pito and
notes that they do not appear on Humboldt’s table of Brazilian social plants:
Não estão no quadro das plantas sociais brasileiras, de Humboldt, e é pos-

sível que as primeiras vicejem, noutros climas, isoladas. Ali se associam.
E, estreitamente solidárias as suas raízes, no subsolo, em apertada trama,
retêm as águas, retêm as terras que se desagregam, e formam, ao cabo,
num longo esforço, o solo arável em que nascem, vencendo, pela capilari-
dade do inextricável tecido de radicular enredadas em malhas numerosas,
a sucção insaciável dos estratos e das areias. E vivem. Vivem é o termo—
porque há, no fato, um traço superior à passividade da evolução vegeta-
tiva… (30–31, emphases mine)33
This exclusion limits both their access and their exposure to world geog-
raphy. In short, this Brazilian social plant fails to enter the realm of the
universal (Alexander von Humboldt) and is subsequently limited to the
local (Euclides da Cunha). Might this not be an extended metaphor for
the uniquely Brazilian subject—that is, the jagunço? In the local context,
both inhabitant and land must behave in ways foreign to their nature:
isolated and individualistic in other climes, “here they are distinctly
social” (trans. in Putnam 33). The four-line sentence following this dec-
laration exposes a language of solidarity and interaction. The series of
12 commas acts like the netting that connects the roots of clauses, while
the sibilance lends to the suctioning and working sounds produced by
the “numerous meshes.” The repetition of “retêm” contributes to the
rhythm of what sounds much like a chain gang working together to
bring in the water, bring in the soil. And finally, a large part of the dic-
tion—“nascem, vencendo, pela capilaridade do inextricável tecido” [they
spring, overcoming, through the capillarity of their inextricable tissues]—
personifies the plants with bodies and systems that are distinctly human.
As if to cement in readers his belief in the canudos-de-pito’s perseverance,
da Cunha follows this long, intricately constructed, net-like sentence
with the punchiest of declarations: “And they do live.”
The canudos-de-pito lives, da Cunha informs us, “for there is, as a
matter of fact, a higher significance to be discerned in the passivity exhib-
ited by this evolved form of vegetable life.” If his representation of the
plant functions as an extended metaphor for the jagunço, then passive
acceptance undoubtedly flounders in the face of active resistance and
unification: the defining quality, he seems to suggest, of Brazilian nation-
ality. The author presents the caatinga as the resounding exemplification
of Brazilian strength and camaraderie, an example—lest we forget—
denied entry into Humboldt’s European charts. By metaphorically
aligning the canundos-de-pito with the people of its region, da Cunha
elevates those Brazilian citizens to the very level of the land of which he
stands in awe, thereby revealing what he acutely describes as the “higher
significance” to be discerned.
236 A.S. MADAN
Song of My Brazil

In da Cunha’s rectification of the Baron, we might notice that the tone
of wonder remains, at least in part. An Edenic Brazil emerges out of the
pages of Os sertões, a land that exudes tinges of paradisiacal grandeur
in his lengthy descriptions of the flora and fauna, descriptions entirely
entrenched in the Kantian aesthetic sublime; this awe stands in stark
opposition to Buckle’s fear. Yet an element of the matter-of-fact, pre-
cision-driven engineer always remains under the surface, a reflection of
the author’s time as chief Brazilian representative on a border demarca-
tion expedition. Da Cunha is not alone in seeing his pragmatic national
tasks become inspiration for—and even lend authority to—aesthetic pro-
duction. Beyond Zeballos, we might note that Colombian author José
Eustacio Rivera, author of La vorágine (1924), was legal advisor to and
member of the Venezuela/Colombia Boundary Commission. Despite
training in neither science nor geography, Humboldt himself was lured
to the study and aesthetic representation of land from his initial career
as a mine inspector (Hartshorne 49–50). With his scientific founda-
tion preceding the advent of his literary masterpiece, da Cunha invests a
disproportionate amount of the narrative’s pages in national landscape,
and this effort often reveals a sort of pedagogical zeal—that is to say,
a hope for his reader to know the land, know the country. Knowledge
of the territory predominates in the text, as suggested by the book’s
Portuguese original title, Os sertões, which loosely translates to “The
Backlands.” Yet it purports to be, as the English translation’s title sug-
gests, about a Rebellion in the Backlands. Da Cunha inserts the arbitrary
subjective text (Antonio Conselheiro and the Canudos rebellions) late in
the narrative—and on the heels of what was initially presented as geo-
graphical observation—as though it too is an objective conclusion, leav-
ing his readers, perhaps, with the sense that this national narrative is a
mind trick to ensnare readers.
Da Cunha, I have attempted to demonstrate, employs litera-
ture to articulate and to give form to the immensity—and immense
importance—of the national geography. By enrapturing readers with

the tale of Canudos, by luring them into understanding the vínculo that
outweighs even the desire to live, the Brazilian author seams together
a broken nation both aesthetically and politically. Like the mirage-filled
sertão that it sketches out and colors in, his magnum opus provides the
illusion of consolidation through its material and symbolic inclusion of
the Brazilian northeast, of the backlands settlement of Canudos, of the

barbaric jagunço. He achieves this inclusion at the intersection of form
and content. Yet in the context of fin-de-siècle Brazilian literary stud-
ies, Euclides da Cunha prompts quite a different reaction than does,
say, Machado de Assis. As contemporaries, da Cunha and Machado
often elicit comparison, if for other no reason than their mutual dedica-
tion to language and nation. Generally speaking, critics tend to assign
supreme mastery of form to the one (Machado) and effective execution
of content to the other (da Cunha). In “A Translator’s Introduction” to
Rebellion in the Backlands, Samuel Putnam illustrates this tendency:
In literature, likewise, [Euclides da Cunha] was a pathfinder, being one of

the two principal fountainheads of the modern Brazilian novel, the other
being Machado de Assis. In the one case (Machado de Assis), the stress is
on form; in the other, on content. Os Sertões may be said to have posed the
problem which faces the twentieth-century novelist in Brazil: that of how
to achieve an artistic synthesis of the rich social content which his country
affords him. Because he grappled with this problem so valiantly and solved
it in so extraordinary and individual a fashion, the author continues to be a
symbol and an inspiration to creative writers. (viii)
I point out Putnam’s contradiction to underscore my departure from

his commonly held impression: on the one hand, he excludes da Cunha
from the category of form; yet on the other, he underscores the Brazilian
author’s pioneering ability to mediate between the aesthetic and the
social, “to achieve an artistic synthesis of the rich social content which
his country affords him.” By extension of this achievement, da Cunha,
according to the translator, becomes a literary role model. However, the
one cannot exist without the other: da Cunha powerfully deploys form
and content to help readers viscerally experience the sometimes uncom-
fortable political context that he represents.
Beyond Machado, Putman also draws parallels between da Cunha
and the North American Walt Whitman, acutely aligning their literary
and political projects and further universalizing the Brazilian context for
English-language readers. Lines later, however, he denies da Cunha’s
sonority: “[his prose] is characterized by a definite, brusque avoidance of
lyricism and emphasis to the point of appearing overwrought and pain-
ful” (ix). The inconsistency startles, for Putnam’s characterization of da
Cunha follows his comparison between the Brazilian and none other
238 A.S. MADAN
than the author of “Song of Myself,” the master of lyricism par excel-
lence. Like Whitman, da Cunha employs the trope of metonymy with
equal efficacy. Whitman’s accolades of nation in “Song of Myself” might
well translate to “Song of My America”; similarly, da Cunha’s tale of
Canudos is, in effect, a tale of Brazil: part represents whole.
I have attempted to explicate the ways in which Euclides da Cunha
integrates Canudos into the national sphere, both symbolically and
materially. Aside from the explicit incorporation of Canudos into his
literary map, he poetically writes the jagunços into the national sphere.
He matures as a writer during the heydey of “scientific poetry” in
Brazil, which emanated from the works of José Isodoro Martins Júnior
(1860–1904), whom Gilberto Freyre describes as the founding father
of the genre. Da Cunha’s tendencies thus stem from both his times and
his career, an observation that González Echevarría notes well: “In Os
Sertões, Euclides made a heroic attempt to stave off the literary by sed-
ulously heeding the voice of the land surveyor in him, and by remem-
bering the scientific authorities he had learned to trust” (130). This
attempt, however, is just that: a hero’s valiant effort that ultimately fails,
for the text exudes poetry at every moment through its precise diction,
its gliding transitions, its inverted metaphors.
Yet this is not his only failure. Indeed, da Cunha’s Brazilian rendi-
tion of manifest destiny has been read with the same pejorative analyses
as the original Manifest Destiny: whether north or south, expansion does
not amount to inclusion, especially when—as Adriana Johnson (2010)
shows—a populace does not wish to be included. Thus, while Os sertões’s
transculturated geographical discourse makes of Brazilian geography an
authentically Brazilian Portuguese text—thereby undoing his accusation
that “our natural history still stammers in six or seven foreign languages,
and our physical geography is an unpublished book (“Plano de uma cru-
zada” 155)—da Cunha could not unify the nation’s plural subjectivities
through an aesthetics of domination. Occidental geography is transcul-
turated, but it still rests on the basic premise of divide and dispossess
articulated with the Treaty of Tordesillas. Though it documents and even
chastises the elimination of subaltern populations, Os sertões can only point
an incriminating finger at the state. Style, in the end, cannot surmount
erasure. The spatial strategy can thus organize two mutually informative
stories—of Brazilian literature and of Brazilian geography—but it cannot
reintegrate a population banished to the backlands where, still today, they
teeter at the precipice of chronic poverty and uneven development.
Notes
1. “É que a nossa historia natural ainda balbucia em seis ou sete línguas
estrangeiras, e a nossa geographia physica é um livro inedito” (155).
2. Hecht is not alone. In fact, within recent Euclidean criticism we see an
Amazonian current. See, for example, Leandro Belinaso Guimarães
(2010), Leopoldo M. Bernucci (2011), and Aarti S. Madan (2014).
3. Adriana Michéle Campos Johnson (2010) argues that Euclides da
Cunha is complicit in subalternizing the population of Canudos with
his Os sertões, what she calls a “sentence to history.” In her meticulously
researched study, Johnson contends that the sertanejos were not banished
to the sertão—da Cunha’s assessment and therefore the dominant telling
of the situation—but rather chose to be there to escape a government
they did not trust and a nation to which they did not want to belong. I
find her reading compelling, but my analysis takes as its object not the
historiography of Os sertões, but rather its aesthetics and politics as inter-
twined at the site of geography.
4. In a 1950 volume of the Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São
Paulo, Pelágio Alvares Lobo recounts that “No public man conquered
the confidence of the Nation and its integral recognition more viva-
ciously, more decisively, than Rio Branco. He vigilantly defended our ter-
ritorial interests, from 1893—when he assumed our defense in the matter
of Misiones—until 1909, when he concluded the boundary agreement
with Peru and the divisions with Uruguay, completed by the demarcating
clarifications as with Argentina and Bolivia. In other words, in less than
16 years, these providential men secured for our country, by peaceful
means and skillful understandings, almost as much land as the banderi-
antes, those hard men in leather shorts, who with harquebus and machete
had conquered for two centuries, in those dizzying offensives that had
the power to displace the meridian of Tordesillas” (72).
5. See Chap. 4 of Andermann’s The Optic of the State (2007), in which he
makes sense of the Brazilian state’s visual production of the “Planalto
Central,” what he describes as the “predestined heart of Brazil and future
site of the national capital” (134). Begun in 1892 when the Republican
government commissioned Luíz Cruls to explore and demarcate the area,
the project inaugurates a series of excursions to enframe Brazil, enframing
being a “way of presenting space as the neutral, inert canvas on which a
production of order can take its place, intervening into social practices in
the name of the superior harmony of the picture” (136). Andermann’s
study particularly interests me because it too aims to understand the
ways in which the ordering of space resignifies not only the interior but
also the entire nation-state. Yet it does so grounded more in theories of
240 A.S. MADAN
natural geometry and rectilinear subdivision of lands than in the discur-

sive discipline of geography, this despite acknowledging Brazil’s success in
border disputes “thanks in great part to the sophistication attained by the
discipline of historical geography” (140).
6. Fernandes’s declaration ensues in order to contest that of Luiz Costa
Lima (2002), who argues that the literary register of Os sertões serves as
the framework for what is, in reality, scientific analysis. Like Fernandes, I
maintain that both registers exist simultaneously and complementarily.
7. Andermann (2007) thoughtfully documents the ways in which geography
and history collide with the IHGB. He explains that “[b]y compiling colo-
nial legends, documents of the struggle against the French and the Dutch,
or accounts of the war against Argentina in 1825–1828, the institute was
chiefly concerned with the construction of an archive capable of turning
cartographic into affective space, a ‘realm of memories’ to paraphrase Pierre
Nora, in which the nation-state could be situated and legitimized” (122).
Andermann thus documents the new epistemological status of vision.
8. Recall, too, that Sarmiento established his relationship with Estanislao
Zeballos upon writing laudatory reviews of the latter’s La conquista de
quince mil leguas. In this sense, both Sarmiento and da Cunha—relative
outsiders to geography’s elite—gain entry into the inner circle by means
of their reviews of other texts.
9. Cândido Mendes publishes the first Atlas do Império in 1868, and some
7 years later the Barão da Ponte Riveiro draws a more detailed Carta
di Império do Brasil (1875). Over time cartography becomes critical in
defining not only the vast wilderness, but also the expansive industrial
complex growing around Rio’s railway system. To that end, the British
engineer James H. Wells produces in 1879 a general map of the rail net-
work through the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas
Gerais. The Ministry of Agriculture issues a map in 1883 with similar
intentions, albeit focusing not only on railways but also on telegraph lines
and steam navigations. And, of course, Euclides da Cunha himself takes
up the task of mapping Amazonia, as documented in his collection of
essays À Margem da História as well as in Hecht’s 2013 study.
10. Of course, the errors that work to Brazil’s advantage are less offensive
to da Cunha, who functions in a Brazil that, in Hecht’s (2013) words,
“was inventive with its spatial logic” (357); delineation’s fictions are clear
to him from the outset, whether his own fictions or others: “That maps
could be texts of multiple and layered meanings, and could be produced
and read with rhetorical and political eyes, was clear to the [sic] both the
author and the cartographer in da Cunha, who as an artist and a scien-
tist understood the powers both of fiction and of what was taken as fact”
(Scramble for the Amazon 356).
11. In Humboldt’s view, communal lands bore no opportunity for progress in

their state of “perpetual sterility” (Political Essay 142).
12. Republican Brazil ultimately practices a sort of neocolonial politics as it
seizes Indian lands and extends the landlord monopoly, thereby con-
tinuing the imperialist inclinations of the allegedly democratic state of
Portugal.
13. Later, we see that he simply employs the generic pronoun “those”—to
what end? I believe that he avoids accusation because he writes to a spe-
cific audience of Europeans and North Americans. Rather than coming
off as antagonistic, he portrays an image of the smart and authoritative
Brazilian. And, most importantly, he acquires a sense of authority from
knowing (in other words, being familiar with the works of) non-Brazilian
scholars instead of openly criticizing them (which is to say, presuming
superiority by critiquing their works).
14. See Javier Uriarte (2012) for an excellent reading on space and (in)visibility
in Os sertões.
15. Da Cunha does not stand alone in this tendency. Rather, as Andermann
explains, the “ideal gaze from above” was a mode implemented in Latin
America since the beginnings of colonization (Rama), such that “[t]he
foundation of Brasília inverts the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel:
rather than employing the science of the architect to elevate human
vision to the divine height of all-encompassing knowledge, the creators of
Brazil’s modernist capital simply presupposed the view from above as the
starting point of urbanist creation” (Optic of the State 133). This obser-
vation aligns with theories of the “imperial eye” (Pratt 1992) or “impe-
rial fantasies” (Wittenberg 2004), which rely on particular geographical
images—chief among them mountains and snow-capped peaks—to nour-
ish a discourse of whiteness, masculinity, and civilization. In fact, though
he speaks of Africa, Wittenberg’s emphasis on the vista from above
resonates across the gamut of European writing about the Americas.
Consider, for example, the Austrian Dr. Karl von Scherzer’s (1861–1863)
observations from the summit of Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro. From
the rocky peak at 2300 f high, the “traveller can gaze over the delight-
ful panorama below with as much, or even more, comfort and security,
than from the Righi or the great Winerberg in the Saxon Switzerland.
[…] What a wonderful prospect! It is scarcely possible to have, from a
single point of view, a grander or more varied natural picture” (127).
Not only does Ritter reproduce the Humboldtian trope of the traveler’s
gaze, he also legitimizes his native informant—the veteran Brazilian natu-
ralist Dom Antonio Ildefonso Gomez—as an authority and learned fig-
ure only insofar as he had traveled through Europe and even attended a
talk in Paris with Humboldt. Significantly, Dom Ildefonso views German
242 A.S. MADAN
settlement in Brazil as the essential path to progress (128). We have seen

this internal rhetoric regarding the necessity of European immigration
replicated in previous chapters, most explicitly with Sarmiento.
16. “Accordingly, one who traverses it to the north is aware of notable
changes in landscape relief: first of all, the continuous, dominant row of
mountains which form a prominently jutting girdle above the projecting
shore line; then, on the segment of seashore between Rio de Janeiro and
Espírito Santo, a stretch of rocky coast made up of disjointed mountain
ranges, studded with peaks and corroded by mountain streams, indented
with bays and broken up into islands and naked reefs, mute evidence as it
were of the age-old conflict which here has been waged between sea and
the earth […]” (trans. in Putnam 3).
17. Derby effectively institutionalizes Brazilian geology, founding the survey
in which da Cunha participates and directing it between 1907 and 1915.
Finally becoming a Brazilian citizen several months before his suicide in
1915, he was revered in his times as South America’s most prominent
geologist. The Geological Society of London awarded him the prestig-
ious Wollaston Donation Fund award, for instance, and he worked as
associate editor of the Journal of Geology and frequently contributed to
the American Journal of Science (Branner 340).
18. Both railroad engineers-cum-travel writers, Bigg-Wither and Wells pen
narratives whose titles illustrate the colonial tone of their expeditions:
respectively, Pioneering in South Brazil (1878) and Three Thousand Miles
through Brazil, from Rio de Janeiro to Maranhão (1873). “Pioneering”
suggests a lack of inhabitants, and Bigg-Wither does indeed write under
the auspices of the Royal Geographic Society to an audience of potential
English colonizers whom he wishes to attract to Paraná. Continuing in
the vein I began with regard to Sarmiento, then, immigration unfolds as
a means by which the “unpopulated” land can gain inhabitants.
19. In a fantastic article arguing for da Cunha as a “proto political ecolo-
gist,” Susanna Hecht quotes a passage from his O Paraíso Perdido that
illustrates the thematic consistency of his ire at the Brazilian obsession
with non-Brazilian thought. Quoting from Inferno Verde, Hecht trans-
lates the passage this way: “We think too much in French, in German,
or even in formal Portuguese. We live in a spiritual colony almost a cen-
tury after political autonomy. From the construction of phrases to the
organization of ideas, we too much respect the prejudices of exotic cul-
tures that impress us, and form in us a singular state of consciousness,
blind to the real depictions of our lives, such that our own character is
lost to us, papered over by other attributes that diminish and discount
the convergences of our origins […]. A kind of psychic mimicry has been
instituted and in this cowardice we camouflage ourselves in the external
similarities to the people who both intimidate and enchant us. To the
degree that we explore our own reality we must overcome the precon-
ception that we must be as little Brazilian as possible. And thus we eru-
ditely render (our experience) into formal Portuguese, forgetting that our
greatest pride should consist in our own idiomatic language confounding
their translations […]. In any case, it is time we emancipated ourselves”
(“The Last Unfinished Page” 22). Beyond the epistemological break he
proposes, I find value in da Cunha’s desire to create Brazil’s “own idi-
omatic language” that is distinct from formal Portuguese, indeed a desire
reminiscent of Sarmiento’s new orthography for Latin American Spanish.
Zeballos of course abides by Sarmiento’s grammar. Da Cunha, arguably,
creates Brazilian earth-writing with his transculturated geographical dis-
course.
20. That Brazil falls outside of already written categories comes up several
times, for example under the subsection “A geographical category that
Hegel does not mention,” which I will further analyze later in the chap-
ter.
21. “Com efeito, a natureza em Mato Grosso balanceia os exageros de
Buckle. É excepcional e nitidamente destacada. Nenhuma se lhe asse-
melha. Toda a imponência selvagem, toda a exuberância inconceptível,
unidas à brutalidade máxima dos elementos, que o preeminente pen-
sador, em precipitada generalização, ideou no Brasil, ali estão francas,
rompentes em cenários portentosos. Contemplando-as, mesmo através da
frieza das observações de naturalistas pouco vezados a efeitos descritivos,
vê-se que aquele regímen climatológico anômalo é o mais fundo traço de
nossa variabilidade mesológica” (52).
22. “There is nothing like it, when it comes to a play of antithesis. The gen-
eral aspect of the region is one of extreme benignity—the earth in love
with life; fecund Nature in a triumphant apotheosis of bright, calm days;
the soil blossoming with a fantastic vegetation—fertile, irrigated with riv-
ers that spread out to the four corners of the compass. But this opulent
placidity conceals, paradoxically, the germs of cataclysms, which, bursting
forth always with an unalterable rhythm, in the summertime, heralded by
the same infallible omens, here descend with the irresistible finality of a
natural law” (trans. in Putnam 57).
23. Recall, here, Hegel’s insistence that in order to achieve freedom and spirit
(Geist), ease of terrain reigns supreme: “Nature is the first standpoint
from which man can gain freedom within himself, and this liberation
must not be rendered difficult by natural obstructions” (80). Though
Philosophy of History appears posthumously in 1899, its contents initially
emerge from Hegel’s Jena lectures between 1805 and 1806. Buckle pub-
lishes his study in 1862. Despite their immense esteem and popularity,
244 A.S. MADAN
Hegel and Buckle do not intimidate da Cunha; in fact, he takes some-

thing like pride in demonstrating not only familiarity with their writings
but also disagreement.
24. This is one of his most prominent strategies, in fact. Da Cunha often
transmits an image of the sertão as a stagnant place replete with immobil-
ity, paralysis, and a sense of interminability—a work in progress akin to
the one that Sarmiento portrays with regard to Argentina. He tells that
“the stagnant atmosphere cast a motionless spell on surrounding nature”
(24; trans. in Putnam 25), “the birds that fall in death from the stagnant
air” (312; trans. in Putnam 378), and the pumas that appear mid-jump,
the humans in mid-scratch, and the oxen in mid-stand, each paralyzed in
their heat-preserved death (313).
25. “For moments, a dense cloud cumulus with copper-colored borders
looms darkly on the southern horizon. Then comes a breeze whose
velocity rapidly increases, turning into a high wind. The temperature falls
in a few minutes, and, a moment later, the earth is shaken by a violent
hurricane. Lightening flashes; thunderbolts resound in a sky that is low-
ering now; and a torrential rain descends on the vast expanse of plains,
wiping out in a single inundation the uncertain divortium aquarum that
crosses them, uniting the sources of the rivers and embroiling their beds
in a limitless overflow” (trans. in Putnam 57–58).
26. Borges, too, stamps his writing with a sense of interminability, but with
a “create your own adventure” flair: reader becomes writer and can
complete the story, leaving the text with multiple interpretations to be
extracted, much like a Barthestian writerly text. Consider the short story
“Et cetera,” for example.
27. Note that only literary language suffices to express the land’s grandeur,
a theme we see iterated again in Vollman (2009) and others (Abreu
Mendoza [2014], for instance) that focus on the aesthetic sublime. As
the storm intensifies, for example, da Cunha personifies the trees as they
double over and moan (52). In so doing, he naturalizes the trees, mak-
ing them humankind’s equal, particularly in their explicit naming: “os
carandás.” Herein we have geography’s nuances, its antitheses. Rather
than an adversary, the trees (one component of the geography) experi-
ence the same jolts and bolts as human subjects (another component of
the geography). And, most importantly, the jolts and bolts stem from yet
another component of the geography: the climate.
28. “An hour later the sun is shining triumphantly in the purest of skies! The
restless birds are singing in the dripping foliage; the air is filled with gen-
tle breezes – and man, leaving the shelter to which he had tremulously
repaired, comes forth to view, amid the universal revival of Nature, the
damage wrought by the storm. Trunks and boughs of trees rent by
lightening and twisted by the winds; cottages in ruins, their roofs strewn
over the ground; muddy rivers overflowing their banks with the last of
the downpour; the grass of the fields beaten down, as if a herd of buffalos
had passed that way – sorry reminders, all, of the tempest and its fulmi-
nating onslaught” (trans. in Putnam 58).
29. “Some days later the winds once more begin blowing up slowly from the
east; the temperature begins to mount again; the barometer drops, little
by little; and the feeling of general uneasiness constantly increases. This
keeps up until the motionless air is caught in the formidable grip of the
pampeiro, and the destructive tempest arrives, blowing in turbulent whirl-
ing eddies, against the same lugubrious background, reviving the same
old cycle, the same vicious circle of catastrophes” (trans. in Putnam 58).
30. Although outside the scope of the present project, da Cunha’s allusions
to Shakespeare reinforce the literary quality of his narrative. Who is
more literary than the Bard himself? Consider, for instance, da Cunha’s
descriptions of knightly business, which he portrays as “cavalheiresco e
tumultuoso”—“full of sound and fury,” precisely the lines in Macbeth’s
famous soliloquy in Act 5, Scene 5. Later in Os sertões, da Cunha includes
another allusion to Macbeth, in which the title character arrives at a cru-
cial moment of self-awareness upon the realization that he has killed King
Duncan, his grooms, and Banquo—he has little choice but to March
on: “I am in blood /Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, /
Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (3.4.135–3.4.137). Three cen-
turies after the writing of this pivotal play, the Republican soldiers at
Canudos find themselves in a similar situation: “They were at the center
of operations—and they could take one step forward, and what was
worse, they couldn’t take one step back” (278). Trapped in a moment of
escalating confusion, the soldiers are “forcibly heroic, cornered, sewn into
a gore” (277). Like Macbeth, the soldiers too have arrived at a moment
of self-awareness; if they are heroes, it is merely due to circumstance and
not action, for their enemy—weak both in arms and sustenance—has
consistently triumphed over their killer cannons, their Krupp rifles, and
their inexhaustible supplies: “They began to see them as heroic” (365).
To be sure, da Cunha defines himself according to the qualities of the
Shakespearean hero, evinced in a letter to João Luís: “I sometimes agitate
this sinister question mark like Hamlet in the throes of to be or not to be,
and as a Shakespearean hero I let myself be dominated by the most pain-
ful doubts. In any case, it is possible that the letters I have written have
been lost. I will, therefore, heroically insist on the correspondence” (84).
31. “The caatinga, on the other hand, stifles him; it cuts short his view, strikes
him in the face, so to speak, and stuns him, enmeshes him in its spiny
wood, and holds out no compensating attractions. It repulses him with
246 A.S. MADAN
its thorns and prickly leaves, its twigs sharp as lances; and it stretches out
in front of him, for mile on mile, unchanging in its desolate aspect of leaf-
less trees, of dried and twisted boughs, a turbulent maze of vegetation
standing rigidly in space or spreading out sinuously along the ground,
representing, as it would seem, the agonized struggles of a tortured,
writhing flora…” (trans. in Putnam 30).
32. “When, contrary to the cases mentioned, the species are not well
equipped for a victorious reaction, arrangements which are, perhaps, still
more interesting than may be observed. In this case, the plants unite in
an intimate embrace, being transformed into social growths. Not being
able to weather it out in isolation, they discipline themselves, become
gregarious and regimented. To this group belong all the Caesalpinia and
the catingueiras, constituting in those places where they appear 60 per
cent of the desert flora; and then there are the tableland evergreens and
the pipe reeds, shrubby, hollow-stemmed heliotropes, streaked with white
and with flowers that grow in spiked clusters, the latter species being
destined to give its name to the most legendary of villages…” (trans. in
Putnam 33).
33. “These are not to be found in Humboldt’s table of Brazilian social plants,
and it is possible that the first named also grow, isolated, in other cli-
mates; but here they are distinctly social. Their roots, tightly interlaced
beneath the ground, constitute a net to catch the waters and the crum-
bling earth, and, as a result of prolonged effort, they finally form the fer-
tile soil from which they spring, overcoming, through the capillarity of
their inextricable tissues, with their numerous meshes, the insatiable suc-
tion of the strata and the sands. And they do live. ‘Live’ is the word—
for there is, as a matter of fact, a higher significance to be discerned in
the passivity exhibited by this evolved form of vegetable life… (trans. in
Putnam 33).
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ate Novara. London: Saunders, Otley, and Co., 1861–1863.
Uriarte, Javier. “Through an enemy land: On space and (In)visibility in Euclides
da Cunha’s Os sertões.” Revisiting Twentieth Century Wars: New Readings of
Modern Armed Conflicts in Literature and Image Media. Eds. Luiz Gustavo
Vieira et al. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2012: 101–117.
Zea, Leopoldo. The Latin-American Mind. Trans. James H. Abbott & Lowell
Dunham. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1963.
Zeballos, Estanislao Severo. Arbitration Upon a Part of the National Territory of
Misiones Disputed by the United States of Brazil: Argentine Evidence Laid Before
the President of the United States of America. New York: S. Figueroa, 1893.
CHAPTER 6
Hereafter: Off the Grid
Around minute 50 of El país del Diablo, Andrés Di Tella’s award-winning

2007 documentary that retraces Estanislao Zeballos’s mapmaking footsteps
through the Pampa in the months following the Conquista del Desierto,
we meet Daniel Cabral, one of the last living speakers of the Ranquel lan-
guage. He resides in Colonia Emilio Mitre, a territory described as deso-
late, practically inaccessible—off the proverbial grid. Yet the gridlines of the
map play a significant role in the documentary, which features numerous
cartographic references, ranging from a poncho-clad figurine of Zeballos
wielding a map to several hand-drawn maps illustrating this expanse of
land that is, it would seem, still peripheral to modern lines of geography.
Language and land collide messily here as the last linguistic vestiges of the
Ranquel people are banished off the grid into a hamlet that even God will
not approach, for, in Zeballos’s naming of it on the map he ultimately pro-
duces, it is the Devil’s country—“El país del Diablo.”
After Di Tella imagines the eerily quiet scene as it would have been
prior to the state-commissioned ethnocide—bustling with people, with
campfires, with life—we transition frames to Cabral and his account of
unlearning the Ranquel language at an internment camp in Santa Isabel.
The teacher, Señora Rosetti, first attempts to teach him “Mamá” and
“Papá” by asking him how to say the titles in his native tongue. She tells
him he must rid his memory of such words, for no one remains to speak
or to understand them. Standing rigid in his commitment—“Voy a seguir
hablando” [I am going to keep speaking], he affirms over and again—he
is immediately told to bare his legs and kneel on gravel that she orders

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55140-1_6
250 A.S. MADAN
another young boy to sprinkle in front of him. Aside from the c orporeal
punishment and alignment between language (both its learning and
unlearning) and body, what stands out most about Cabral’s interactions
with Señora Rosetti is that, following the parental titles, she transitions to
naming the motherland: she insists on teaching him two very particular
nouns—Argentina and mapa [map]—over and above other words, even
above the Latin characters that might actually enable him to read. The
teacher, he recounts, points to “Argentina” on the blackboard and com-
mands him to read it. Not knowing a lick of Spanish, and having never
even heard the name of the nation-state to which he ostensibly belongs,
he of course remains silent, this while squirming and shifting in pain as
gravel begins to break the skin of his knees. She insists that if he does
not learn the word that day, then she will beat him with an extra-long
wooden ruler that comes to a sharp point. Next word: “mapa” [map].
He cannot read it. Señora Rosetti points and again commands, “Decí
mapa [Say map].” Met with silence, she rips the ruler across Cabral’s
head with such force that blood drips down his face.
*******
So powerfully captured for posterity and given an afterlife with

Di Tella’s camera, Cabral’s account illustrates the sustained impulse across
time and space to use geography and language to discipline the Latin
American nation, be it punitively, didactically, or institutionally. His inter-
change with Señora Rosetti must take place somewhere in the middle of
the twentieth century, somewhere in the middle of the Pampa, yet it sheds
light on the overarching limits of both language and geography as they
emerge as regulated practice in service of national consolidation across the
region. By means of a process of administration and subjectification—the
two main translinguistic needs for imperial education enterprises, accord-
ing to Mary Louis Pratt (2015)—the nation-state becomes mathematized,
reduced, reconstructed, and rendered a totality in a model of everydayness
grounded on a homogenous citizenry.1 Yet in the push toward legibility
and normalization, we see land evolve into territory for select denizens of
the nation. This action is forgotten as contingency transforms into inevita-
bility, and the social process becomes obscured by a technical procedure.
For Señora Rosetti, replacing the Ranquel tongue with Spanish and
recognizing the nation-state’s name alongside the notion of a map
is tantamount to prompting, borrowing Michel de Certeau’s words,
6 HEREAFTER: OFF THE GRID 251
“a way of being in the world to be forgotten” (97).2 She commands

Cabral to forget, but he defies her demands to erase his memory and,
in turn, his people’s way of being. Though she may beat his body, his
language and culture are embodied in his heart, steadfast and enduring:
“No voy a olvidar jamás porque llevo un recuerdo muy grande como una
marca dentro de mi corazón, de mi gente” [I am never going to forget
because I carry a very big memory as a mark of my people inside my heart].
He thus imagines and realizes another possibility that does not erase the
potentiality of his people—that does not deny their futuricity—indeed,
the fundamental consequence of colonialism, as spelled out by David
Lloyd (2008) in his study on the Irish colonial context. This new hereaf-
ter is anchored upon hearing the Ranquel language echoed in the voices
of future generations, and the Spanish language thus has an “imperial
afterlife,” following Pratt, as an (ex)-imperial language (351). We see this
didactic project as Di Tella moves on to a schoolhouse scene in which
Cabral teaches a dozen or so Ranquel adolescents their language, previ-
ously oral but now a written coda that represents their birthright, their
culture, their history. Nothing short of a reincarnation, the students
inject elements of traditional life back into their nearly expired heritage,
not, as Lloyd might describe it, as “melancholy survivals,” but rather as
an afterlife that transforms rather than maintains an old practice, a revival
that changes rather than recovers (29).
Di Tella’s camera does much the same as it represents the land not
only through the Humboldtian metaphor of water nor as mere codified
landscape, but rather as the site of genocide.
In so doing he revives the subjects who populated the Pampa
and suggests that, contrary to popular belief and despite (and more
likely, because of) his architectural role in the Conquista del Desierto,
Estanislao Zeballos similarly sought an afterlife for Argentina’s indig-
enous inhabitants by writing them into posterity, thereby granting them
a future that lies “athwart modernity” (Lloyd 29). In a sense, Di Tella
reincarnates Zeballos, whose contradictory project is something of a dia-
lectical tug-of-war, the state of being that most explicitly seems to govern
the figures of this study as they grapple with the central tension nourish-
ing national consolidation across the hemisphere: that of embracing or
erasing the autochthonous primitivism that distinguishes the continent
from Europe; indeed, that singular quality that Sarmiento most famously
deems “barbarism.” I have suggested that these individual próceres
sought national unification by means of geographical discourse—that
252 A.S. MADAN
is, by appealing to both geography and literature in what ultimately

amounts to a primitive language that appeals to the very barbarism they
strive to extinguish: the discipline and its cultural manifestation and insti-
tutionalization materialize out of a very specific project wherein land and
letters unify and thereby override the relations between knowledge and
conquest consecrated with the Treaty of Tordesillas. Vis-à-vis the territo-
rial and literary reclamation, the geographical discourse that distinguishes
the subjects of this study from their sources of authorization prompts
their narratives’ local and global canonization and thereby proves doubly
functional: by discursively creating—rather than reflecting—a spatial real-
ity, the genre lends its corresponding nation-states a cohesive, internal
definition that, in turn, prompts their entry into the international com-
modity market. Latin America, from this vantage point, appears ripe for
both extraction and settlement, which, in turn, will allow it to settle into
its modernized self.3
Yet, in a peripatetic reversal that prompts a new understanding of the
challenges of modernity, the abuse upon the land amounts to a sort of
violation that is untenable, unsustainable; we see this peripety animated
as various geographical institutions across the continent make the tran-
sition from extraction to conservation, as, in Fredric Jameson’s words,
“what looked like built-in superiorities suddenly prove to set the most
ironclad limits on […] future development” (qtd. in Tally 7).4 Put
another way, pillaging the land by means of territorial demarcation
becomes, over time, less attractive (and less nationalistic) than protect-
ing it, especially in light of transnational companies seeking to do the
same. We thus see manifest a unique brand of social ecology fitted to the
parameters not of the center but rather of the periphery, and, therefore,
wholly unlike what we might see in territories never before colonized.5
Herein lies the (initial) outcome for the first component of the formula
that makes of cultural geography a discipline—that is, the interrelations
between land and subject (Carter 1964).
Before complicating this outcome with the current global ecologi-
cal crisis, let us consider the human subject that brings the culture into
most conceptualizations of cultural geography and spatial studies. If we
go past the geocentric and to the egocentric, as Robert Tally (2014) sug-
gests in his extension of Bertrand Westphal’s geocriticism, then here,
too, we experience peripeteia. In Latin American geographical discourse,
form and content unite in a vindication of a Vichean past, but that uni-
fication proves theoretical and never practical, as many of the region’s
indigenous inhabitants continue to live isolated, subalternized, and ban-

ished, off the grid and therefore outside of Western conceptualizations
of modernity, this despite intergenerational attempts to inculcate in them
a heavy-handed nationalism undergirded by didactic projects of know-
ing land and language à la Señora Rosetti. Poetics thus failed: the figures
of this study could not sustain a project of consolidation by controlling,
through aesthetics, the plural subjectivities within their national territo-
ries. This failure is valuable if only for the paradoxes to which it leads
us. The possibilities of geographical discourse are ample, hemispheric,
global, for, across the seas and through the centuries, territorial knowl-
edge proves essential to maintaining hegemony. In geography the great
próceres locate the cure to their respective nations’ vulnerabilities: know-
ing the terrain is likened to protection from both internal and external
forces. Yet it is just this protective quality that is both the discipline’s
greatest possibility and its most threatening limitation; the twofold
defense system might indeed segue into economic stability and a certain
notion of social progress for a select stratum of the population, but at the
expense of the alterity that makes of Latin American space a place.
This valorization of alterity is, ultimately, why the conjugation of spa-
tial studies and fin-de-siècle Latin American literature is such a unique
force field. In this comparative space and time we engage with two tiers
of otherness. We see, firstly, the difference of the emergent nation-states
as the elite intellectuals construct anti-imperial geographies—indeed,
the foundational fictions—that set, in the case of this study, two nations
and two languages apart from their colonizers both literally and literar-
ily. Secondly, we encounter the internal Other, embodied in the indig-
enous inhabitants whose primitive energy nourishes and complicates
these literary cartographies, allowing them to depart from dominant and
Eurocentric geographical knowledges. Such a departure results in heter-
ogeneous human geographies in spite of (and in response to) Occidental
geographies grounded on the dictum of divide and dispossess—but not,
to be sure, without mimetically reproducing the same schema and enact-
ing it upon other bodies.
With the indigenous Other as our guiding light, then, we might
look beyond—as Sahar Amaer and Laura Doyle (2015) have urged—
the historical and geographical coordinates of “Western modernity” in
a paradigmatic rethinking that is post-Eurocentric. I have maintained
throughout this book that Latin America’s national consolidation cannot
be fully understood without considering the ways in which geography
254 A.S. MADAN
propelled both aesthetics and politics across the continent; indeed, the
geographical institutes were incongruously the very locus of enunciation
for scientific work that returned to the humanistic origins of geography,
to writing the earth as philosophical speculation rather than simple privi-
leging of empirical data. This return to humanism is, in effect, a return
to Europe—to Strabo and the Greeks. However, it is also a return to
the primitive, to the autochthonous, to the local, both linguistically
and practically, thereby upending and reorienting the critical axes of
disciplinary geography by yet one more degree. While the first local
(if Eurocentric) geographies might well belong to the figures of this
study, the original geographical knowledge of the Americas is nothing
if not Amerindian. The statesmen examined here necessarily and presci-
ently nod a head toward the baqueano’s territorial expertise as one to
contend with and learn from, this despite its premodern origins; in both
the geographical and the linguistic, they challenge the periodizing divi-
sions between modern and premodern, while instantiating that bifur-
cation by means of literary writing. They politicize that contradictory
juncture by creating a new national discourse that writes alongside and
against the very subjects who, two centuries later, have not quit engaging
in everyday political and historical praxis to defend their rights, to restage
and resurge alternative epistemologies and memory practices.
I will thus double back to where I began this chapter, with Andrés Di
Tella’s documentary and its revival of a divergent modernity, a term I
borrow from Julio Ramos (2001). By locating its legitimacy in European
modes and models, Latin America’s turn-of-the-century transculturated
geographical discourse sought to foster linguistic, territorial, and politi-
cal unification and transcendence for the newly independent and there-
fore vulnerable nation-states; the narratives that compose my archive
stake claim to both land and letters. A similar appropriation and reter-
ritorialization are happening in neoliberal Latin America, and Di Tella’s
camera captures just one example as the orality of the Ranquel lan-
guage becomes codified in Latin characters in Daniel Cabral’s student
notebooks. Within the entanglement of Spanish and Ranquel, we see
confirmed Mary Louise Pratt’s contention that “[e]xtinguishing exist-
ing languages—that is, interrupting their day-to-day transmission from
older to younger speakers—takes even more time and more aggression,
and the process is often incomplete, not least because some communi-
ties fiercely resist it” (351). As Cabral’s speech patterns morph from a
localized dialect to a transregional, transgenerational, and transliterated
language, we see Latin America’s internal Other embracing the letrado’s

paradigm of rationality, wherein writing and grammar point to a will
to reason; indeed, to a will to resistance. Yet embracing and reproduc-
ing foreign models unfolds here not only as resistance but as an after-
life—a hereafter—that cannot be contained within or restricted by Latin
America’s lines of geography. If the geographical and literary projects
of the liberal nineteenth century were about Cartesian rationalization—
about imposing an order upon América’s “barbarism” —then pro-
jects like Di Tella’s are the first steps toward peripatetically reversing
that model by questioning the imposition of “civilization” on América,
which, since the encounter and until the present day, has viewed the
land and its original subjects only through the dual lenses of extraction
and exploitation. By revisiting Estanislao Zeballos and reframing the
Conquista del Desierto, Di Tella participates in a metonymic recasting
of the original Conquest, thereby helping to rewrite piecemeal the over-
arching narrative and, at least in theory, resuscitate its human and non-
human victims. The closing scene of the documentary shows, in fact, a
lengthy series of images from renowned Argentine photographer José
Depetris, who captures survivors’ faces in something of a contestation to
the nameless skulls appearing at the end of the dark labyrinth of hall-
ways in the basement of the Museo de Ciencia; the images revive a name
and an identity, while the skulls are identified by nothing but a number,
illustrating, in a sense, yet another sort of empiricism that extinguishes
any notion of the Self. Di Tella hypothesizes that Zeballos’s return to El
País del Diablo and his subsequent literary production constituted a con-
certed effort to reconcile his part in the scientific expedition-cum-ethno-
cide, thereby returning the humanity to what was ultimately the epitome
of the inhumane. This is indeed precisely what Di Tella himself aims to
do: “Zeballos… una especie de documentalista. Como yo” [Zeballos… a
sort of documentarian. Like me], we hear him quietly narrate, his voiceo-
ver thoughtful, matter-of-fact, yet almost incredulous at admitting any
likeness to the mastermind of state-sponsored genocide (Di Tella, El
país del diablo).
Such diverse cultural revivals abound across contemporary Latin
America, whether from external or internal actors or some combina-
tion thereof, be it Mapuche literature in Chile (e.g., Elicura Chihuailaf,
Leonel Lienlaf, and Eliana Pulquillanca), oralituras and indigenous liter-
ature in Colombia (e.g., Fredy Chikangana and Hugo Jamioy), Ye’kuana
oral narratives transcribed in Southern Venezuela (e.g., the Watunna
256 A.S. MADAN
origins tale translated into Spanish by Marc de Civrieux and into English
by David Guss), ethnographic inquiries of Amerindian conceptualiza-
tions of emotion (e.g., Manuel Gutiérrez Estévez and Alexandre Surallés’
edited collection, Retórica de los sentimientos: etnografías amerindias), or
endeavors less literary and more legal (e.g., the Ecuadorian and Bolivian
constitutions of, respectively, 2008 and 2009, which draw from the
Amerindian cosmovision to normalize conservation and grant subjec-
tivity to nature’s non-human components). Even Hollywood actors are
using their pulpit of celebrity to honor the exploitation of first nations,
their histories, and their lands—Leonardo DiCaprio, for instance, in his
2016 Golden Globe acceptance speech for Best Actor in The Revenant
(2015), a film committed to capturing another variant of the earth’s
wildness and the human subject’s place in such a wilderness. We are in
the epoch of acknowledging our own complicity rather than pointing
fingers, of saying, as Sebastião Salgado does in Salt of the Earth (2016),
that we humans are animals, and terrible animals at that.
But why is reclaiming this social memory necessary? Why are reclama-
tions happening more than ever? And what do these examples have in
common?
Each of these continental efforts signals the practical need to look
elsewhere, to post-Eurocentric paradigms, to overcome and identify
an exit strategy for the multiple crises spawned by global capitalism,
chief among them the ecological. They return to the human, subjec-
tive dimension of place, which has, in Eric Prieto’s words, “attracted
the attention of those who worry about the transformations that
modernity (and a fortiori postmodernity) have wrought on our built
and natural environments and the consequences of these transforma-
tions for the ways in which we relate to the world around us” (15). In
the realm of theory, Latin Americanists such as Idelber Avelar (2014),
Malcolm McNee (2014), and Juan Duchesne Winter (2015) explain
that Western notions of “development” have subsisted on a geographi-
cally enabled extractivism that has reached its limits in this new era of the
Anthropocene, a term coined by geologists to denote Homo sapiens’ role
as geological agents with the power to put ourselves and most other spe-
cies into extinction (Chakrabarty 209). Capturing the dire consequences
of this newfound agency, Avelar warns that “we must think outside the
anthropocentric paradigm, or pretty soon we will not be thinking any-
more” (Avelar 111).
Thinking outside the box, here, is a return to the primitive, to

Amerindian knowledge, which has in recent years been most famously
recapitulated and condensed in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s notion of
“Amerindian perspectivism,” a hemispheric upending of Western rela-
tions between nature and culture that posits a world in which everything
is human and thus the “exclusivity of the human species as the only sub-
ject of rights […] must be questioned” (Avelar 117). Also drawing on
Viveiros de Castro, Duchesne proposes that the alternative to anthro-
pocentrism implies a transformation in the way we perceive human
and non-human relations at the cosmic level, in what amounts to a
“cosmopolítica” [cosmopolitics]—in other words, a way of existing that
goes beyond society or exclusively human culture and into the realm of
“mixed, hybrid collectivities in which animals, plants, microorganisms,
minerals, chemical, geological, atmospheric, astronomic entities; human
artifacts, systems of signs and languages, human persons, ideas, con-
cepts, affects, interact on the same plane of agency” (274). This nominal
return to Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos is, at bottom, revealing: at
least implicitly, Latin American theory is returning to and drawing upon
Humboldt’s intrigue with Amerindian thought.
As for the knowledge of the Ranquel adolescents in Daniel Cabral’s
classroom, Di Tella illuminates just one manifestation of an Amerindian
hybrid existence wherein human and animal unite on a continuum
embodied and historicized in each individual’s name: Trulé Piuqué
(Deer’s Heart); Cal Vupal (Blue Star); Teumú Piuqué (Lion’s Heart).
Countenanced with the tale of Cacique Mariano Rosa’s skull—a his-
tory that the students have internalized and recount on Di Tella’s
prompting—these names are anything but an artifact of the autochtho-
nous lining the shelves of the Museo de Buenos Aires: they are flesh
and blood, and they are the next generation. I close with this notion,
then, of aspiring to interact and exist “on the same plan of agency,” for
no amount of aesthetics or politics has sufficed thus far to sustain any
true egalitarian society in Latin America, where the geographical has
divvied up all sentient beings into different planes, some on and others
off the grid. Indeed, lines of geography have only diced this vast terri-
tory into more controlled pieces of difference ready for extraction and
exploitation, proving time and again that, in William Vollman’s words,
“[d]elineation is the merest, absurdist fiction, yet delineation engenders
control” (44, emphasis in original). To recognize this fiction and to sur-
mount its power are to acknowledge that we have in fact lost control
258 A.S. MADAN
in the current ecological tailspin. Amerindian animistic thought might

indeed be one way to swim up and out of this vortex, for it maintains
that we humanoids are the most inhumane of all beings and, as such,
it is those different beings—those who are not Homo sapiens—who
ultimately teach us to be humans. Rethinking Sarmiento’s original dia-
lectic through this post-Eurocentric perspective means that barbarism
must win if we are to have a hereafter that is compatible with modern
capitalist civilization.
Notes
1. In her article “Language and the Afterlives of Empire,” Pratt interrogates
imperial educational enterprises to shed light on the two main translinguis-
tic needs of administration and subjectification, wherein the former refers
to managing and organizing economic extraction through various judicial
processes and hierarchies of command and the latter to producing “impe-
rial subjects by organizing knowledge, identities, and desires through
schooling and religious indoctrination” (352–433).
2. We a similar threat unfold in Lucio Mansilla’s Una excursión a los indios
ranqueles (1870), further illustrating the drama of erasure that is at the
heart of Argentina’s imagined history. Faced with the Ranqueles’ immi-
nent rebellion, Coronel Mansilla declares, “si ustedes no me tratasen a
mí y a los que me acompañan con todo respeto y consideración, si no me
dejasen volver o me matases, día más día menos, vendría un ejército que
los pasaría a todos por el filo de la espada, por traidores; y en estas pampas
inmensas, en estos bosques solitarios, no quedarían ni recuerdos, ni ves-
tigio de que ustedes vivieron en ellos” (308). For Mansilla, the only way to
quash the rebellion and coerce their submission is to propose both real and
symbolic annihilation, a notion that Carlos Abreu Mendoza (forthcoming,
Chasqui) observes in his article about Juan José Saer’s El entenado (1983),
which he reads as a melancholic lament prompted by the discursive erasure
of indigenous subjects populations.
3. See Laura Benton’s A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in
European Empire, 1400–1900 (Cambridge UP 2009) for a fascinating
examination of how we might conceive of a spatial rendering of globali-
zation wherein “[t]he conceptualization of the global was made possible
by representations of distant territories as knowable spaces, while the tran-
scendence of space by market forces assumes at least a logical progression
from exploration to conquest, to integration, and to exploitation” (13).
This logical progression happens within the global advance of empire, of
course, but it can be superimposed upon the internal conquests that take
place across fin-de-siècle Latin America.
4. I am indebted here to Robert Tally’s essay on “Geocriticism in the Middle

of Things: Place, Peripeteia, and the Prospects of Comparative Literature”
(6–15).
5. By closely reading Euclides da Cunha’s collection of essays A margem da
historia, I flesh out these ideas further in “Mapmaking, Rubbertapping:
Cartography and Social Ecology in Euclides da Cunha’s The Amazon:
Land without History” (2014).
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Index
A Avelar, Idelber, 256

Abram, David, 43–44 Azaryahu, Maz, 10
Acosta, Alberto, 39, 44
Agassiz, Louis, 3, 101
Akerman, James R., 58, 61 B
Alberdi, Juan Batista, 99 Babini, José, 84
Aldao, Carlos A., 149 Bacon, Francis, 40
Allen, Paula Gunn, 41 Balderston, Daniel, 178n2
Alonso, Carlos, 9, 23 Balmaceda, Raúl C. Rey, 138
Alonso, Lisandro Bancroft, George, 14
Jauja, 20 Baqueano, the, 8, 45, 77, 79, 117, 254
Alves, João Luís, 197 Barbarism, 6, 31, 45, 65, 79, 83, 94,
Amaer, Sahar, 253 97, 98, 105, 107, 114, 117, 131,
Amante, Adriana, 80 161, 189, 221, 234, 251, 255. See
American Geographical Society, the, also Primitivism; Premodern, the
144–145 Barcia, Andrés González de, 58–59
Amerindian perspectivism, 42, 257. See Baron Rio Branco, 8, 17, 187, 191
also Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo Battle of Caseros, the, 82
Andermann, Jens, 136, 157, 171, Battle of Junín, the, 1, 20
178n2, 179n4, 239n5 Benton, Laura, 4, 58, 159, 258n3
Anderson, Benedict, 4 Berg, Carlos, 141–142
Anthropocene, the, 41 Bernal, Luz Fernanda Azuela, 53
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 25n13 Bernucci, Leopoldo M., 239n2
Armory, Frederic, 195 Bhabha, Homi, 11, 25n13
Arredondo, Marcos, 8, 17, 130, Bigg-Wither, Thomas P., 213
149–153, 155
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 281

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55140-1
282 Index
Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Cartesianism, 44, 193

Madrid, 5, 15. See also Sociedad Cartography, 4, 30, 155, 171, 204,
Geográfica de Madrid 206, 240n9. See also Cartesianism;
Boletín del Instituto Geográfico Geographical discourse;
Argentina, 7, 16, 107, 129–130, Geography; Positivism; Science
138–139, 148. See also Instituto and da Cunha, 6–9, 17, 39, 63, 65,
Geográfico Argentino, Estanislao 130, 230
Zeballos and geocriticism, 13, 29
Bolívar, Simón, 1, 4, 8, 20, 51, 60, and Humboldt, 41, 68
62–63, 81, 161 and modern imperialism, 4, 13, 31,
Bolivian constitution of 2009, 256 38–39, 45, 57, 60, 73n20
Borges, Jorge Luis, 106, 155, 244n26 and reductionism, 13
Botting, Douglas, 69n3 and Sarmiento, 72n20, 80–84
Brickhouse, Anna, 23n7 and spatial studies, 9
Buckle, Henry Thomas, 5, 6, 17, and Strabo, 63
64, 190, 218, 220, 222–223, and the Spanish empire, 162
225–226 and Zeballos, 127, 131, 137–138,
Buenaño, Alexandre, 187 140–142, 149, 162
Buen Vivir, 45 Casa de Contratación, the, 158
Buffon, Comte de, 70n10 Castillo, Horacio, 121n19
Bunkley, Allison Williams, 114, Castillo, Luisa V de, 32
120n13 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 256
Burmeister, Karl Hermann, 6, 64, Chihuailaf, Elicura, 255
83–84, 89, 141 Chikangana, Fredy, 255
Bushell, Sally, 10 Cicerchia, Ricardo, 90
Cleveland, Grover, 191
Cocola, Jim, 24n8
C Codazzi, Agustín, 5, 6, 64, 145
Caatingas, the, 204, 207, 210, Colón, Cristobal, 3
231–233 Columba, Ramón, 127
Cabot, Juan, 146 Columbus, Christopher, 49, 208, 215
Cabot, Sebastián, 146–147 Commercial museums, 52, 164–165.
Caldas, Francisco José de, 40 See also Geographical institutes
Campobassi, José S., 83 Comte, Auguste, 194–195, 197
Campos, Rafael Torres, 61 Conquista del Desierto, the, 6, 21–22,
Candido, Antonio, 108, 110, 199 135, 249, 251, 255
Cañizares- Esguerra, Jorge, 40, 58 Conselheiro, Antonio, 189
Capel, Horacio, 60–61, 159, 181n13 Constant, Benjamin, 195–196
Capitalism, 4, 31, 45, 57, 256. See Cortés, Hernán, 3
also Geography; Imperialism; Cosmopolitics, 257
Modernity; New World, the Costa, João Cruz, 194, 196
Capitalocene, the, 41, 47
Index 283
Costa, Joaquín, 5, 13, 17, 130–131, De Assis, Machado, 237

151 De Certeau, Michel, 153, 250
and commerce, 154, 158–161, De E. Taunay, Alfonso, 201
163–164 De Holanda, Sérgio Buarque, 199
and the Sociedad Geográfica de Deleuze, Gilles, 29
Madrid, 158 De Mattos, Ilmar Rohloff, 202
on Spanish backwardness, 162 De Moussy, Martin, 146
Costa Lima, Luiz, 22n4, 68 Departamento Topográfico Nacional,
Council of the Indies, the, 158 the, 85
Craib, Raymond, 15, 50, 53, 85, 154, Depetris, José, 255
171, 196 Derby, Orville, 17, 190, 200, 213
Creative destruction, 39, 41, 44, 84. Derrida, Jacques, 144
See also Capitalism; Extractivism De Vries, Scott M., 118n4
Creoles, the, 1 Díez, Beatriz S., 179n3
Cultural studies, 14. See also Di Tella, Andrés
Ecocriticism; Geocriticism; Spatial El país del Diablo, 22, 249, 255
studies Dom Pedro II, 195
and ecocriticism, 25n16 Donaghue, Denis, 10
geocentered, 14 Doyle, Laura, 253
and geography, 23n7 Driver, Felix, 4
hemispheric, 15 Duchesne Winter, Juan, 256
D E
Da Cunha, Euclides, 6, 14, 17, 39, 63, Earth-writing, 7, 13–15, 20, 33,
65, 205 37, 139–140, 158, 243n19.
and América, 62 See also Geographical discourse,
and geographical institutions, 7, 252 Geography
and positivism, 190, 193–195 Eclecticism, 193
and the “Question de Misiones", Ecocriticism, 25n16, 38
191 Ecuadorian constitution of 2008, 256
literary tendency of, 188–189 Edney, Matthew, 4, 61
mapping of the Amazonian region Egypt, 61
by, 187–188 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 149
Os sertões, 6, 10, 17–18, 79, 175, Empiricism, 32, 35–36, 55, 71n12,
188–189, 193, 197–199, 201– 118, 197, 255. See also Positivism;
204, 206–209, 211, 213–214, Science
218, 220, 226 Engels, Friedrich, 132
revision of Humboldt by, 209, 211, England, 160–161
213, 215, 230–231 English Royal Geographic Society,
Da Silva, Lafayette Caetano, 192 the, 82
De Andrade, Osvaldo, 230
284 Index
Enlightenment, the, 7, 60, 193, 194, Garfield, Simon, 67, 71n14

211 Garibotto, Verónica, 25n15
Environmentalism, 15, 31, 38, 44 Garro, Cristóbal Ricardo, 78, 85
Epistemology, 40. See also Gaucho, the, 66, 68, 79, 98–99,
Cartesianism; Eclecticism; 109–111, 114
Enlightenment, the; Empiricism; Generation of ’98, the, 150–151
Positivism; Science; Sensualism Geocriticism, 9, 252
Amerindian, 40, 42 and literary form, 9
Argentine, 133, 136–137, 149 and minor discourses, 12
Occidental, 40, 41 and ontology, 10
of Spanish cosmography, 157 formation of, 10, 16, 30
of the Global North, 205 Geographical discourse, 5, 6, 16, 46.
Eratosthenes, 54, 67 See also Earth-writing
Eschwege, Wilhelm Ludwig von, 17, and Bolívar, 60
190, 214 and da Cunha, 175, 177, 187,
Estévez, Manuel Gutiérrez, 256 189–190, 192, 196–204, 217,
Ette, Ottmar, 29, 47, 49, 70n10 219, 225
Extractivism, 13, 39, 256 and Sarmiento, 14, 65–66, 68, 77,
83, 86, 93, 98–101, 104, 110,
119n11
F and Zeballos, 9, 87, 107, 127,
Falconer, W., 24n12 129–132, 136, 138, 140–141,
Faria Fernandes, Tabatha de, 22n4 143, 146–147, 151, 167
Felice, Carlos, 142 as regulated practice, 22
Fernandes, Raúl C. Gouveia, 198 contemporary consequences of, 9,
Fifth International Geographic 60, 154, 159, 194, 255
Congress, the, 179n5 critical reorientation of, 8
Floría, Pedro Navarro, 178n2 Humboldtian origins of, 5, 15, 20,
Fonseca, Deodoro, 195 22, 32, 38, 42, 47, 64, 68n1
Fontana, Patricio, 180n8 transculturation of, 64, 72n20, 215,
Foote, Kenneth, 10 229–230
Foster, Georg, 69n1 and “word-pictures", 19
Foucault, Michel, 40, 215 Geographic institutes, 7, 12, 17,
Foundational fictions, 4, 253 161, 163, 200, 254. See also
French, Jennifer, 2 American Geographical Society,
Fréret, Nicolas, 40 the; Departamento Topográfico
Freyre, Gilberto, 199, 213, 238 Nacional, the; English Royal
Geographic Society, the; Fifth
International Geographic
G Congress, the; the Instituto
Gallegos, Rómulo, 15 Geográfico Argentino; Instituto
Gárate, Miriam V., 22n4 Geográfico e Histórico Brasileiro;
Index 285
Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Görbert, Johannes, 69n1

Brasileiro; Instituto Histórico- Graczyk, Annette, 69n1
Geográfico del Río de la Plata; Grandmontagne, Francisco, 150–151,
Instituto Nacional de Geografía 157
y Estadística; Joint Commission Guattari, Felix, 29
for the Reconnaissance of Gudynas, Eduardo, 45
the Upper Purús; Sociedad Guerra, Ciro
Científica Argentina; Sociedad Embrace of the Serpent, 21
de Geografía Comercial, the; Guimarães, Leandro Belinaso, 239n2
Sociedad Geográfica Española; Guimarães, Manoel Luis Lima
Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid; Salgado, 201
Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía
y Estadística; Societé de
Geographie, the H
Geography, 2–4, 14–17, 81, 222, Haberly, David T., 90
228, 230, 235–236. See also Harisse, Henry, 5, 146
Capitalism; Cartography; Earth- Harley, Brian, 13
writing; Geographic insti- Harley, J.B., 49, 51, 71n17, 72n19,
tutes; Imperialism; Humboldt; 156
Modernity; Strabo Hartshorne, Richard, 79, 81, 156, 236
and didacticism, 16 Harvey, David, 8, 45, 81
and empire, 4, 5, 30, 50, 54, 58–59, Hecht, Susana B., 188, 240n10,
61–62, 82 242n19
and literature, 4–14, 18, 20, 63–65, Heffernan, Mike, 145
93, 99, 110, 130, 140, 148 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 190,
and positivism, 190 221
and Spanish cosmography, 157 and da Cunha, 206, 214, 216,
and the land/inhabitant relation, 79 240n9
cultural, 32, 252 and Grandmontagne, 150
institutionalization of, 8, 14, 78–79, and Sarmiento, 110
81, 84–85, 90, 110, 130, 150, and the New World, 70n10
157, 160, 164, 171, 190, 201, and Zeballos, 127, 141, 166
252 Helferich, Gerard, 69n3
Strabonic origins of, 54, 63 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 122n22
Globalization, 68, 258n3 Herzog, Tamar, 24n11
Godlewka, Anne, 32, 54 Hiller, Anne E., 118n4
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 2, 30, Hipparchus, 54, 56
40 Hoeg, Jerry, 25n16
Goetzmann, William, 69n2 Holanda, Lourival, 22n4
González Echevarría, Roberto, 5, 9, Homer, 18, 54
22n4, 78–79, 81, 110, 215, 238 Hsu, Hsuan L., 24n8
Myth and Archive, 78 Hudson, Brian J., 32
286 Index
Humanism, 8, 30, 34, 81, 167, 254 and Bolívar, 60, 62

Humboldt, Alexander von, 2, 3, 5–7, and geographical knowledge, 8
9, 11, 13, 15–17, 19, 23–24, and Humboldt, 20, 36, 37, 39, 40,
29–31, 56–57, 63, 65–66, 68, 43, 55, 69, 70n6, 70n10
70n6, 145, 190, 209, 241n11 and Sarmiento, 99, 107
and América, 62 and Zeballos, 107, 127, 155, 159,
and anthropocentrism, 41–43 220
and Elisée Reclus, 2–3 knowledges of, 7, 118n1
and error, 35, 37–38, 49 Instituto Geográfico Argentino, the,
and geographical discourse, 5, 20, 16, 53, 77, 84, 87, 106, 129, 137
50 Instituto Geográfico e Histórico
and Gudynas, 45 Brasileiro, 192
and institutions, 52 Instituto Histórico e Geográfico
and orality, 44, 54 Brasileiro, 53
and Simón Bolívar, 51, 62 Instituto Histórico-Geográfico del Río
and Strabo, 44, 53–56 de la Plata, 87
and transculturation, 64 Instituto Nacional de Geografía y
Aspects of Nature, 31 Estadística, 87
Cosmos, 11, 19, 31–37, 46, 52, 55
Examen Critique, 49
legacy of, 33, 64, 202 J
on fluvial networks, 29 Jagunço, the, 66, 68, 189, 205–208,
Personal Narrative, 32–33, 41–43, 212, 229
45, 95 Jameson, Fredric, 68, 252
Physical Tableau of the Canary James, Preson, 81
Islands, 49 Jamioy, Hugo, 255
Political Essay on the Kingdom of Jenkins, Alice, 38
New Spain, 15, 59, 77 Jitrik, Noé, 80
studies of, 12, 38 Johnson, Adriana Michéle Campos,
Views of the Cordilleras, 70 239n3
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 41 Joint Commission for the
Reconnaissance of the Upper
Purús, 187
I José Paranhos, Baron of Rio Branco See
Identity politics, 8 Baron Rio Branco
Imperialism, 4, 13, 31, 38, 39, 45, 57, Júnior, José Isodoro Martins, 174
60, 73n20
Iñárritu, Alejandro González
The Revenant, 21, 256 K
Indexicality, 52, 70n9 Kant, Immanuel, 43
Indigenous, 258 Katra, William H., 122n22
Indigenous subjects, 21, 30, 70, Kenosian, David, 43
71n17, 72n18, 72n20, 118, Knowledge/conquest dialectic, the,
251–253, 255, 258n2 12, 39, 83
Index 287
Kutsinzki, Vera M., 31, 37, 47, 70n10 Mendoza, Carlos Abreu, 244n27,
258n2
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 44
L Millán, Elizabeth, 6, 32
Lacoste, Pablo, 135 Millionth Map of Hispanic America,
Lafer, Celso, 187 the, 144–145
Latin American studies, 32 Miscegenation, 215, 229
Leask, Nigel, 68n1 Modernity, 132, 201, 205, 251–254,
Lefebvre, Henri, 12, 156, 211 256
Leguizamón, Martiniano, 147–148 and extractivism, 39
Lemos, Miguel, 195 and modern technologies, 22
Lestringant, Frank, 147 Humboldt’s paradigm of, 29, 43,
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 144 45, 60
Liais, Emmanuel, 196 post-Eurocentric rethinking of, 253
Lienlaf, Leonel, 255 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 20
Lima, Luiz Costa, 23, 68, 240n6 Moneta, Pompeyo, 77, 85
Lipp, Solomon, 79 Montaldo, Graciela, 9, 90
Lisbon, 46, 48 Montt, Manuel, 106
Llanos, the, 112, 113, 124n28 Moore, Jason W., 41, 47
Lloyd, David, 251 Moreno, Carlos, 118n3
Lobo, Pelágio Alvarez, 239n4 Moreno, Francisco P., 84
Loefgren, Albert, 200 Moretti, Franco, 10
Lorentz, Paul, 89 Atlas of the European Novel,
Lund, Joshua, 108 1800–1900, 10
Moslund, Sten Pultz, 11
Mundy, Barbara, 73n20
M Muñiz, Francisco Javier, 119n10
Madan, Aarti S., 239n2 Mutis, José Celestino, 40
Madrid, 46, 48, 61, 89, 160
Maher, Susan Naramore, 25n14
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 72n20, 229 N
Mansilla, Lucio, 258n2 Napoloenic campaigns, the, 53
Marcone, Jorge, 5, 39 Napp, Richard, 90, 102
Martin, Geoffrey, 3 Nationalism, 99, 102, 115, 170, 175,
Martins, Charles Frederic, 3 189, 215, 253
Martius, Carl Friedrich Philip von, 17 and maps, 59
Marx, Karl, 41 and the gaucho, 94
Mayhew, Robert John, 82 the discourse of, 14, 159
McNee, Malcolm, 256 Neocolonialism, 164, 190
Medina, José Toribio, 142–143 Neoliberalism, 21, 254
Mendes, Cândido, 240n9 New World, the, 3, 30, 57–59, 69n1,
Mendes, Raimundo Teixeira, 195 70n10, 131, 140, 145, 158
and the Old World, 6, 7, 140, 157
288 Index
Nicolau, Juan Carlos, 82 Primitivism, 13, 35, 251

Nouzeilles, Gabriela, 9 Ptolemy, 24n12, 56
Novela de la tierra, 9 Pulquillanca, Eliana, 255
O Q
Old World, the, 6, 7, 16, 117, 157, Quiroga, Horacio, 15
168
Olmedo, José Joaquín, 1–3, 20, 62,
105 R
Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, 53 Raimondi, Antonio, 144, 145
Ortiz, Fernando, 64, 72n20, 229–230 Rama, Ángel, 64, 72n20
Otherness, 12, 253 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 73n20
Ramírez Márquez, Alister, 5
Ramos, Julio, 79, 254
P Rancière, Jacques, 86
Padrón, Ricardo, 72n17, 157–158 Rangel, Alberto, 199–201
Palacio, Germán, 118n4 Rangelova, Radost, 24n7
Panofsky, Erwin, 24n9 Reclus, Elisée, 2–5, 20
Pearson, Alastair, 145 Regeneración, the, 159, 162
Peixoto, Floriano, 195 Regionalismo, 9
Peláez, Ricardo R., 85, 89 Renaissance, the, 157
Pérez Rosales, Vicente, 8, 99 Revista de geografía comercial,
Piglia, Ricardo, 79, 81, 106 159–160, 163, 166
Pissis, Aimie, 146 Revista do Instituto Histórico e
Place-names, 48–50, 58, 59, 87 Geográfico de São Paulo, 239n4
Platt, Raye Roberts, 144 Rhoden, Laura Barbas, 25n16
Plural subjectivities, 8, 9, 14, 22, 130, Risco, Eduardo Barredo, 53
151, 156, 238, 253 Ritter, Carl, 32
Poetics, 9, 64, 68, 79, 81, 110–111, Rivera, José Eustacio, 15, 236
158, 253 Rivera-Barnes, Beatriz, 25n16
Portuondo, María, 157–159 Roca, Julio, 135–137
Positivism, 55, 71, 161, 190, 193– Rodenas, Adriana Méndez, 69n1,
197, 199 69n5
Post-Eurocentrism, 14, 45, 253, 256, Rodríguez, Fermín, 118n2, 178n2,
258 179n4
Postmodernity, 256 Rogers, Charlotte, 9
Poulantazas, Nicos, 156 Roman, Claudia, 180n8
Pratt, Mary Louise, 5, 15, 32, 39, Romanticism, 30, 32
70n10, 72n20, 90, 250, 251 Rosales, Vicente Pérez, 79, 101–102
Premodern, the, 31, 44, 63, 254 Rosas, Juan Manuel, 82, 94, 122
Prieto, Eric, 90, 256 Royal Geographic Society, the, 53
Index 289
Rupke, Nicolaas, 69n3 revision of Humboldt by, 13,

Ryan, Marie-Laure, 10 62–64, 93, 95, 101, 106, 107
Schilling, Derek, 9
Schulz, Guillermo, 118n6
S Schwarcz, Lilia, 200
Sachs, Aaron, 15, 39 Schwarz, Roberto, 21, 65, 230
Safier, Neil, 43, 48, 50 Science, 9, 167, 195, 198, 201, 208.
Said, Edward, 60 See also Cartesianism; Empiricism;
Orientalism, 60 the Enlightenment; Geographical
Salgado, Juliano Ribeiro discourse; Modernity; Positivism
The Salt of the Earth, 21, 42, 256 and da Cunha, 193, 196–198,
Salgado, Sebastião, 21, 42, 256 200–203, 211, 212, 218, 220
Sampaio, Teodoro, 196 and geographic institutes, 200
Samper, José María, 15 and Romanticism, 30
Sánchez, Santiago Javier, 140 and Sarmiento, 66, 68, 77–82, 95
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 6–7, and Spanish cosmography, 157
17, 39, 45, 63, 65, 124, 142, and the arts, 39, 40, 52, 56, 140
179n4 and Zeballos, 107, 127, 130, 142
and América, 62 as statecraft, 158
and didactic geography, 16, 55, 78, hegemonic discourse of, 9, 78
97, 114, 116, 136, 170 Humbolditan, 30–33, 44, 49, 52,
and diplomacy, 89 69n2
and territorial demarcation, 86, 87, Seelstrang y A.Tourmente, Arthur von,
169 118n5
and European and immigration, Sensualism, 193
105, 114, 116, 132 Serres, Michel, 25n13
and marketable geography, 105, Shakespeare, William, 245n30
117, 134–136 Sociedad Científica Argentina, 77, 83,
and the disciplining of geography, 84, 87, 89, 129
81 Sociedad de Geografía Comercial, the,
and the national subject, 66, 110, 13, 17, 131, 160, 166, 181n14
223 Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid, 60,
and Zeballos, 79, 127 61, 89, 158, 159, 163. See also
audience of, 114 Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica
Campaña en el ejército grande, 96 de Madrid
dialectics of, 93, 97, 117 Sociedad Geográfica Española, 164
ecocritical studies of, 118n14 Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y
Facundo, 6, 14, 16, 23, 65, 82, 89, Estadística, 53
90, 94–98, 102, 106, 107, 118, Societé de Geographie, the, 53
176, 181 Sociology, 195
poetics of, 110, 111 Solano, Joseph, 49
Solís, Juan Díaz de, 142, 143
290 Index
Spanish-American War, the, 17, 84 Uriarte, Javier, 241n14

Spanish cosmography, 157 Utilitarianism, 193
Sparke, Matthew, 8
Spatial studies, 9, 23n7, 252, 253. See
also geocriticism V
Statecraft, 6, 10, 12, 13, 15, 53, 86 Vico, Giambattista, 7, 13, 15–16, 31,
Statistics, 15, 35, 53, 60, 86, 99, 159, 40, 64, 66, 67, 111, 117, 210
166 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 42, 257
Stelzner, Alfred, 89 Volcanism, 2
Strabo, 7, 57, 64, 106, 254 Vollman, William
and Homer, 24 Imperial, 3, 13, 17–19, 20, 241n15,
and Humboldt, 19, 22, 29, 31, 38, 250
48–51, 55 von Martius, Carl Friedrich Philip,
and Sarmiento, 100 190, 201, 214
and Zeballos, 127, 144
Geographica, 13, 47, 48
Surallés, Alexandre, 256 W
Walls, Laura Dassow, 15, 24n8,
32–33, 39, 43
T Wappäus, Johann Eduard, 99–100,
Tally, Robert, 9, 29, 252 213
Terra, Helmut de, 42, 69n3 Warburton, William, 40
Territory, 12, 25n13, 44, 58, 68, War of Canudos, the, 189, 211
71n15 Wells, James W., 213
Thoreau, Henry David, 14 Wenders, Wim
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 91–93, The Salt of the Earth, 21, 42, 256
120n13, 213 Westphal, Bertrand, 9, 12, 18, 252
Topopoetics, 12 Geocriticism: Real and Fictional
Treaty of Tordesillas, the, 4, 7, 17, 46, Spaces, 25n13, 29
48, 191, 238, 252 White, Hayden, 66
Turnbull, David, 52, 70n9 Whitman, Walt, 44, 237
Wilke, Sabine, 38, 49
Winichakul, Thongchai, 73n20
U Wittenberg, Hermann, 241n15
Unamuno, Miguel de, 151 Wulf, Andrea
Unanué, Hipólito, 40 The Invention of Nature, 33
Universal history, 17, 30, 38, 143, Wylie, Leslie, 9
176, 228
Index 291
Z and European immigration, 105,

Zea, Leopoldo, 141, 161, 193 114, 116, 132, 140
Zeballos, Estanislao, 6–7, 9, 16, 17, and geographical institutions, 7
39, 63, 65, 68, 87, 107, 127, La rejión de trigo, 130, 141
134–137, 141–143, 151, 178n2, literary reputation of, 107
181n15 prefiguration by Sarmiento of, 64
and América, 62 and the “Question de Misiones”,
“Apuntaciones para una bibliografía 191
argentina”, 16, 130, 169 satire of, 127, 129
Conquista de quince mil leguas, 18, Zilly, Berthold, 22n4
86, 87, 127, 129, 130, 135, Zimmer, Zac, 118n4
137
Di Tella on, 249, 251, 254–255,
257

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Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies

Aarti Smith Madan

‘Madan’s monograph is a fascinating and well-executed study of two major

More information about this series at

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939927

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Rodríguez, Carla Giaudrone, Javier Uriarte, Sarah Ohmer, Christian

Kris Boudreau, John Sanbonmatsu, Roger Gottleib, Jennifer McWeeny,

2 Geographical Discourse and Alexander Von Humboldt 29

3 Sarmiento the Geographer: Unearthing the Literary

4 Estanislao Severos Zeballos and the Transatlantic Science

5 Euclides da Cunha’s Literary Map, or Including

6 Hereafter: Off the Grid 249

Fig. 4.1 Untitled caricature by Ramón Columba (1916)

Mas los sublimes montes, cuya frente

On the heels of leading Peru to liberation from Spain in 1824, Simón

© The Author(s) 2017 1

In his South American volume of L’Homme et la terra (The Earth and

and confirmation of hegemonic power: “Delineation is the ­ merest,

As Laura Benton (2009), Matthew Edney (2009), Felix Driver (2000),

and practitioners in Latin America’s nation-building processes must

parameters of geography as a discipline, practice, and institution. Like

Second, my analysis of the form–content relationship at work in these

writer-statesmen help institutionalize the discipline at the very moment

by emphasizing that like Humboldt—the primordial Eurocentric man—

Geographical Discourse and Geocriticism

around spatial concerns—consolidating vast expanses and overcoming

In Humboldt’s formulation, language is most effectively wielded from

Moslund considers “topopoetics” as both a way to langscape ­literature

understanding: “[w]ithout a past, no matter how controvertible, the

a second-order internal Creole complicity. Within this “geocentered”

(Past)iche, or Intertextuality and History

This book is not a history of Latin American literary geography, nor

(poet, philosopher, and first president of the American Geographical

thereby tying Latin America’s emergent geographical institutions to the

politics is not limited to the spatial and temporal parameters ­defining

corner of California—are somehow beyond the scope of r­epresentation.

otherwise in the shadows, spotlighting their histories and offering them

Yet Vollman insists, following Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1927), that the

frontier.16 Or, to put it differently, maybe it is, as Vollman repeats time

comparison and more in an illustration of change over time. This book,

context. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century geocritical scholarship,

Moslund, Sten Pultz, “The Presencing of Place in Literature: Towards an

Wylie, Leslie. Colombia’s Forgotten Frontier: A Literary Geography of the

Geographical Discourse and Alexander

In his Translator’s Preface to Westphal’s Geocriticism: Real and Fictional

© The Author(s) 2017 29

In Part I, “Connections,” I consider Humboldt’s bridging of art and

process addressing the at times vexed relationship between the natural

on his 89th birthday, he defends errors as a stop along the path of

make sense of Humboldt’s philosophy within the specific trifecta of land,

Undue conciseness often checks the flow of expression, while diffuseness

Whereas Humboldt concedes to the possibility of multiple answers in

Humboldt’s admitted commitment to aesthetics on behalf of ­posterity

of a “severer aspect,” which requires weighing the “value of observations,

(emphasis added, 56). This language, according to Humboldt, appears in

Wilke’s German Culture and the Modern Environmental Imagination:

Humboldt affirms, “it is with nations as with nature, which, according to

of natural forces” in which everything is connected and, as previously

Humboldt’s appeal to a circular, holistic philosophy resonates more

2 Geographical Discourse and Alexander Von Humboldt 29

Fig. 4.1 Untitled caricature by Ramón Columba (1916)

and confirmation of hegemonic power: “Delineation is the merest,

Geographical Discourse and Geocriticism

Moslund considers “topopoetics” as both a way to langscape literature

(Past)iche, or Intertextuality and History

politics is not limited to the spatial and temporal parameters defining

corner of California—are somehow beyond the scope of representation.

Geographical Discourse and Alexander

Humboldt’s admitted commitment to aesthetics on behalf of posterity

map-making: “the powerful sway of territoriality as the basis for m odern