After the publication of Eduardo Gutiérrez’s Juan Moreira (1879), its successful theatricaladaptation, and the numerous narratives about rebellious gauchos that followed, the set ofpractices and discourses that create a sense of belonging around the figure of the gaucho hascome to be known under the umbrella term of criollismo. Although recent research has shownthat criollismo did not disappear in the early twentieth century but converted to other nonliterary media, no approach considers the relationship between criollismo and cinema in thelong term and on a global level. In doing just this, this chapter focuses on the crossingbetween criollismo and cinema by looking at the images of the nation that gaucho-themed filmsbring into play. It explores how a repertoire of themes, characters, arguments, and landscapesdisseminated by criollista literature was adapted to film, projected globally in Hollywood movies, and then reappropriated by the local culture. Finally, it argues that this feedbackbetween criollista literature and film was fruitful until the late 1970s, when – after reaching a high level of violence – the political uses of criollismo became less massive and more sporadic.

Chapter 4 considers a debate between two Argentine political thinkers of the period of national organization that followed the end of the wars of independence in Latin America: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888) and Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810-1884). Both of them endorsed liberal republicanism, a set of doctrines of moral and political philosophy that opposed Bolivarism and which was widely popular in the region during the post-independence period. The chapter demonstrates that Sarmiento and Alberdi had in common a general philosophical framework, even when they perceived their views as incompatible with each other's. Key shared doctrines included the infamous civilization/barbarism dichotomy and the no-less-infamous European-transplantation model of Latin American identity. This chapter argues that since Sarmiento and Alberdi had these substantive doctrines in common in matters concerning race and liberal democracy (judged to be the best form of polity for the new Latin American nations), their differences were almost trivial. Both of them disagreed with Bolívar, who acknowledged Latin America’s ethnic and racial diversity but remained skeptical about the suitability of liberal democracy in the region.

Against a certain perception of him as a cerebral writer with sophisticated philosophical tastes, the focus of much of Borges’s life and work is the popular or even the vulgar: the gaucho code; the hoodlums/compadritos of Buenos Aires; pirates and gangsters; tangos; classical Hollywood movies, and so forth. Following his biography of dissolute poet, Evaristo Carriego, ’Man on Pink Corner’ features criminal low-lifes and is Borges’s first real story published in a book. The figure of the gaucho appears in certain canonical stories of the 1940s - ’The South’, for example. A poem from the early 1960s, ’The Tango’, indulges an urban nostalgia and is elegiac. Detective stories had an abiding appeal for Borges. And the cinema inspired him to collaborate on a number of screenplays, author reviews, and translate aspects of cinematic style into his fictions. Borges’s influence on filmmakers was profound and extensive.