SOURCE: Ramos, Julio. “The Other's Knowledge: Writing and Orality in Sarmiento's Facundo.” In Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, translated by John D. Blanco, pp. 3-22. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, originally published in 1989, Ramos asserts that the heterogeneity and undisciplined nature of Facundo actually represents an attempt to have writing bring order to the political and social chaos of newly liberated Argentina.

It has been said that during the Latin American wars of independence the Creole elites succeeded in voicing a general consensus—a we that quickly coalesced and gathered momentum around a common enemy (Spain). Yet behind the subsequent inauguration of new governments, fundamental contradictions reemerged on the surface of social life. The new states had to be consolidated, a project that entailed the delimitation of borders and territories, the generalization of authority under a central law capable of submitting...