National Symbol : Spirit of the Gaucho Calls to Argentines

“There is high enjoyment in the independence of the gaucho life--to be able at any moment to pull up your horse and say, ‘Here we will pass the night.”’

--Charles Darwin, 1833

A man from the city offered to buy Ricardo Villega’s gaucho belt, knife, spurs and bridle a while back for $2,000, nearly twice what Villega earns in a year. He said no.

In so many words, Villega explained that his memories and his heritage have no price.

The grizzled, 62-year-old Villega was among 1,200 modern-day gauchos who gathered in this prairie town one recent Sunday. As they celebrated their past, they also served notice that the 1880s obituaries for the gaucho were premature.

Argentines have spent more than a century lamenting the passing of the gaucho, an untamed version of the cowboy who once roamed the verdant countryside and unwittingly helped to bind Argentina into a nation.

Cruel Barbed Wire

Odes to the gaucho command the most revered niches in Argentina’s literature and culture, often recalling the cruel role of barbed wire in fencing in the plains and ending the gaucho’s nomad ways.

On National Tradition Day last month, modern gauchos donned their distinctive garb--floppy felt hats, baggy pants tucked into soft-soled horsehide boots--for displays of unrivaled horsemanship, country songs and meals around the campfire. For these men, the gaucho’s skills and traditions remain very much alive.

Few gauchos now are as elegantly wild as those encountered by naturalist Charles Darwin during his travels with gauchos through the Argentine countryside in 1833. Gauchos, Darwin said, looked like “they would cut your throat and make a bow at the same time.”

Their mores and way of life have changed. Villega receives a government pension--$97 a month--and lives in a house, not under the stars. Most of the gauchos who gathered in San Antonio de Areco, 70 miles west of Buenos Aires, came aboard rented flatbed trucks; only a few still found the time to make the trek on horseback, as tradition once dictated.

Still Drive Cattle

Yet the men still make a living driving cattle, breaking horses and generating the rural wealth that propelled Argentina into the ranks of the 10 richest countries in the world for a time, early in this century.

Urbane, aristocratic portenos , the people of the port city of Buenos Aires more often look to Europe than to their own interior for their roots. The gaucho is an exception to this world view, a symbol of national identity.

Like their forebears, gauchos still mourn the incursions of modernity. These days it is electrified fences, the modern version of barbed wire, that worry them. And they worry that the traditions are fading, even as younger gauchos learn the old ways.

For the past 34 years, Villega has turned up each November in San Antonio de Areco for the horseback parade and competitions in bronco busting, herding and dress. This year the town charged admission--70 cents. At the customary asado, a vast barbecue of beef and innards, the gauchos, in the tradition of their predecessors, shunned plates and forks, slicing chunks of meat from the roasts and eating it from the points of their knives.

A few thousand people, including some city folk and a few foreigners, but mostly families, came to watch the ceremonial march in front of the pink, colonial-era town hall in the tree-shaded central plaza and the contests in a huge paddock on the edge of town.

Dignified Event

There was nary a souvenir stand, not a single attempt to commercialize what for these people is a dignified and serious event, laden with significance.

Villega, a lifelong ranch hand and horse trader, began fashioning his belt nearly 40 years ago, painstakingly attaching coins from Bolivia, Uruguay and more distant lands to the broad band of black leather. From time to time, he adds a new coin. Like most gaucho belts, it is a work of art in progress.

His late brother gave him his gaucho knife, a finely worked 18-inch-long silver blade in an adorned scabbard. In gaucho fashion, he keeps it tucked into his belt behind his back, ready if needed.

“We are from a gaucho family. My father taught me to work the country. I have many memories of him that are worth a lot to me,” Villega said. “I’d rather keep these things for my sons and grandsons.”

Gauchos were long regarded as anarchic, filthy vagabonds, prone to drink and quick with their knives. Often of mixed Spanish and Indian blood, they surfaced in the late 17th Century and dominated the pampas, or humid plains, for more than 100 years. They were adept with their lassos and boleadoras , a weapon made of three stones lashed together with leather strips that was thrown at the legs of their prey at full gallop. They gambled by throwing cow knuckle bones, and they sang ditties around the fire.

Darwin marveled at their skills, which he never matched. At a trot, he managed to entangle his own horse’s legs in the boleadora and bring himself down.

Gauchos were often enlisted by the caudillos , rural warlords who fended off the central government in the years after Argentina’s independence in 1810.

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an educator who later became president, wrote viciously of the gauchos in 1842. He quoted Sir Walter Scott’s earlier description: “A sort of Christian savages called gauchos whose principal furniture is the skull of horses, whose only food is raw beef and water . . . and whose chief amusement is to ride wild horses to death.”

But in 1872, Jose Hernandez published the first part of his epic poem, “The Gaucho Martin Fierro,” which became a treasured literary work, mourning the fencing of the land by settlers:

“And this is my pride: to live as free

as the bird that cleaves the sky;

I build no nest on this careworn earth,

Where sorrow is long, and short is mirth,

And when I am gone none will grieve for me,

And none care where I lie.”

Until then, gauchos were dismissed with remarks like that in La Prensa, an influential newspaper, which said the poem captured “the customs and details, however insignificant but always curious, of the gaucho’s way of life.”

Nostalgia for Gauchos

But the hugely popular “Martin Fierro” generated nostalgia for the gaucho, as well as respect for his struggle to resist being hemmed in and becoming simply a hired hand.

In a much-loved 1926 novel, “Don Segundo Sombra,” Ricardo Guiraldes wrote of an orphan boy who attaches himself to an old gaucho and discovers the ways of the land. Then the boy learns that his father was a wealthy man who left him a huge ranch.

“I am a gaucho and want to be free. I shall be a proprietor, but a proprietor of what? Of a piece of land?” the boy asks old Don Segundo. “I, who have conquered the whole pampas by my endurance. I shall no longer be a gaucho.”

Guiraldes’ estancia (ranch) was in San Antonio de Areco, and the real Don Segundo, who lived there, became a national figure, to his own disgust. The estate now is the site of a tasteful gaucho museum and of the annual gaucho festivities.

The museum’s director, Martha Smith, said that most of the examples of silver spurs, round leather stirrups and other gaucho items have been loaned by local families, who began arriving in 1635. The museum opened in 1938, and the first festival was held a year later, for local people only.

“Even though much has changed, and barbed wire has fenced in the country, the people haven’t changed that much. They still preserve their traditions,” she said. Referring to the gauchos who attend, she added: “These are people with little money, people who live humbly. They still enjoy sitting around a campfire, playing guitars and dancing.”

The oldest gaucho present was “El Mosco” Perreira, 84. His son sang at the campfire on the evening before the public events, when only the gauchos themselves were present.

“The roots of Argentines are still in question. Politically, it is a country that is still at blows,” Smith said. “There were Italian immigrants, Spanish, English--they didn’t share a nationality. This makes it difficult for us to have a true national conscience. So when we speak of the fogon (campfire), of the chacarera (gaucho folk dance), this is our Argentina. This is what we need to affirm.”

Villega said he still manages to keep eight horses, but only because friends allow his animals to graze on their fields. “Before, there were estancias with 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of open space. Now they use electrified fences, and sometimes there are no more than 20 hectares (50 acres) of open space,” he said.

“This is ending; the young people don’t want this life,” he said.

Yet among the 16-member gaucho team that came from Villega’s hometown of Capitan Sarmiento was 5-year-old Martin Russell, atop a full-size horse beside his father, Hugo Russell, the ranch foreman. Villega taught the boy to ride last year.

“We live comfortably now, we live in houses. There are no real gauchos left,” said Hugo Russell. “But we want to remember.”

Villega has three sons, only one of whom remains on the land and who was also riding that day. His 3-year-old granddaughter also rides. His other two sons, however, moved to Buenos Aires, eschewing the hard country life. Villega doesn’t begrudge them their choice.

“If you are a peon, you are going to earn like a peon. The boss is going to pay as little as he has to,” he said. “Before, you could live quite well, you had enough at the end of the year. It was another way of life, very beautiful.”