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A gaucho () or gaúcho () is a skilled horseman, reputed to be brave and unruly. The figure of the gaucho is a folk symbol of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, southern Bolivia, and southern Chile. Gauchos became greatly admired and renowned in legend, folklore, and literature and became an important part of their regional cultural tradition. Beginning late in the 19th century, after the heyday of the gauchos, they were celebrated by South American writers.
According to the Diccionario de la lengua española, in its historical sense a gaucho was a "mestizo who, in the 18th and 19th centuries, inhabited Argentina, Uruguay, and Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, and was a migratory horseman, and adept in cattle work". In Argentina and Uruguay today, gaucho can refer to any "country person, experienced in traditional livestock farming". Because historical gauchos were reputed to be brave, if unruly, the word is also applied metaphorically to mean "noble, brave and generous", but also "one who is skillful in subtle tricks, crafty". In Portuguese the word gaúcho means "an inhabitant of the plains of Rio Grande do Sul or the Pampas of Argentina of European and indigenous American descent who devotes himself to lassoing and raising cattle and horses"; gaúcho has also acquired a signification in Brazil, meaning anyone, even an urban dweller, who is a citizen of the state of Rio Grande do Sul.
| + Some proposed explanations for "gaucho" |
| Paullada 1961; Trifilo 1964 |
| Paullada 1961 |
| Groussac 1904; Paullada 1961; Trifilo 1964; Gibson 1892; |
| Paullada 1961; Hollinger 1928 |
| Groussac 1893; Groussac 1904; Paullada 1961; Rona 1964; |
| Hollinger 1928 |
| Lehmann-Nitsche 1928 |
| Groussac 1904; Paullada 1961; Hollinger 1928; Rona 1964 |
| Rona 1964 |
| Assunção 2011; Hollinger 1928. |
Hence the Uruguayan sociolinguist José Pedro Rona thought the origin of the word was to be sought "on the frontier zone between Spanish and Portuguese, which goes from northern Uruguay to the Argentine province of Corrientes and the Brazilian area between them".
Rona, himself born on a language frontier in pre-Holocaust Europe, was a pioneer of the concept of linguistic borders, and studied the dialects of northern Uruguay where Portuguese and Spanish intermingle. Rona thought that, of the two forms — gaúcho and gaucho — the former probably came first, because it was linguistically more natural for gaúcho to evolve by accent-shift to gáucho, than the other way round. Thus the problem came down to explaining the origin of gaúcho.
As to that, Rona thought that gaúcho originated in northern Uruguay, and came from garrucho, a derisive wordTwo examples are: (1) An 1813 copla mocking the besiegers of Montevideo (2) An incident in 1817 in the town of São Borja, in the tri-border area. An angry marauder, sacking the local church, tore the earrings off a statue of the BV Mary, saying (in Portuguese) "this garrucha doesn't need them any more". The parish priest, a learned man, explained that the word meant "old indian": . possibly of CharruaThe Charrua language became extinct in the 19th century, as did the people, but Rona points out that, most unusually for an indigenous language, it contained the phoneme /rr/, as its very name testifies: . origin, which meant something like "old indian" or "contemptible person", and is actually foundHere his theory differs from Caravaglia's (#9, above), who also postulated garrucho but conjectured that it had been a Spanish word meaning "cattle pole wielder"; this meaning is nowhere attested. (There is indeed a Spanish word garrucho, but this refers to an item of nautical equipment, and is therefore remote). in the historical record. However in the Portuguese-based dialects of northern Uruguay the phoneme /rr/ is not easily pronounced, and so is rendered as /h/ (sounding rather like English h). Thus garrucho would be rendered as gahucho, and indeed the French naturalist Augustin Saint-Hilaire, travelling in Uruguay during the Artigas insurgency, wrote in his diary (16 October 1820): The native Spanish-speakers of these borderlands, however, could not process the phoneme /h/, and would render it as a null, thus gaúcho. In sum, according to this theory, gaúcho originated in the Uruguay-Brazil dialect borderlands, deriving from a derisive indigenous word garrucho, then in Spanish lands evolved by accent-shift to gaucho.
The original gaucho was typically descended from unions between Iberian men and Amerindian women, although he might also have African ancestry. A DNA analysis study of rural inhabitants of Rio Grande do Sul, who style themselves gaúchos, has claimed to discern, not only Amerindian (Charrúa and Guaraní) ancestry in the female line but, in the male line, a higher proportion of Spanish ancestry than is usual in Brazil. However, gauchos were a social class, not an ethnic group.
Gauchos are first mentioned by name in the 18th century records of the Spanish colonial authorities who administered the Banda Oriental (present-day Uruguay). For them, he is an outlaw, cattle thief, robber and smuggler. Félix de Azara (1790) said gauchos were "the dregs of the Rio de la Plata and of Brazil". Summarised one scholar: "Fundamentally the was a colonial bootlegger whose business was contraband trade in cattle hides. His work was highly illegal; his character lamentably reprehensible; his social standing exceedingly low.
"Gaucho" was an insult; yet it was possible to use the word to refer, without animosity, to country people in general. Furthermore the gaucho's skills, though useful in banditry or smuggling, were just as useful for serving in the frontier police. The Spanish administration recruited its anti-smuggling Cuerpo de Blandengues from among the outlaws themselves. The Uruguayan patriot José Gervasio Artigas made precisely that career transition.
Visitors to the newly emergent Argentina and Uruguay perceived that a "gaucho" was a country person or herdsman: seldom was there a pejorative significance. Emeric Essex Vidal, the first artist to paint gauchos,See the article on that artist. noted their mobility (1820):
Vidal also painted visiting gauchos from up-country Tucumán. ("Their features are particularly Spanish, uncrossed by that mixture observable in the citizens of Buenos Ayres"). They are not horsemen: they are oxcart drivers, and may or may not have called themselves gauchos in their home province.
Charles Darwin observed life on the pampas for six months and reflected in his diary (1833):
Hence in Argentina, vagrancy laws required rural workers to carry employment documents. Some restrictions on the gaucho's freedom of movement were imposed under Spanish Viceroy Sobremonte, but they were greatly intensified under Bernardino Rivadavia, and were enforced more vigorously still under Juan Manuel de Rosas. Those who did not carry the documentation could be sentenced to years in the military. From 1822 to 1873 even internal passports were required.
According to Marxist and other scholars the gaucho became "proletarianized", preferring life as a salaried peon on an estancia to forced enlistment, irregular pay and harsh discipline. However, some resisted. "In words and deeds, soldiers contested the state's disciplinary model", frequently deserting. Deserters often fled to the Indian frontier, or even took refuge with the Indians themselves. José Hernández described the bitter fate of just such a gaucho protagonist in his poem Martín Fierro (1872), a great popular success in the countryside. One estimate was that renegade gauchos comprised half of all Indian raiding parties.
Lucio Victorio Mansilla (1877) thought he could discern two types of gaucho in the soldiers under his command:
The paisano gaucho (country worker) has a home, a fixed abode, work habits, respect for authority, on whose side he will always be, even against his better feelings.But the gaucho neto (out-and-out gaucho) is the typical wandering Creole peoples, here today, there tomorrow; gambler, quarreler, enemy of discipline; who flees military service when it is his turn, takes refuge among the Indians if he knifes someone, or joins the montoneras (armed rabble) if it shows up.
The first has the instincts of civilization; he imitates the man of the cities in his dress, in his customs. The second loves tradition; he hates foreigners;Sc. "el gringo" in original; but in Argentina this meant any kind of foreigner. Thus e.g. an Italian was a gringo. his luxury is his spurs, his flash gear, his leather sash, his facón (dagger-sword). The first takes off his poncho to go into town, the second goes there flaunting his trappings. The first is a cultivator, oxcart driver, cattle drover, herdsman, a peon. The second hires himself out for cattle branding. The first has been a soldier several times. The second was once part of a squadron and as soon as he saw his chance he deserted.
The first is always federal, the second is no longer anything. The first still believes in something; the second believes in nothing. He has suffered more than the city slicker, and so has been disillusioned quicker. He votes, because the Commander or the Mayor tells him to, and with that universal suffrage is achieved. If he has a claim, he drops it because he thinks it is frankly a waste of time. In a word, the first is a useful man for industry and work — the second is a dangerous inhabitant anywhere. If he resorts to the courts, it is because he has the instinct to believe that they will do him justice out of fear – and there are examples, if they don't do it he takes revenge — he wounds or kills. The former makes up the Argentine social mass; the second is disappearing.
Already in 1845 a local dialect dictionary, Voces usadas con generalidad en las Repûblicas del Plata, la Argentina y la Oriental del Uruguay. by a knowledgeable compiler,Francisco Muñiz, a country doctor who had practised around Luján for many yeara. gave "gaucho" as meaning any kind of rural worker, including one who cultivated the soil. To refer to the wandering sort, one had to specify further.E.g. gaucho neto or gaucho alzado. Documentary researchIn censuses and farm records. has shown the great majority of rural workers in Buenos Aires province were not herdsmen, but cultivators or shepherds. Thus, the gaucho that survives in today's popular imagination — the galloping horseman — was not typical.
The Portuguese Crown, in order to conquer southern Brazil — it was disputed with the Spanish Empire — distributed vast tracts of land to a few hundred families. Labour in this region was scarce, so great landowners acquired it by allowing a social class, called agregados, to settle on their land with their own animals. Values were martial and paternalistic, for the territory went back and forth between Portugal and Spain.
Brazilian inheritance laws compelled landowners to leave their lands in equal shares to their sons and daughters, and since they were numerous, and those laws were hard to evade, great landholdings fractured in a few generations. There were not the huge cattle estates of Buenos Aires province where, as an extreme example, the Anchorena family owned in 1864.
Unlike Argentina, cattlemen in Rio Grande do Sul did not have vagrancy laws to tie gaúchos to their ranches. However, slavery was legal in Brazil; in Rio Grande do Sul it existed until 1884; and perhaps a majority of permanent ranch workers were enslaved. Thus many horse-riding campeiros (cowboys) were black slaves. They enjoyed sharply better living conditions than the slaves who worked in the brutal xarqueadas (beef-salting plants). John Charles Chasteen explained why:
Land-hungry Rio Grande cattlemen bought up estates cheaply in neighbouring Uruguay until they owned about 30% of that country, which they ranched with their slaves and cattle. The border area was fluid, bilingual and lawless. Though slavery was abolished in Uruguay in 1846, and there were laws against human trafficking, weak governments poorly enforced those laws. Often Brazilian ranchers simply ignored them, even crossing and re-crossing the border with their slaves and cattle. An 1851 extradition treaty required Uruguay to return fugitive Brazilian slaves.
Governments found it hard to establish a monopoly of violence in the border area. In the Federalist Revolution of 1893 gaúcho-manned armies led by elite families fought each other with exceptional barbarity. Powerful Brazilian-Uruguayan families, like the Saraivas, led mounted insurrections in both countries, even in the 20th century. In the satirical cartoon (1904) Aparicio Saravia says it is time for "another little revolution": they have been at peace long enough and are starting to look ridiculous. This time, however, his mobile, lance-wielding horsemen were put down, and decisively, by Uruguayan troops armed with Mauser rifles and Krupp cannon, efficiently deployed by telegraph and rail.
Once political stability was achieved the results were dramatic. From around 1875 a flood of immigrants altered the country's ethnic composition. In 1914, 40% of Argentina's residents were foreign-born. Today, Italian surnames are more common than Spanish.
Barbed wire, cheap from 1876, fenced the pampa "and thus eliminated the need for gaucho cowboys". Gauchos were forced off the land, drifting into rural towns to look for work, though a few were retained as peon labourers. Cunninghame Graham, after whom a Buenos Aires street is named, and who had lived as a gaucho in the 1870s, returned in 1914 to "his first love, Argentina" and found it had greatly changed. "Progress, which he constantly lambasted, had rendered the gaucho virtually extinct".
Wote S. Samuel Trifilo (1964): "The gaucho of today working on the pampas of Argentina is no more a real gaucho than is our own present-day cowboy the cowboy of the Wild West; both have gone forever."
Two-thirds of Uruguay lies south of the Río Negro, and this part was fenced most intensively in the decade 1870-1880. The gaucho was marginalised and was frequently driven to live in pueblos de ratas (rural slums, literally rat towns).
North of the Río Negro mobile gauchos survived rather longer. A Scottish anthropologist in the central region (1882) saw many of them as unsettled. European immigration to the countryside was smaller. The central government failed to consolidate its power over the countryside, and gaucho-manned armies continued to defy it until 1904. The turbulent gaucho leaders e.g. the Saravias had connections with the cattlemen over the Brazilian border, where there was much less European immigration; Wire fences did not become common in the borderland until the close of the 19th century.
The revolutionary battles in Brazil ended by 1930 under the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas, who disarmed the private gaúcho armies and prohibited the carrying of guns in public.
Writers variously reflecting this tendency included José María Ramos Mejía, Manuel Gálvez, Rafael Obligado, José Ingenieros, Miguel Cané, and above all Leopoldo Lugones and Ricardo Güiraldes. Their answer was to go back to values that could be attributed to the old-time gaucho. However, the gaucho they chose was not the one who cultivated the land, but the one who galloped across it.
For Lugones (1913), to discern a people's true character, one had to read its epic poetry; and Martín Fierro was the Argentine epic poem par excellence. Far from being a barbarian, the gaucho was the hero who did what the Spanish Empire could not — civilise the pampa by subjugating the Indian. To be a gaucho demanded "composure, courage, ingenuity, meditation, sobriety, vigour; all this made him a free man". But in that case, asked Lugones, why did the gaucho disappear? Because, together with his virtues, he had inherited two defects from his Indian and Spanish ancestors: laziness and pessimism.
Lugones' lectures, where he Western canon Martín Fierro with its quarreling gaucho protagonist, had official support: the president of the Republic and his cabinet attended them, as did prominent members of the traditional ruling classes.
However, wrote a Mexican scholar, in exalting this gaucho Lugones and others were not recreating a real historical character, they were weaving a nationalist myth, for political purposes.See also ; . Jorge Luis Borges thought their choice of gaucho was a poor role model for Argentines.
Wrote musicologist Melanie Plesch:
The iconic gaucho gained traction in popular culture because he appealed to diverse social groups: displaced rural workers; European immigrants anxious to assimilate; traditional ruling classes wanting to affirm their own legitimacy.A classic thesis developed by Adolfo Prieto. At a time when the elite was extolling Argentina as a "white" country, a fourth group, those who possessed dark skins, felt validated by the gaucho's elevation, seeing that his non-white ancestry was too well known to be concealed.
Political factions have competed to appropriate the gaucho icon and interpret him their way. In a review of Ezequiel Adamovsky's El gaucho indómito. De Martín Fierro a Perón, el emblema imposible de una nación desgarrada (The indomitable gaucho: from Martín Fierro to Perón, the impossible emblem of a torn nation), Raanan Rein wrote:
Today a popular movement celebrates gaucho culture.
The Movimento Tradicionalista Gaúcho (MTG) has an active participation of two million people, and claims to be the largest popular culture movement in the Western world. Essentially urban, rooted in nostalgia for rural life, the MTG fosters gaúcho culture. There are 2,000 Centres for Gaúcho Traditions, not only in the state, but elsewhere, even Los Angeles and Osaka, Japan. Gaúcho products include television and radio programs, articles, books, dance halls, performers, records, theme restaurants, and clothing. The movement was founded by intellectuals, apparently sons of downwardly mobile small landowners who had moved to the cities to study. Since gaúcho culture was seen as male, only later were women invited to participate. Though the real gaúchos of history lived in the Campanha (plains region), some of the first to join were of German or Italian ethnicity from outside that area, a social class who had idealised the gaúcho rancher as a type superior to themselves.
The naturalist William Henry Hudson, who was born on the Pampas of Buenos Aires province, recorded that the gauchos of his childhood used to say that a man without a horse was a man without legs. He described meeting a blind gaucho who was obliged to beg for his food yet behaved with dignity and went about on horseback. Richard W. Slatta, the author of a scholarly work about gauchos, notes that the gaucho used horses to collect, mark, drive or tame cattle, to draw fishing nets, to hunt ostriches, to snare partridges, to draw well water, and even—with the help of his friends—to ride to his own burial.
By reputation the quintessential gaucho caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas could throw his hat on the ground and scoop it up while galloping his horse, without touching the saddle with his hand. For the gaucho, the horse was absolutely essential to his survival for, said Hudson: "he must every day traverse vast distances, see quickly, judge rapidly, be ready at all times to encounter hunger and fatigue, violent changes of temperature, great and sudden perils".
A popular copla was:
It was the gaucho's passion to own all his steeds in matching colours. Hudson recalled:
The gaucho, from the poorest worker on horseback to the largest owner of lands and cattle, has, or had in those days, a fancy for having all his riding-horses of one colour. Every man as a rule had his tropilla — his own half a dozen or a dozen or more saddle-horses, and he would have them all as nearly alike as possible, so that one man had chestnuts, another browns, bays, silver- or iron-greys, duns, fawns, cream-noses, or blacks, or whites, or piebalds.
The caudillo Chacho Peñaloza described the low point of his life as "In Chile − and on foot!" (En Chile y a pie.)
Gauchos routinely maltreated their horses since these were plentiful. Even a poor gaucho usually had a tropilla of perhaps a dozen. Most of those sports were banned by the elite.
The higher skills were lost as the gaucho was marginalized, wrote Slatta:
Gauchos were generally reputed to be strong, honest, silent types, but proud and capable of violence when provoked. The gaucho tendency to violence over petty matters is also recognized as a typical trait. Gauchos' use of the facón—a large knife generally tucked into the rear of the gaucho's sash—is legendary, often associated with considerable bloodletting. Historically, the facón was typically the only eating instrument that a gaucho carried.
The gaucho diet was composed almost entirely of beef while on the range, supplemented by mate, an herbal infusion made from the leaves of yerba mate, a type of holly rich in caffeine and nutrients. The water for mate was heated short of boiling on a stove in a kettle, and traditionally served in a hollowed-out gourd and sipped through a metal straw called a bombilla.
Gauchos dressed and wielded tools quite distinct from North American cowboys. In addition to the lasso, gauchos used bolas or boleadoras (boleadeiras in Portuguese)—three leather-bound rocks tied together with leather straps. The typical gaucho outfit would include a poncho, which doubled as a saddle blanket and as sleeping gear; a facón (dagger); a leather whip called a rebenque; and loose-fitting trousers called bombacha]]s or a poncho or blanket wrapped around the loins like a diaper called a chiripá]], belted with a sash called a faja. A leather belt, sometimes decorated with coins and elaborate buckles, is often worn over the sash. During winters, gauchos wore heavy wool ponchos to protect against cold.
Their tasks were to move the cattle between grazing fields, or to market sites such as the port of Buenos Aires. The yerra consists of branding the animal with the owner's sign. The taming of animals was another of their usual activities. Taming was a trade especially appreciated throughout Argentina and competitions to domesticate wild foal remained in force at festivals. The majority of gauchos were illiterate and considered as countrymen.
Gauchos would frequent small businesses known as pulperías, which served as a general store, a tavern, and sometimes as a fence to which stolen goods were sold to. Pulperías were typically located far in the country side and sold items such as yerba mate, liquor, tobacco, sugar, clothing, horse tack, and may other things vital to survival in the countryside.
With so much of gaucho life revolving around cattle, beef is still a major part of their culinary culture. The tradition of large cookouts known as Asado is still prevalent in certain regions, with the event taking place in an outbuilding fitted with a large grill and outdoor kitchen known as a quincho. Typical foods include meats cooked over an open flame accompanied with chimichurri, and staples such as Empanada and mate.
Oral tradition is an important medium in which the heritage of the gaucho is maintained. Folk music is often used to tell stories, with themes of love, rural life, and the hardships that come with it being prevalent. Genres such as payada make strong use of this spoken word style medium, with performers known as Payada dressing in traditional clothing and exchanging improvised verses in a duel until a winner is clear.
The attire typically associated with gauchos has for the most part disappeared, however the traditional clothing is still sometimes worn to festivals and events, and as work wear in certain estancias that cater to tourism, known as Parador. The Facon is still often worn at asados, both in a symbolic manner and also to cut meat.
In recent years many environmental movements worldwide have drawn inspiration from the gaucho ideology of living in harmony with nature and being sustainable with farming practices. Public support for grass fed beef, maintaining biodiversity, and eco-tourism aligns closely with the way of life of modern gauchos. The gaucho lifestyle has been romanticized heavily in culture, and as a result many people pay to experience this lifestyle at estancias, much like Guest ranch in the American west. At these ranches, guests partake in traditional activities such as horseback riding, roping, with other outdoor activities such as hunting (waterfowl, red deer), and trout fishing being common as well.
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