The Gaucho Martín Fierro by José Hernández

First published: part 1, El gaucho Martín Fierro, 1872; part 2, La vuelta de Martín Fierro, 1879 (English translation, 1935)

Type of work: Poetry

Type of plot: Adventure

Time of plot: Nineteenth century

Locale: Argentina

Principal characters

• Martín Fierro, the gaucho
• Cruz, his friend
• Picardia, Cruz’s son
• Two Sons of Martín Fierro,

The Poem:

Martín Fierro is a gaucho, born and raised on the rolling plains of Argentina. A gaucho is a mixture of the Spaniard and the Moor, transplanted to South America and mixed again with aboriginal Indians. He is God-fearing, brutal, superstitious, ignorant, lazy, and kind. His type is a passing one, but while he roams the plains he is a legend. Martín plays his guitar and sings his songs, songs that tell of his unhappiness and the sorrows of the gaucho all over the land.

Martín has a home and a wife and children to comfort him. He owns land and cattle and a snug house. He rides the plains and lives in peace with his neighbors. Then officers appear to take Martín and his neighbors away from their homes and families to serve the government in wars with the Indians. Martín is among those chosen because he did not vote when the judge was up for election, and the judge says that those who do not vote help the opposition. The government promises that the gauchos will serve only six months and then be replaced. Martín takes his horse and clothes and leaves his wife and children.

The men live in filth and poverty. Complaints bring a staking out and lashes with leather thongs. There are no arms; the colonel keeps the guns and ammunition locked up except when the Indians attack. The Indians come and go as they please, killing, plundering, and taking hostages. They pull babies from mothers’ arms and kill them for sport. The Indians are not much worse than the officers, however. The men have no pay, no decent food. They wear rags, and rats crawl over them while they sleep.

At last, Martín escapes and returns to his home. There he finds his wife and sons gone, the house destroyed, the cattle and sheep sold by the government. Martín swears revenge and sets out to find his sons. He is soon in more trouble. He kills a black man in a fight. Another swaggering gaucho picks a quarrel and Martín kills him. These killings bring the police after him. They track him down and are about to kill him when one of their number joins him in fighting the others. Cruz, his new friend, fights so bravely that the two of them drive off or kill their attackers.

Cruz, telling Martín his story, sings it like a true gaucho. He lost his woman to the commandante of the army and so left his home. He, too, killed a man and was hunted by the law until an influential friend got him a pardon and a job with the police, but Cruz has no heart for the police. Seeing Martín prepared to fight against great odds, he decides to join him. The two resolve to leave the frontier and go to live among the Indians.

Martín and Cruz travel across the desert to the land of the savages. Before they can make friends and join a tribe, they are captured by a raiding party. For two years, they suffer tortures inflicted by the Indians; then they are allowed to pitch a tent and live together, still under guard. They have to ride with the savages on raids against the Christians. When smallpox ravages the tribe, Cruz gives his life by nursing a chief who has been kind to them.

Martín is alone once more. At last, he escapes from the Indians. He rescues a white woman who had been beaten with the bowels of her own baby son. After weeks of weary travel, they return to the plains, where Martín leaves the woman with a rancher and goes on his way. He knows by then that even the evils of the government are better than life with savage Indians.

Martín, returning to his homeland, learns that he is no longer wanted by the government. The judge who put him into the army is dead, and no one any longer cares about the black man and the gaucho he killed in fair fights. In his new freedom, he goes to a racing meet and there is reunited with two of his sons. From them, he learns that his wife is dead and that they had also been tortured and cheated by the government.

The older son sings his song first. He had been arrested and convicted for a killing that he did not do. Beaten, starved, abused, he spent a long time in the penitentiary. In his loneliness, he had had no friend to share his woes. He cautions all who hear his tale to keep away from the law, for the law is not for the gaucho.

The second son sings his song. An aunt died and left him some property. The judge appointed a tutor who robbed the boy of his inheritance and beat him and starved him. Penniless, Martín’s second son roamed the land like a tramp until he was sent to the frontier with the army.

Father and sons sit singing and talking, when a stranger named Picardia appears and sings his song. Like the others, he was sent to serve in the army and endured the tortures of the wicked officials. At the end of his song, Picardia tells Martín that he is the son of Cruz, Martín’s old friend. The friends celebrate the meeting with wine and song. While they sing, a black man joins them. He and Martín hold a singing match, a common thing among the gauchos. The African American sings that he is the brother of the black man Martín killed long years before, and that he will avenge the death. Before they can fight, other gauchos step between them and send Martín, his sons, and Picardia on their way.

They ride only a short distance together, then separate to seek new lives, each man alone. Before they depart, Martín gives the young men some advice out of his own experience. He tells them to be true to their friends, to give every man his due, to obey the law, and to never cheat. If ever a woman should win their hearts, they must treat her well and be true. The four scatter, each one taking a new name from that day on. Martín, ending his song, commends his words to gauchos everywhere, for they come from the wisdom of an old man. Then he lays down his guitar, never to sing again.

Bibliography

Dabove, Juan Pablo. “Martín Fierro: Banditry and the Frontiers of the Voice.” In Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin America, 1816-1929. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Focuses on the depiction of banditry in Hernández’s poem and in other works of Latin American literature. Describes how this representation is related to the formation of nation states within the region.

Franco, Jean. An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Pages 77-82 relate the poem’s plot and demonstrate how Hernández’s masterpiece transcends the regional dimensions of the pampas to become a universal myth.

Geirola, Gustavo. “Eroticism and Homoeroticism in Martín Fierro.” In Bodies and Biases: Sexualities in Hispanic Cultures and Literatures, edited by David William Foster and Roberto Reis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Geirola’s reading of the poem focuses on its depiction of sexuality and gender.

Hanway, Nancy. “The Injured Body: Martín Fierro and the Public Hygiene Movement.” In Embodying Argentina: Body, Space, and Nation in Nineteenth Century Narrative. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003. Hanway examines the relationship between the poem’s theme of displacement and the nineteenth century debate over public hygiene. She also explores how the poem, and other works of Argentine literature written between 1850 and 1880, depict changing ideas about Argentine nationhood.

Lindstrom, Naomi. “Argentina.” In Handbook of Latin American Literature, edited by David William Foster. 2d ed. New York: Garland, 1992. Shows that, despite its harsh criticism of the Argentine government’s policy of waging war on the Indians in the pampas, this poem did not slow the campaign to convert the pampas to fenced private property.

Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Compares the poem to José Mármol’s novel Amalia (1851), and shows how the former projects an epic view of the Argentine nation as rooted in the ruggedness of the gaucho way of life.

Vogeley, Nancy. “The Figure of the Black Payador in Martín Fierro.” College Language Association Journal 26, no. 1 (September, 1982): 34-48. Compares the unfavorable depiction of the black singer in The Gaucho Martín Fierro with the favorable depiction of the gaucho.