Ricardo Güiraldes's «Américas»: Reappropriation and Reacculturation in «Xaimaca» (1923)

J. P. Spicer-Escalante

Travel writing, from the era of the Encounter to the present day, has played an integral role in the dialectical envisioning of Latin America and Latin American culture by Europeans, North Americans and Latin Americans alike. In my analysis of the cosmopolitan Argentine writer Ricardo Güiraldes's novel Xaimaca (1923), I tackle this writer's grappling with the Latin American elite's customary trip of acculturation to Europe. I demonstrate that, far from blindly supporting the belief that culture is a principally metropolitan phenomenon, Güiraldes proposes the notion of cultural (re)discovery within the Latin American context as seen through his protagonist's journey from Buenos Aires to Jamaica. Thus, Xaimaca is more than just the narration of a simple journey; it is also a metaphorical pilgrimage towards the autochthonous, as well as a proposal for a de-centring of Latin American cultural production and the creation of anew continental aesthetic in the post-First World War era.

Although never formally considered by traditional critics of Latin American literature as a high-art genre in itself², Latin American travel writing, often ignored or (mis)labelled as history or science, or reduced to the level of kitschy Travel Channel globe-trotting gossip, is coming into its own as an important form of cultural production. It is beginning to be tackled from a different angle which highlights its works as meaningful literary, social and cultural texts, not just as reminiscences of conquest, enlightenment writings on epistemological pursuits in unknown geographies, nineteenth-century junket pieces on potential business ventures, sentimental objectifications of indigenous cultures, or simple post-modern travel propaganda. A case in point is the recognition by current criticism of the fact that in Latin America, travel writing has historically been most important in terms of the definition and continual re-definition of the continent as not only a geographic, but also an important cultural and social space. Mary Louise Pratt has pointed out, for example, that Latin America is a cultural 'contact zone', a place where 'disparate cultures meet and clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination'³. However, as her analysis also demonstrates, the bounds of this geocultural construct ripe with contact and conflict go well beyond the anthropological plane. The phenomenon that is the contact zone also lends itself to the notion of the existence of a textual point of contact where literary works -as disparate as the epic poem and the essay- duel and wrestle with each other in terms of representation, ideology, and competing notions of epistemology, often, at least initially in the colonial/imperial period, in disparate relations of authority and subjugation⁴.

The general source of conflict which characterises the contact zone has to do, in fact, with the varied ways in which it has been envisioned historically. Although it has been a reality for its inhabitants for millennia, in spite of their lack of general consciousness of this fact, Latin America was first conceived from the outside as part of a mythical European geopolitical, socioeconomic and fictive imaginary, spawned from generations of travelogues and fiction. Its concrete entrance into the realm of European consciousness can be seen via the act of appropriation and shaping that characterises travel writing as diverse yet similar as Columbus's captain's logs and Alexander von Humboldt's topographical, political and cultural mappings of late colonial Latin America. This geotextual construct has also been envisioned, however, through the works of nineteenth-century writers such as English businessmen Francis Bond Head and Joseph Andrews⁵, and the naturalist Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). During the same century, one of the many foreign feminine voices who envisioned Latin America is U. S. suffragist and author of the anti-slavery work A Trip to Cuba (1860), Julia Ward Howe. Post-modern examples which continue to elaborate an ever-changing vision of Latin America abound, including a profusion of internet resources, as well as the Fodor's and Lonely Planet guides to a plethora of its tourist destinations, a point which confirms the eternally protean signifier that is Latin America.

Likewise, it must be stated that the internal envisioning of Latin America has shown itself to be equally polymorphous and conflictive. That is, Latin American writers, at least partially in response to external representations of their geocultural space, have continually re-conceived the continent from a domestic perspective through travel writing via what could be called a sort of textual intrageografía. This contestatory re-defining of Latin America via the travel text by Latin Americans harkens back to the demystifying revisionist accounts of Latin American creole insiders from the colonial period and those who, in their wake, have brought the genre to new levels of relevance. Two cases in point with respect to the colonial period are the Mexican writer Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Peruvian resident Alonso Carrió de la Vandera. Sigüenza y Góngora, an intellectual partner and companion of the illustrious Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, is best known for his 1690 work Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez, a prime counterdiscursive travel narrative which details the picaresque wanderings of the creole Alonso Ramírez through the vast post-1588 Spanish empire. In a powerful statement on the decadence of Spanish royal authority, his search for a creole identity in the midst of the overwhelming nature of belonging to the colonial periphery is a fruitless and futile venture. Carrió de la Vandera, a travelling royal functionary charged with inspecting the governmental posts between Montevideo and Lima in the late colonial period, is best known for the literary product of his travel ventures, his Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes, a clandestinely published work dating from 1775 or 1776. His narrative, an almost costumbrista description of the lands and peoples who inhabit the region which spans from Argentina to Peru during the late colonial period, is punctuated by a demystifying textual dialogue between a Spanish oidor and his indigenous travel guide, Concolorcorvo. This work, a response to European travel writings on Latin America through an appropriated native voice, acts as an unparalleled example of the dialogic nature of the travel genre.

The phenomenon of contact between the Americas and Europe becomes ever more important, however, during the post-Independence era when technological advances made travel easier and faster. At this historical juncture, it became the perceived duty of the nineteenth-century Latin American elite, so recently culturally self-orphaned due to the Wars of Independence with the madre patria, to venture forth and to partake in socially obligatory rites of acculturation through a mix of the viaje consumidor and the viaje ceremonial, in the nomenclature of Argentine critic David Viñas⁶. The result was that travel writing reflected an ever-increasing dialectic nature during the nineteenth century. As Europeans and North Americans travelled to Latin America at an increasing rate, Latin American ideologues and aesthetes also more frequently ventured to Europe and North America to seek out 'modern' notions on epistemology and aesthetics, so as to diminish via direct experience their perception of a sociocultural gap that distanced them from Europe and North America. The result of this more balanced cultural commerce was the consumption by Latin Americans of metropolitan cultural production in situ, and the committing to paper, in a variety of genres, of their visions of Europe and North America for broad dissemination and consumption at home. A prime example of both this form of 'creole self-fashioning' and the counterdiscursive reinventing of Europe and North America is Domingo Sarmiento's Viajes (1849-51), written between 1845 and 1847, a work which encompasses his travel experiences in Europe, North Africa and the United States during that period⁷. However, a much more contestatory response is seen in the Argentine writer Eugenio Cambaceres's novel Música sentimental: silbidos de un vago, and Franco-Argentine Paul Groussac's Fruto vedado: costumbres argentinas (1884). These works not only respond to European visions of Latin America, but address, at the same time, the problematics of Latin American cultural identity vis-à-vis European cultural hegemony and the perceived need of the Latin American oligarchy to become cultured through contact with the Old World. Although the process of cultural identification continues to the present day, especially in terms of aesthetics where even fashion is dictated from North to South and East to West, the historical progress of the growing textual exchange between Europe and Latin America is marked by a major turning point: the First World War. Simply put, as Europe -perceived by Latin Americans in general as the centre of world-wide cultural activity at the time- cannibalised itself, Latin American elites witnessed this self-destruction in horror. Europe, the continent they had perceived as the paradigm of modernity, was eager for destruction, something that Marinetti's futurismo had amply foreshadowed from 1910. This reality provoked a profound re-examination of their views in relation to their own continent and a cultural movement towards their own autochthonous cultures⁸. The Latin American ideological and cultural intelligentsia, in this act of necessary self-reflection, therefore turned back to themselves and their own cultural referents, and reflected upon the cultural and aesthetic possibilities that they offered. This return to the domestic is seen in the (re)discoveries of numerous Latin American writers who had been -or even still were, in many cases- enamoured of Europe and of metropolitan culture. Several cases in point are Latin American writers Miguel Ángel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier and Julio Cortázar. Asturias not only rediscovers, but also re-elaborates Mayan legends after his anthropological studies in Paris under Georges Reynaud, the translator of many Mayan texts. Carpentier, a Cuban cultural attaché and renowned world traveller, discovers the 'magically real' during a trip to Haiti, not Europe or the Far East, even though they serve as geocultural referents for the rediscovery of his home continent and region. Finally, Julio Cortázar, the Belgian-born Argentine in self-exile in Paris since the 1950s, not only reconsiders his ideological obligations as a Latin American writer after numerous trips to Cuba, but rediscovers them most notably after visiting Sandinista-held Nicaragua in the late 1970s.

As a result of the turn of events that was the 'war to end all wars', one can thus see that in the post-First World War era Latin America as a construct becomes more a theme of interest to latinoamericanos themselves. This fact amplifies Latin American travel writing's scope and creates the notion of a literature which can be conceived as a gesture of counterconquest, a means of textual reappropriation of the often ignored quotidian -the under-represented home continent, the Américas- as well as a reacculturative medium for the Latin American elite.

Such is the case of the cosmopolitan Argentine writer Ricardo Güiraldes, probably best known for his 1926 gaucho novel, Don Segundo Sombra⁹. Yet, reducing Güiraldes's literary production to only gaucho literature tremendously limits the scope of his work, especially since travel plays an important role in his life and his artistic vision on both physical and metaphysical planes. The son of a wealthy Argentine landowner, Güiraldes was a perennial traveller within both his own domestic space and within foreign spheres, as well as within diverse literary genres¹⁰. He travelled incessantly during his life between the Argentine capital and the family's estancia in the province of Buenos Aires, as well as between Argentina and Europe, and the Far East. In fact, while he was a young child, his family resided on the outskirts of Paris, the same city where he would also die at the premature age of 41¹¹. Therefore, it seems inevitable that his constant geographic movement should spill over into his literary production, where travel -or the concept of the journey- is a common motif¹².

With this in mind, I would now like to focus on Güiraldes's third work, Xaimaca, a lyrical novel written in 1919 and published in 1923¹³. I argue that Güiraldes utilises the travel genre, although with a dose of awkward ambivalence so common to Latin American cultural elites even today, to subvert the requisite fin-de-siècle journey of acculturation to Europe by Latin American high society. In Xaimaca, Güiraldes substitutes this traditional elitist notion of travel with a journey of reappropriation and reacculturation; in essence, of (re)discovery of Latin America as an aesthetic and ideological milieu. As an extension, I would like to relate the protagonist's quest to the Latin American cultural artist's search for lost roots in the post-First World War period, a point that links this textual voyage of rediscovery to Güiraldes's own avant garde aspirations¹⁴.

Loosely based on Güiraldes's own experiences during a 1916-17 voyage to the Caribbean via Chile and the Pacific with his wife, the Argentine poet Adelina del Carril, Xaimaca takes the form of a daily travelogue written by the work's protagonist, Marcos Galván. This young, cultured Argentine's initial travel motive as he departs by train from Buenos Aires is indicative of his quest: he seeks to immerse himself in 'the remains of pre-Incan civilisation' (p. 269)¹⁵. Although his original plans are to venture only as far as the Peruvian cities of Mollendo, Callao or Trujillo, his travel companions, Clara Ordóñez and her brother, Peñalba, convince him to continue with them to Jamaica. Through addressing his home continent and culture with great emphasis during his travels and incorporating them into his own text, Güiraldes's Galván textually reappropriates his personal geographic space and reacculturates himself with respect to his own Latin American roots, converting Xaimaca plainly into a text of (re)discovery and (re)conquest.

Galván gives the indication from the beginning of the text while in Buenos Aires that his journey is reflective of a heightened individual aesthetic impulse, a sort of self-induced hyperaesthesia. Upon embarking on his quest, he describes himself as pre-disposed to self-inscription at the experiential level. In the travel diary's first entry he states: 'Above all, I hope to personalise my sensations, as if my journey were a point of departure towards something definite. Things shall inscribe themselves upon me according to my own idiosyncrasy' (p. 269)¹⁶. In terms of the narrator's act of (re)discovery and (re)conquest, Güiraldes allows his narrator to define himself here in a counterdiscursive inversion of the traditional Eurocentric Spanish conquistador role. Thus, the narrator sees himself not as an explorer or adventure-seeker mundanely interested in the mere accumulation of wealth or power, but as a 'minor discoverer of my own impressions' (p. 269) whose only moral baggage is his 'great curiosity' (p. 269). Beyond 'a quantity sufficient to travel for five months' (p. 269), his only belongings are his suitcases and his travel documents. Thus, Güiraldes characterises his narrator -in essence a self-portrait or his own envisioning of the Latin American artist- as a hypersensitive aesthete in search of ancient cultural roots and modern vital experiences; that is, a sort of non-materially oriented, subjective tabula rasa. The author appears to suggest that the Latin American aesthete's is a journey of discovery in the hinterlands of Latin American (pre)history and culture, not a quest for material riches. In addition, the fact that he has little additional baggage, either real or figurative, to tie him down, is a relevant point since this open posture allows for a naked, non-preconceived rapprochement to his own continent and its cultures.

As the train crosses the vast pampas on its way to Mendoza and across the Andes to Chile, Galván's initial impressions refer to the countryside that lies before his eyes. Using Switzerland as a point of a comparison -an element so common to the European writers of discovery and conquest who wrote on the Americas as to become a cliché- the narrator perceives that the Argentine landscape pales in comparison with its European counterpart¹⁷. After two hours traversing the flatlands that make up the province of Buenos Aires, with only brief bursts of vegetation, Galván exclaims 'This is too flat. Oh Switzerland!' (p. 270). While the comparison with Europe appears initially problematic, Güiraldes's text progressively displays the narrator's passage towards the recognition of the heightened aesthetic beauty of his surroundings. Although his reaction is mediated at the beginning of his journey by the extreme summer heat of the southern hemisphere, Galván slowly awakes from the heat-induced lethargy and begins slowly to respond to the terrain before his eyes. In an entry that prefigures his later maternal characterisation of the Argentine grasslands/Earth in Don Segundo Sombra, Güiraldes's narrator begins to rediscover his origins while also finding an aesthetic impulse: 'Further out, beyond suspicion, the world continues; world means pampa. Pampa Mother, creator in me of a drop of sap that yearns to become a song' (p. 270). The narrator's act of (re)discovery, which allows the reader to dismiss his initial Eurocentric comparisons, continues as the train arrives in Mendoza. In a prefiguration of the elevated experience he will have as he passes through the Andes, he transforms the diminutive Trasandino train into a 'sheath from which the marvellous shall burst forth' (p. 271). As the train departs towards the Andes, he witnesses the surrounding mountainous landscape and captures his impressions of the terrain in a series of staccato-like images: 'the broad bed of an almost dry torrential river; the tortuous dwarf-like vegetation that grows amongst the rude, rocky cliffs that border the mountains; the tense colours of some flowers that serve as the ornamentation of a well-kept garden' (p. 272). The progression of images that Güiraldes uses here, a metaphor in itself of the narrator's anaemic movement towards a positive sense, progresses from the dry and almost sterile, to the aesthetically pleasing and ornamental.

In an example reminiscent of the European texts of discovery in the Americas, Güiraldes also appeals to the baroque belief in the impossibility of mere words to characterise the concrete reality, so charged with admiratio, that the narrator experiences. As the trip continues, Galván perceives that he has become limited by the folly of believing that his words are capable of characterising the beauty which surrounds him: 'To speak of the Cordillera in these notes would be like trying to fit the sun in my suitcase' (p. 272). Although he demonstrates an apparent humility by stating that he is dwarfed by the scope of the experience -'that which is primary bypasses me due to its magnitude' (p. 272)- Galván does, however, continue to characterise the scenery around him, not unlike his earlier European counterparts. As the train climbs further up into the mountains, Güiraldes's narrator, in a foreshadowing of this author's later El sendero with respect to the cosmic qualities of the earthly experience, appeals to a punctuated accumulatio in his attempt to describe the landscape that surrounds him. This scenery, which slowly approaches the infinite sky, takes on ultra-earthly qualities:

The overall effect of this aesthetic experience transports Galván to a cosmic plane that is indirectly juxtaposed to the mundane and pedestrian descriptions of the early Spanish explorers. The feeling he experiences is likened to an 'incredible planetary insanity', which is enhanced by the thin mountain air which produces in the narrator a 'mystical dizziness' (p. 272). This description of the mountains, linked to this quasi-extraplanetary experience, is almost hyperbolic: 'the multi-chromatic ribbons of stone, once raised and torn by an unknown force, give the idea that we are to pass through the close intersection of the vertiginous influence of the stars in rotation' (p. 272). After a border check and safe passage to the Chilean side of the Andes, Galván, in an appropriation of the Columbus-like discourse of bounty, finds himself in idyllic awe of the fertile valleys on the Chilean side of the border. He portrays the Chilean lands in terms of their abundance: 'tall and rare wheat, alfalfa green to the point of saturation, and alamo trees, many alamo trees' (p. 273). Thus, although Güiraldes reverts to the image of, and the images created by, European explorers in the Americas, he offers an inverted portrait of the conquistador in Galván by appropriating the subtleties of the conquistador's discourses and inverting the equation of discovery so as to transform it into an act of appropriative (re)discovery.

The narrator's process of geographic reappropriation proceeds as the three travellers slowly progress towards the Chilean coast. There, they are received by what Galván describes as 'the livid clarity of the dawn' over the ocean which greets them as they arrive in Valparaiso, whose 'colony of lights' appear as if they were 'a vague million phosphorescent lights at the bottom of the sea' (p. 280). The reappropriative process thus continues on the Aysen, the ship which carries them on towards Panama, especially in relation to the agricultural plenty that Galván's comments upon arriving in Chile foreshadow. While in port in Coquimbo, Chile for a brief stay, Galván first witnesses the 'green, earthly fertility of the valley' (p. 281) near the port city. The bounty of these fertile lands then appears on the deck of the ship, which has been 'invaded by flowers, fruits and cheeses, in fine baskets' (p. 281), as the local vendors offer a cornucopia of products to the ship's passengers. Once again, Galván returns to the accumulatio to describe the scope of the abundance of their products: 'figs, papayas, cherries, plums, peaches, apricots, cucumbers, carnations' (p. 281).

On a similar visit in the bay at Taltal, Chile, however, Galván's tone changes, denoting a change in mood. Both the narrator and Peñalba feel suffocated by the 'hostile rise of the sterile slopes' (p. 283) that surround the small port city whose arid land 'exists only to maintain its [inhabitants'] bodies on its surface' (p. 283). This characterisation, however, points out a textual nexus between Galván's landscape descriptions and his emotional state. That is, the limited number of negative impressions of Latin American scenery which he experiences are textually linked to the vicissitudes that he experiences in his relationship with his paramour, Clara Ordóñez. In Taltal, he experiences an 'anguished separation' (p. 282) from her and is affected by her emotional distance from him. On an extratextual level, however, these changes in mood are relevant, since they describe the often tortuous relationship between the Latin American home continent and the Latin American cultural elite in general that existed at this period¹⁹.

Yet, Güiraldes offers an important counterpoint to the previous landscape description via the recounting of a brief visit to a carefully protected garden of la Quinta Casela, a 'laborious conjunction of earthly greens' (p. 285) in the northern city of Antofagasta. The experience provokes the following response in the hypersensitive narrator which re-establishes the sense of wonderment that he previously experienced in the Andes: 'For an hour, we ventured through the only gardens to be found in the place, admiring the colorful flowers as if drugged by their toxins, the voluminous legumes, or the trees which are found to be on a satisfactory path of development' (p. 285)²⁰. Later on during the journey, in a consciously reappropriative moment while in a hotel in the city of Colón, Panamá, Galván perceives a fantastic view of the Caribbean, which he describes as an 'immense blue happiness, under a clear-blue sky' (p. 309). In an important intertextual scene, Güiraldes once again repeats the notion of his narrator as a sort of reappropriative Latin American conquistador. As Galván sits in the window of his hotel, he evokes both childhood literary memories of fantastic literature and the novels of chivalry which accompanied the conquistadores to the Americas and shaped their view of the newly discovered lands of the New World: 'I prop myself up in the window so as to seize an impression upon arrival, and delve into the most desirable theme of contemplation. I am faced with one of those images from fantastic works, that left my admiration perplexed as a child' (p. 309). His enthusiasm carries over to their visit to the 'extraordinarily verdant' Jamaica (p. 315), the trio's final destination. Once again, a sensation linking the aesthetic to the telluric is felt by Galván in the heart of a Jamaican valley. In another Columbus-like, although more poetic, moment, the travellers find themselves 'suddenly dwarfed by the silent solitude of the valley, our senses concentrated in the experiencing of its millions of trees, plants and mosses' (p. 317). Thus, Galván appeals anew to the sensory effect of the scenery and the experience which captivates the travellers' sensations. In Galván's own words, 'The Earth drugs us with a broad surge of perfume' (p. 317). The fact that Jamaica is curiously the scene of both Galván's final experience and Columbus's final venture in the Americas is not a point that should be ignored here. On the contrary, Galván's reconquest of the earthly nature of the island, without ulterior motives related to material gain, is another example of how Güiraldes subverts the conquistador attitude of colonising Europeans, both in the early colonial period and during the period in which he wrote, as well as the viaje consumidor of Latin American elites from the mid-nineteenth century through the author's own time period.

Thus, Güiraldes, through his narrator cum Latin American (re)conquist-ador, rediscovers and reconquers Latin America, and manifests this act through a process of textual reappropriation. In other words, Latin America, not Europe, enters into the realm of the aesthetic as a source of artistic inspiration, not material gain. This textual reconquest is not carried out by a European conquistador, but by a Latin American writer who rediscovers that which makes up his world: his home continent, Latin America.

Galván's travels also describe, however, the intricate process of the reacculturation of the Latin American elite as the narrator ventures from one locale to another, reacculturating himself through contact with elements which compose a common set of Latin American cultural baggage. In short, Galván participates in a process of rapprochement with respect to autochthonous Latin American culture. This geocultural reapproximation, however, takes on increasingly dialectical proportions when inserted into the anti-imperialist discourse, vis-à-vis both Britain and the United States.

Although contact with specific Latin American people and cultural elements is limited up to the stay of the trio of Galván, Ordóñez, and Peñalba in Chile, an unexpected automobile breakdown between Santiago and Valparaiso leads to a fortuitous rediscovery of the simple pleasures of local culture, a fact which distances them from the European culture that characterises the cosmopolitan Buenos Aires in which they live. In the provincial town of Curacaví, the three travellers, who are awaiting the arrival of replacement vehicles for their trip to the coast, journey out into the night air after dinner. They find themselves immersed in a place from another time that exhales 'the subtle aroma of an unreal, centenary remembrance' (p. 278). The travellers are captivated by the sounds of distant music that comes from a voice 'which sings out a simple and measured air, that ventures out from a window like an uncontainable, tender word' (p. 278). They are thus provoked, by an intimate impulse, to seek out the music's source for they want to see the cueca that they have heard and savoured be danced. However, as they take up a voyeuristic stance to peer into the home from which the music emanates and spy a 'presumptuous young man, with a... young girl' (p. 278) who are dancing the cueca, the sound of their 'Buenos Aires shoes', a clear reference to the travellers' cosmopolitan nature, startles the musician and dancers into silence. Their continued march through the streets is interrupted, however, by the narrator's description of a group of musicians who, arriving for a musical celebration in a local family home, envelop the three urban travellers in 'laughter and exclamations' (p. 279). As the singers and dancers of the caravan say goodbye, Gal van brings to a close this cultural scene from yesteryear with yet another cosmic reference: 'The musical murmurs die off in the distance with the benevolence of a celestial shower. The night returns to cloak the simple locale with its vast calm, and the homes allow lunar rays to once again penetrate their walls with phosphorescent passiveness' (p. 280). The narrator's depiction of beloved local customs thus serves as a textual record of a simpler, purer era that is (re)discovered by Galván, Ordóñez, and Peñalba via their journey.

Galván's process of cultural reawakening proceeds as the excursion continues on the Arisen. However, the events that the narrator describes begin to reveal a burgeoning and conspicuous anti-imperialist discourse in Xaimaca, written not long after the inauguration of the Panama Canal and during the First World War²¹. In fact, the position that Güiraldes takes in this novel with respect to the extension of imperialist control in the Americas by Great Britain and the United States, rampant at that chronological juncture, points to the growing abyss that opened between what was later to be called the First World and the Third World in the post-World War I era. As the Aysen journeys towards Panama, the three passengers witness an altercation which breaks out between an English seaman and an indigenous Peruvian woman on board to sell her wares during a brief stopover in port. In Galván's words, which carry a great amount of ironic weight as they describe the sailor's actions and reflect the author's characterisation of his perceived attitude, the sailor pushes the Indian woman 'with all the rudeness that the superiority of his race permits him' (p. 298)²². Galván's ironic stance with regards to the sailor's perceived thoughts of supposed superiority takes the form of a manifestation of the civilisation/barbarism dichotomy so prevalent in Latin American letters. For Galván, in the mind of the English seaman 'Only the rejects... come late to civilisation and it is good to dictate authority with a big stick' (p. 298), an obvious reference to Theodore Roosevelt's famous dictum on international diplomacy²³. Güiraldes's ideological position on the Englishman's actions is seen in the following statement from the old woman in the use of an anti-imperialist ethnic epithet: 'disgusting gringos' (298). However, the incident also prompts the author to reflect in more depth upon Europe, the United States and imperialist ideology via his narrator, which locates him with respect to his own cultural and ethnic identity and ideology. In a reference to Incan and Spanish colonial history, Galván writes: 'Atahualpa must have thought the same when faced with the greed that made gold out of his gods' (p. 298). In continuation, he -not unlike Güiraldes who identified greatly with the telluric forces of his native Argentine culture even in the light of his frequent travels to Europe- sees that he shares 'some common roots' (p. 299) with the Incan ruler. In a diachronic moment, he relates the abuses of the Spaniards during the conquest to the underlying reasons that lead to the First World War: 'my current sentiments lead me to think of the utilitarian culture that is making Europe abort itself in blood, with hatred' (p. 298-9). Therefore, in the author's mind, there is a common element in both the Spanish conquest and the 'war to end all wars': they are a testament to utilitarian greed with dire cultural consequences.

A similar observation that binds indigenous culture to Güiraldes's anti-imperialist thought appears when the ship traverses the Panama Canal Zone, seen as the principal representation of U. S. imperialism in Latin America. Here Galván inverts the execution of Atahualpa at the hands of the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1533 -death by dismemberment of the corporal extremities- by inverting the operative dialectical terms that are the symbol of imperialism: the docking Aysen, and the executed Incan ruler. Turning the English ship into an object at the will of the slain indigenous leader, Galván writes: 'The ship is held subject on all four sides, as if it were to place itself at Atahualpa's mercy' (p. 305). As an extension of this theme, Güiraldes portrays the Canal Zone as a sign of the destructive imperialist process. Its construction makes the Panamanian countryside become a barren wasteland, a 'strange landscape of sadness', where 'Through the vast flooded regions, a forest of barren trees extends: an army of standing skeletons, whose last bones rot in the humidity' (p. 306). The construction of the continental passage has created a 'Botanical Necropolis that extends for kilometres' (p. 306). Galván's response to the strident nature of the locus he surveys, the busy Canal Zone which represents utilitarian modernisation, is the urgency of flight: 'Given that it was impossible for us to remain enslaved by the brutality of the iron and gears, which chew at the prevailing silence with a strident nature, we fled in search of greater calm' (p. 307). The main symbol of U. S. imperialism, the Canal Zone, is therefore reduced by Güiraldes's highly sensorial narrator to the role of an agent of destruction, imposed upon Latin America by foreign interests in the name of global capitalist expansion.

Their tour of Kingston, Jamaica, extends this anti-imperialist discourse by linking it to the temporal reality that is the First World War. The European hostilities require the immediate embarkation of Afro-Jamaican soldiers, a point that neither the narrator nor Güiraldes misses. In a violent characterisation that foreshadows and places blame for the contingent's ultimate demise, Galván states that 'From the Port of Kingston, where the palm trees are decapitated by the wind, the Fifth Jamaican Contingent departs for the European war' (p. 322). For the Jamaican soldiers who have only played war games as part of their basic training, 'The game of "Toy Soldier" has concluded in an anguish-laden reality' (p. 322). In a curious textual ex-abrupto, Galván points out that the war, the product of capitalist arms makers from apparently civilised metropolitan nations, will lead only to destruction: 'Destiny already points to the brutal combat of the civilised nations, avid as merchants of power and riches. There will the fields, ploughed by the iron forged for death, be laid barren' (pp. 322-3). In addition, Galván, replete with irony, points out an important dialectical distinction between the metropolis and the periphery. This war will radically affect the lives of the peripheral colonials who will be forced to fight and die in a metropolitan battle that is not of their making. Their destiny, death, is almost sure as 'projectiles will make red liquid of the mass of black muscles' (p. 333) that make up the Jamaican bodies. In like manner, the calm that will remain after the war is over will be at the expense of the Jamaican soldiers' extinguished lives: 'The silence that surrounds them will be the eternal silence of the Jamaican contingent' (pp. 332-3). In other words, Güiraldes points out that the supposedly 'barbaric' Jamaican soldiers are nothing more than cannon fodder for 'civilised' European warlords who are thirsty for material progress, even at the expense of numerous innocent lives.

Therefore, as in the case of the hitherto studied textual reappropriation which Güiraldes carries out in Xaimaca, one can also perceive the existence of the notion of reacculturation in this work. However, as the previous examples demonstrate, this process goes well beyond a simple reacquaintance with colourful local customs in quaint and remote provincial hamlets. It also extends to the work's ideological plane where the anti-imperialist discourse operates to convert the text into an ideological foreboding vis-à-vis the relevance and survival of autochthonous culture. Thus, through Galván's travel diary, Güiraldes not only shows an appreciation for the traditional culture of Latin America, but also acts as a voice that clarifies and warns of the dangers of an ever present threat from imperial powers which will radically change the nature of Latin American and Latin American culture if given the chance.

In his early 1970s reflections on Argentina in the essay 'The Return of Eva Perón', the Nobel Laureate and post-colonial writer from Trinidad, V. S. Naipaul, comments that: 'To be Argentine was not to be South American. It was to be European; and many Argentines became European, of Europe. The land that was the source of their wealth became no more than their base... Between the wars there was a stable Argentine community of 100,000 in Paris; the peso was the peso then'²⁴. Notwithstanding the truth that is found in this statement, a clarification in the case of Ricardo Güiraldes, frequently a member of that same Argentine expatriate community in Paris, must be made since he was most definitely an ardent Latin American and defender of all things Latin American²⁵.

As seen through this particular reading of Xaimaca, Güiraldes uses the travel genre not to condone or support the traditional bourgeois Latin American journey of acculturation to Europe so common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and so recognised in Naipaul's declaration. On the contrary, here he demonstrates, via the words, reactions, and emotions of his narrator, his own process of continental reappropriation and reacculturation, a fact that was recognised by his readership and his own convictions²⁶. In other words, through his text, he shows other members of the Latin American elite the validity of the process of reappropriation and reacculturation vis-à-vis the autochthonous. This underlying discursive project results in an invitation to discover -or to rediscover- the local, the national, the continental, not just necessarily the metropolitan which operates in such hegemonic form. Güiraldes, therefore, demystifies the fin-de-siècle journey of cultural consumption to Europe, suggesting an important revisiting of both Latin America and Latin American culture through a process of reappropriation and reacculturation in the wake of the First World War.

This revisiting of the autochthonous in Güiraldes's novel can also be seen as another important step towards his own personal avant-garde aesthetic, his Cencerro de cristal being the first²⁷. In the aftermath of the First World War, which horrified the author, as seen in his 'Notas sobre la Guerra Europea'²⁸, Güiraldes sought ever more to promote an autochthonous vision of an autochthonous América in his work. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in his Don Segundo Sombra, where the development of his own aesthetic can be seen while highlighting the domestic -and rural- cultural contexts, not the borrowed European culture seen in Buenos Aires. In fact, as he states in an essay published in Proa, 'We are, I have heard, a nation of swallows; we wait for everything to be said and done abroad because we have money to buy it. Many who differ with regards to this criterion exist and would like to dignify our America making it give whatever it can as a continent, as a nation, and as individuals' (p. 679). Güiraldes most definitely sought to dignify the Américas in his cultural production and as editor of one of the period's most influential literary magazines. Likewise, as this analysis has proven, his Xaimaca is more than just the narration of a simple journey. It is also a fitting message to the Latin American cultural elite in terms of the important task of fomenting a necessary cultural repositioning as a whole in Latin America, of a broader de-centring of Latin American cultural production in particular, and of the creation of a new continental aesthetic in the vast 'contact zone' that the Américas continue to be.