Sarmiento the Geographer: Unearthing the Literary in Facundo

Abstract

The third chapter offers a fresh reading of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845) by mapping the ways in which his seminal Latin American narrative works alongside and against the institutionalization of Argentine geography. Looking to Sarmiento’s correspondence, editorials, and minor texts, it traces the rise of a new national discourse that revises European representations both aesthetically and orthographically, all the while appealing to Humboldt as a source of legitimization. The chapter argues that Facundo undoes the dialectic between knowledge and conquest as a didactic geography directed toward the citizens of Argentina, who must know the land to secure the nation. Yet because Sarmiento deems the land empty, he constructs a marketable geography to convince potential European and North American immigrants to populate the lush Argentine terrain.