Partly because of where the film industry settled—California, manifest destiny’s manifest destiny—the production of Westerns accelerated at a frenzied pace in cinema’s early years, and the genre’s popularity proved lasting enough to spin off variants, such as the gaucho Western. Thirty or so gaucho Westerns were produced over about twenty-five years—modest compared to Hollywood’s typical onslaught but no mere blip. When Douglas Fairbanks introduced the gaucho into the U.S. mass cultural landscape in 1927, the character’s fate became permanently linked to the cowboy’s. Each was the foundational archetype of its respective liberal federal republic during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Gauchos’ efforts to resist conscription are in many ways the central drama of the gauchesca, the genre that gave gauchos’ adventures literary form in Argentina. During the nineteenth century, gauchos lived as freelance cattle ranchers, armed men who worked for large landowners and occasionally found themselves conscripted into small militias by caudillos, regional military leaders akin to warlords. Gauchos were rural Argentina’s army and workforce, with a reputation for heavy drinking, music playing, oral poetry, and troubled relations with the law. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, Argentina’s newly established state sought to modernize the country. The gaucho was seen as an atavistic figure who had to be disciplined via forced incorporation into a nascent national military. In those same years, the Argentine state attempted to exterminate the Indigenous occupants of what is now its central and southern territory, leaving tens of thousands dead and many more landless and destitute.
Many gauchos assimilated as their traditional lifestyle became increasingly criminalized. Others became thieves and bandits out of desperation and roamed the countryside preying on the weak and careless. Argentina was a “modern” country now, and gauchos couldn’t be allowed to run amok as before. At the same time, waves of European immigration motivated the government to develop a more cohesive national mythology that could subsume their various traditions—Spanish, Italian, German, Jewish—to the singular Argentine banner. The political and cultural elites who had pushed to end the gauchos’ way of life through conscription and assimilation went on to enshrine them as the nation’s ideal in literature and the arts, a potent symbol of the post-independence national character, as critic Josefina Ludmer notes in her defining 1988 study of gauchesca, The Gaucho Genre: A Treatise on the Motherland.