Ideological shift in the rural images in Florencio Sánchez's theater

David William Foster

Florencio Sánchez (1875-1910) may, with little exaggeration, be called the first professional dramatist of International stature of modern, post independence Latin America (Cruz), it is a commonplace of Latin American literary history that drama is the forgotten genre and that few scholars have anything more than a passing acquaintance with the major figures and their accomplishments. This is due in part to the fact that drama in Latin America is more closely identified with the theater than it is in the United States and is not customarily studied as a genre of literature: Spanish has no Shakespeare to have solidly allied theater with literature, at least in academic programs, and the inaccessibility of Spanish-language theater to American studies has contributed to its remoteness and lack of study in the United States.

But whatever these practical and historical considerations may be, the relative inattention to the contributions of theater in Latin America does not derive from either a spotty record of theatrical achievements or the absence of distinguished theater people. Even before the emergence of Sanchez's work, there was a well-defined tradition in important cultural centers. It is true that, during the period of Spanish colonial domination, theatrical activity was concentrated in the viceregal centers of Mexico City, Lima, and Bogota, with varying degrees of lesser activity in Havana, San Juan, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. Early efforts were related to the medieval tradition of the miracle and mystery plays and their Renaissance derivatives. But by the late sixteenth and certainly throughout the seventeenth centuries, works echoed the stunning achievements of Spanish Baroque theater. One of the four major dramatists of Spain's Golden Age theater was the Mexican Juan Ruiz de Alarcón (1580-1639).

Nevertheless, during the flourishing of Latin American theater in the nineteenth century -a flourishing Sánchez was to build upon in the case of Buenos Aires- theater emerged not only as an important form of public entertainment, but as a reliable barometer of the new republican societies. It is one of the ironies of Latin American history that Buenos Aires, a city that during the colonial period was a cultural and social backwater, quickly emerged after 1850 as the most aggressively creative center of Latin America. Not only did Argentina have the most concentrated development of Romanticism in Latin America, but in all spheres of cultural activity, Buenos Aires stood out as a dominant force. The original Teatro Colón opera house dates from 1855, and the emergence of various types of theater houses dates from the same period.

By the time Florencio Sánchez arrived in Buenos Aires from his native Uruguay immediately after the turn of the century, theater was solidly established as an integral part of the cultural life of the city, and Argentine drama continues to this day to constitute, both in the original works by Argentine dramatists and the many productions of foreign works, the measuring stick of Latin American theatrical activity.

Sánchez's specific contribution, within this context, was to bring together a number of the concerns of early twentieth-century Argentina drama: the need for a professional theater that would appeal to the emerging, very wealthy bourgeoisie, the need for a dramatic art that would go beyond picture-postcard local color in order to analyze seriously the sociocultural patterns still in the process of definition, and -perhaps most significant- the need to create national works that could assimilate with some measure of originality the trends of Realism and Naturalism of already established international figures like Eugene O'Neill, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Maxim Gorki. Sánchez was able to fulfill all of these needs with an impressive burst of exemplary creativity in the first decade of the century (Ramírez).

Some information concerning Sánchez's life and career is necessary in order to contextualize his theatrical contributions. Sánchez was the oldest of twelve children born to a typically middle-class Uruguayan Creole family during a time of sociopolitical instability. He pursued elementary studies in public and private schools, and by the time he was fourteen, in 1889, Sánchez was working as a clerk in a government office. By 1991 he was publishing journalistic essays in La voz del pueblo of Minas, Uruguay, under the pseudonym Jack. These articles are satirical in nature and directed against the bureaucracy of which he was a wage-earning member. In the same year Sánchez composed his first drama and became involved in amateur theatricals.

Although Sánchez lost his job in 1892, worked for a time in another agency, and lost that job in 1894, he became more and more active in this period in both journalism and the theater, and in 1894 he began working full-time in Montevideo as a reporter first for El siglo and then for La razón. During the latter years of the 1890s, Sánchez was involved in political activities and uprisings in the struggle for governmental power; these activities obliged him to reside briefly in Argentina, and by 1898 he had installed himself in that country, where he worked for several newspapers as a reporter and editorial assistant. At the same time, Sánchez established extensive contacts with the literary, theatrical and generally bohemian groups in Buenos Aires. When Sánchez lost his job in 1902 with the newspaper La república, he was ready to embark full-time on the theatrical career that would lead him to write and produce over a dozen major plays by the end of the decade. This dramatic activity corresponded with a groundswell of theatrical creativity on the part of Argentine writers.

In 1909 President Williman of Uruguay appointed Sánchez as that country's delegate to an international art exposition in Rome, and Sánchez set sail from Buenos Aires and Montevideo with full honors as a cultural dignitary. However, by the time he arrived in Italy he was already sick, although he pursued a feverish course of contacts with Italian theatrical people, attended performances of plays, and entered into negotiations for the translation and production of his own works; in addition, he composed several new dramas. By the end of the year, his tuberculosis had advanced to the hopeless stage, although he insisted on traveling in Italy; denied lodging in a hotel in Milan because of his sickness, he died in a hospital in that city on November 7. His remains were returned to Montevideo and were received with full honors. His catafalque was put on display in Montevideo's Teatro Solls before final burial in the Panteón Nacional Thus, the theatricality of Sánchez's death echoed eloquently the role he had played in the development of an international Latin American dramatic voice.

Without intending to suggest exclusive categories, we may say that Sánchez's works manifest two major groups of interest. On the one hand, there are those works that focus on the problem of cultural identification in Argentina, especially the impact on traditional ways of life of both the economic exploitation of the Pampas and the arrival of waves of European immigrants (principally Italians and Jews). By contrast, but completing Sánchez's concern for recording the social life of his day, there are the works that examine the concerns of the dominant Buenos Aires middle class in the best tradition of Ibsenian Naturalism. Although these latter works, especially Los derechos de la salud (1907) on the devastating effects of alcoholism, are important documents in understanding the sociocultural preoccupations of early twentieth-century Argentine drama, the former works are generally considered Sánchez's most lasting contribution. At least, these are the works that customarily are used to define his major contributions and that are most frequently anthologized. Among them, in turn, none is more favored than La gringa (1904). This play is complemented by works dealing both with particular socially-defined theses, like the conflict between traditional and modern ways of life (M'hijo el dotor [1903]) and with the tragic dimensions of people who theretofore had only been dealt with in a romantic and idealizing fashion (Barranca abajo [1905]). The difference in ideological underpinnings between these two famous plays of Florencio Sánchez examined in this essay is particularly valuable in signaling the transition between mythification and critical revaluation of beliefs about Argentine rural society.

La gringa was first performed in 1904. The title is the feminine form of gringo, the term used in Argentina and Uruguay to designate an immigrant of Italian origin; gringo may be used in both a neutral or even endearing fashion or as an ethnic slur, like the English «Wop» (although the word may be related to the English «Gringo», the pejorative term attributed to Latin Americans to describe Americans, it obviously bears no semantic similarity). To a great extent, La gringa is the one Sánchez play that enjoys greatest identification with his career in Argentina, and it has become a venerable chestnut for stock companies. Moreover, during the period in which awareness in the United States of Latin America and the teaching of Latin American literature relied on works dealing with putatively charming local issues of a popular of folkloristic nature, La gringa enjoyed considerable diffusion as a school text. In a certain sense, the study of La gringa by both Argentines and foreigners because of its local-color value concerning the comic dimensions of Italian immigration in Argentina has obscured the very real dramatic value of the text. More on this in a moment.

But, despite all of its circumstantial popularity, La gringa is perhaps Sánchez's least typical play. Whereas the bulk of his works deal in the manner of Eugene O'Neill or Henrik Ibsen with social situations in which a naturalistic fatum assumes tragically destructive proportions, La gringa is truly a comedy in the sense both that it has a happy ending and that it looks toward the satisfactory resolution of a specific problem. Its thesis -and it is one of Sánchez's most overtly thesis plays- is that, in spite of the profound cultural differences separating the Gaucho Creoles and the recently arrived Italian immigrants, harmony will be achieved between them, and the result will be a better society derived from the melding of the two initially antagonists stocks (Onega 177-179).

Thus, in the tradition of classical comedy, stability in human relationships will be restored. Yet, it is precisely because of this ringing sentiment toward which the play works that it is so popular. Modern Argentina has become a society in which few citizens have Spanish ancestry, and many are the children and grandchildren of immigrants. As a consequence, La gringa has come to be viewed as one of the most positive treatments of one of the major topics in the country's social history. Since it is a topic that, at least in terms of how Sánchez treats it, presents no challenge to political dissention in the country (as do many of the other major works on the theme, like the dramas of Armando Discépolo [1887-1971] or the novels of Manuel Gálvez [1882-1963]), it has not suffered from the controversies surrounding the latter.

The Liberal government controlling national institutions opened the country up to massive foreign immigration around 1880. The politicians responsible for this policy were the natural heirs of the anti-Spanish freemasons who had engineered Argentine independence. Sixty years previously, and they had two very specific goals in mind: 1) to populate the vast territorial expanse of the country, thereby driving the scattered indigenous population off the Pampas for good and providing the emergent agricultural and manufacturing industries with a larger pool of cheap labor, and 2) to «revitalize» the Creole stock of Spanish descent through the infusion of allegedly harder-working foreign elements. During the next fifty years, Argentina made a dramatic transition from an essentially rural and sparsely populated country to one of the world's most thoroughly immigrant societies; Buenos Aires became one of the world's major urban demographic concentrations, and by the end of the period Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, alarmed over the monster the Paris of the Southern Hemisphere had become, called it a Goliath's head in one of his famous social essays.

Italians, Jews, Germans, Spaniards, Arabs, and a wide assortment of other ethnic and national groups flocked to Argentina, with the result that an awesome array of social problems arose that the originators of the immigration policy had never contemplated and that their descendents were incapable of addressing. In terms of the complex society that has resulted from such a policy and the image projected by La gringa barely twenty years after the Hotel de Inmigrantes (Buenos Aires's equivalent of Ellis island) began receiving newcomers, the contradiction could not be more eloquent. It is as though O'Nell's Desire under the Elms were written with a Happy Days ending. Although Gauchos and Italians did in fact learn to live in harmony, the rosy future prophesied by Sánchez's play is unquestionably disconsonant with Argentine social history (Argentina, la otra patria present a fairly nostalgic view of the Italian community in early twentieth-century Argentina). Such an assessment, in turns only serves to underscore further the way in which La gringa differs from Sánchez's other plays.

La gringa concerns the conflict between the families of Don Nicola Cantalicio González, the latter a crusty old Gaucho who evinces the dirt-poor circumstances in which rural Argentines often continue to live to the present day. Indeed, even for the Buenos Aires theatergoers of 1904, González's way of life must have seemed remote from the bustling ways of the capitalist city. His antagonist is Don Nicola, a hard-working Italian Immigrant who has taken seriously the opportunity offered him by his new homeland to work the land and to achieve a level of prosperity that was only a dream in the old country. The juxtaposition of these two individuals and their respective families allows Sánchez considerable range in the portrayal of the texture of day-to-day existence (Castillo) in the sets and costumes called for, in the various sociolinguistic registers of the characters (Don Nicola barely speaks Spanish and mixes many elements of Italian with what little Spanish he knows, a stock form of humor on the Argentine stage of the period, a la Hyman Kaplan, called cocoliche), and in the continual clash over different value systems, the play evolves by conscientiously exploiting the dramatic possibilities inherent in the confrontation of irreconcilable opposites:

If La gringa derives its dramatic substance from the conflicts between the range of both the human types and the topical conflicts around which the play is constructed (cf. in particular pp. 135-136). Although La gringa is meaningful in terms of the triumph of young love in the face of parental or social opposition and in terms of the sort of racial and ethnic conflict rife in the world, Sánchez's drama acquires special resonance when it can be viewed in the context of the social history evoked by details of texture appropriate to a work of turn-of-the-century Realism as regards language, physical aspect, and interpersonal behavior.

It would be difficult to attribute any real subtlety to La gringa's plot. Yet there is no question that it attests to Sánchez's firm control over the creative possibilities of dramatic art. In this sense, it would be difficult to confuse La gringa with the sort of soft-headed upbeat sitcoms and Hollywood movies dealing with racial and ethnic conflict that are an American dramatic norm. The synecdochal conflict of the play, the one that brings to a head the hostility and anger that separate the two protagonists, concerns Don Nicola's plan to fell a venerable ombú as part of the expansion of his planted fields. The ombú is a bush that, on the desolate, treeless Pampas, grows to enormous proportions and serves as a shade tree. For the Gaucho it is one of the most prized of his cultural symbols. In La gringa it assumes virtually anthropomorphic dimensions and, to Cantalicio, its loss is like that of the death of a venerable family member: «¡Dañinos!... Lo único, lo único... de lo mío que entoavía puedo ver es ese ombú... Pero ché... ¿Y por qué lo están podando así?...» (152).

By contrast, for Don Nicola the ombú is merely a nuisance, not even good for firewood, and his assault on it comes to represent in the play the inability of the immigrant to fathom the significance of Creole cultural symbols, just as Cantalicio cannot understand the intensity with which the Italian pursues his development of the land for farming. Around references to the ombú, stately in Cantalicio's eyes but a hindrance in Don Nicola's, Sánchez constructs the major conflict of his play, one that underscores the apparently unbridgeable abyss between the two men and that will only be overcome through the healing love between Próspero and Victoria. As one of Don Nicola's sons says, prophesying the prosperity and victory of the now age, «¡Mire qué linda pareja!... Hija de gringos puros... hijo de criollos puros... hijo de criollos puros... De ahí va a salir la raza fuerte del porvenir...» (166). The final curtain falls quickly after these words.

It is difficult not to speak of La gringa today without seeming to parody or caricaturize it because the play is so unrelentingly optimistic in the resolution of its basic conflicts. Yet, it is a solidly structured play and represents a challenge to the actors to play their parts in an authentically realistic rather than superficially local-color fashion. The challenge extends equally to the spectator: to see it not as propaganda for a specific Argentine sociopolitical ideology (one that has, in retrospect, been widely discredited), but as a component of Sánchez's professional desire to use the stage for the realistic depiction of authentic social problems. It is in this sense that La gringa remains an integral part of Sánchez's dramatic canon and one of the most representative plays of early Latin American dramatic art.

By the time Sánchez presented Barranca abajo in 1905, the Argentine Gaucho had become a national myth. José Hernández's epic (some would say pseudoepic) poem Martín Fierro (1872) was the first major literary document in a Romantic process that converted the nomadic cowboy of the Pampas into a mythic figure of both the Hispanic, Creole past and the fading hegemony of premodern rural society. If it is true that the cowboy immortalized in the Hollywood films of the thirties and forties never really existed, the Gaucho of these literary works is equally a fabrication, which is not meant to diminish either the sincerity of their authors or the cultural efficacy of such symbols.

In the context of the glorification of the Gaucho as the noble innocent and the quintessence of all that is authentically vital in the Argentine national character, Sánchez's play is frankly shocking. The protagonist of the play, Don Zoilo, may project a long-suffering nobility, but it is clear that his suicide at the end of the play is the relinquishment of leadership in his microcosmic society. The name Zoilo is symbolic. It is derived from Zoilus, the Greek rhetorician known for the implacable severity of his criticism. Don Zoilo, throughout the play, is shown as a detached, disdainful and unyielding critic of the social chaos he observes around him. His daughters are nagging shrews, his wife a stupid schemer, and his neighbors rapacious exploiters. If the play sets out to reconstruct with naturalistic idolity the setting, costumes, and language of the rural citizenry, it becomes immediately apparent that, despite the accuracy of the dramatic voices with which they speak, the characters of Barranca abajo are unwitting beliers of the sociocultural myths of the Gaucho. Only Zoilo and his persecuted, tubercular daughter Robustiana (her name is an ironic play on the adjective «robust») evince any form of decent consideration for others, and they serve as allies against the self-serving designs of their fellow human beings. When Robustiana dies, Zoilo is able to see in suicide the only release from the oppressiveness of his antiedenic existence.

Perhaps the most artful strategy Sánchez employs is the interplay between loquaciousness and silence. If the majority of the characters attest to the colorful patter stereotypically associated with rural society (the opening scene where mother and daughters are busy ironing and otherwise attending to their pampered persons is particularly eloquent), Don Zoilo defies the attempts of the other characters to engage in phatic conversation. He ignores their questions, mutters, hums, and otherwise behaves distractedly in a denial of language that is symptomatic of the breakdown in social structure his anomie in turn is intended to signify:

Barranca abajo functions as an implicit denial of the Garden of Eden topos of romantic Gaucho myths. It is clear that Zoilo's household and the society beyond it are the result of a fall, the degradation of the ennobling solidarity the Gaucho was supposed to represent. But unlike Hernandez's poem, where a similar evocation of the Fall from Grace is given a positive interpretation in terms of modern Argentina (in the second part of the poem published in 1879), Sánchez's play suggests that the Cato-like suicide of Zoilo is the only nobility left the Gaucho, the irrevocable denial of the tragic forces of his degradation: «y cuando ese disgraciao, cuando ese vijo Zoilo, cansao, deshacho, inútil pa todo, sin una esperanza, loco de vergüenza y de sufrimientos, resuelve acabar de una vez con tanta inmudicia de vida, todos corren a atajarlo. ¡No se mate, que la vida es güena! ¿Güena pa qué?» (213). Barranca abajo is one of Sánchez's most eloquent plays, an the elaboration of Zoilo's inexorable fatum is undertaken with an impressive command of dramatic resources. The play acquires special importance in its skillful use of a larger repertory of classic and Christian allusions, especially in juxtaposing its own set of interpretations of those allusions with the more sentimental ones of established sociocultural myths, thereby providing a merciless deconstruction of the latter in a way that La gringa avoids entirely with its facile patriotic sentiment.

• Cruz, Jorge. Genio y figura de Florencio Sánchez. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1966.
• Graña, María Cecilia. «Buenos Aires en la imaginación del 80. El teatro como paradigma». Letteratre d'America, 4, 16 (Winter 1983), 89-121.
• Lonega, Gladys. La inmigración en la literatura argentina. 1880-1910. Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1969.
• Ramírez, Manuel D. «Florencio Sánchez and His Social Consciousness of the River Plate Region». Journal of Inter-American Studies 8 (1966): 585-594.
• Sánchez, Florencio. Teatro completo Florencio Sánchez: veinte piezas seguidas de otras páginas del autor compiladas y anotadas por Dardo Cúneo. Buenos Aires: Caridad, 1953.
• Viñas, David. «Florencio Sánchez y la revolución de los intelectuales», pp. 138-162. In his Literatura argentina y realidad política: apogeo de la oligarquía. Buenos Aires: Siglo Viente, 1975.