By the end of the 19th century, successive waves of immigration had
modified the booming Argentine society at a vertiginous pace,
violently shaking its structures. The undesired side effects of the
massive immigrant flow forced readjustments in the free-thinking,
free-enterprise, liberal line of thought, pursued until then by the
aristocratic but progessive ruling classes. The contradictions in
their ideology surfaced, steering official discourse towards an
often xenophobic, racist, conservative and defensive stance. Within
this context of socio-political skepticism boiling underneath the
euphoria of material progress, a small group of gentlemen-writers
of the 1980s started to question the decadence caused by the lust
for luxury mixed with hypocrisy and speculation, which they viewed
as foreshadowing disaster. Eugenio Cambaceres belonged to this
first generation of the liberal ruling class gifted with a clear
awareness of the predicament that threatened them, and, in 1887, in
the midst of the liberal apotheosis brought by the Juarez Celman
administration, his finely honed class-conservation instincts led
him to write En la sangre, a novel that clearly describes patrician
distrust towards immigration, portraying the
"criollo"oligarchy-controlled spaces as stolen or lost. Genaro
Piazza, the "son of a Neapolitan tinker," is the novel's main
character, but stigmatized right from the beginning he becomes a
source of infectious disease within the plot. Cambaceres makes no
attempt to conceal his hatred of his own character, and adorns him
with all the stereotypes of the social climbing immigrant, so often
depicted in 80s argentine elite paranoia, and which continued to
figure in the country's nationalistic thought in the 20th century.
En la sangre is a loud and sustained cry, an active attempt to
rouse and activate the elite class, pampered and put to sleep by
the achievements of General Julio A. Roca and his successors. Using
techniques of naturalism, Cambaceres reveals his central character
as fraudulent, an illegitimate being that an ill chain of events
made heir to the Argentine oligarchy. The anticlimatic effect is
intended to convey a double lesson. It forces reexamination of the
liberal principles whose excess condemns the dominant class to its
own destruction; and at the same time lays the foundations of a
substitute myth, aristocratic and defensive, built upon a common
base of exclusion, homogeneity and self righteousness as a
privileged racial and social group. As in many other 19th century
novels this self centered point of view should hardly surprise us.
On the contrary, at almost the same time and as a gesture copied
from literature, Latin American politic liberal discourse showed
the same inclination as Cambaceres to recycle the old liberal
principles into new positivist molds, and to point out in the
"others" the same transvestism embodied by Genaro Piazza in En la
sangre. This edition of the disturbing novel En la sangre, with an
introductory essay and notes by Mara Eugenia Mudrovcic, would be
very interesting and provocative reading for both Latin American
Literature and Social Studies courses.
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