1
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Obras Completas, vol. V, Viajes por Europa, África y América (1849; reprint ed., Buenos Aires: Luz del Día, 1949).
2
Eduarda Mansilla de García, Recuerdos de viaje (Buenos Aires: Felipe S. Alsina, 1882).
3
Biographical details have been gathered from Nestor Tomas Auza, «Eduarda Mansilla: escritora y mujer de su tiempo»,in Mujeres y escritura, ed. Mempo Giardinelli (Buenos Aires: Puro Cuento, 1989) 140-144.
4
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Studies in travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) 189-190.
5
Andrea Pagni, «Los viajes y el lugar de la escritura en los textos de Friedrich Gerstacker y de Domingo Faustino Sarmiento», Río de la Plata: Culturas 8 (1989) 152.
6
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo. Civilización y barbarie. Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga (1845; reprint ed., Mexico: Porrúa, 1975).
7
In the introduction to Facundo, Sarmiento expressed his ambition of becoming the Tocqueville of South America (2). For a study of Tocqueville's influence on Sarmiento's work, see Raul A. Orgaz, «Sarmiento y el naturalismo historico», in Socilogogía Argentina, vol. II (Córdoba: Assandri, 1950), 267-332, and Tulio Halperin Donghi Proyecto y construcción de una nación (Argentina 1846-1880) (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980) XXXVI.
8
Nicolas Shumway describes this impulse as originating in the 1820s in The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 84. Later in the century, the Generation of 1880 continued to conceive of Argentina as an artificial «show» that reflected the elite's conception of the nation against its realities at home and its image abroad, with the intention of dispelling any preconceptions for the country as primitive or savage. See Thomas Mcgann's description of Argentine particiaption in the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition in Argentina, the United States, and the Inter-American System, 1880-1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957) 177, and Hubert Howe Bancroft's remarks about the Argentine pavilion at the Chicago World Fair of 1893 in The Book of the Fair, vol. I (New York: Bounty Books, 1894) 217.
9
The word «America» in these texts relflects the kinds of dissensions present in the writings of its time, and meanings which are far from having been radically altered today. I have tried to respect Sarmiento's and Mansilla's usage when quoting or paraphrasing, but without losing sight of the United States tradition that, even today, explicitly excludes the rest of the continent from its own name at the same time as it entertains designs of dominance over its independent nations.
10
Shumway, The Invention of Argentina, 63-67.