by Domingo F. Sarmiento

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was a man of extremes. During his lifetime, he would be both an exile from his own country (in the 1840s, when he wrote Facundo) and president of the Argentine Republic (from 1868 to 1874). Beginning life as an impoverished inhabitant of the frontier, Sarmiento went on to become a powerful politician in the cosmopolitan city of Buenos Aires. His most famous work, known either as Facundo or by its original title, Civilization and Barbarism: Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga, is likewise an essay of extremes. The essay sets forth a basic opposition—between civilization and barbarism—that has profoundly influenced Latin American thought to the present day. By writing Facundo, Sarmiento took vengeance against a figure who had terrorized his own native community of San Juan, yet the author’s main targets were the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas (during whose reign...