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The key takeaways are that the book examines how banditry was represented in Latin American literature from 1816-1929 and how those representations related to ideas of national identity and modernization.

Some of the main texts analyzed include El periquillo sarniento, Facundo, El Chacho, El Zarco, as well as works by Raimundo Nina Rodrigues and Julio Guerrero. Famous works like Martín Fierro, Juan Moreira, and Doña Bárbara are also examined.

The book is not organized chronologically but rather groups case studies into three parts based on how they portray the bandit in relation to national projects - as an 'Other', as an instrument of critique, and as a devious brother/suppressed origin. It examines how the suppression or inclusion of the bandit figured in narratives of national identity.

ILLUMINATIONS | Cultural Formations of the Americas

John Beverley and Sara Castro-Klarén, Editors


Nightmares of the Lettered City
Banditry and Literature in Latin America
1816–1929

University of Pittsburgh Press


Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh PA 15260
Copyright © 2007, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dabove, Juan Pablo.
Nightmares of the lettered city : banditry and literature in Latin
America, 1816–1929 / Juan Pablo Dabove.
p. cm. — (Illuminations: cultural formations of the Americas)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8229-4331-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8229-4331-x (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-8229-5956-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8229-5956-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Latin American literature—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Brigands and robbers in literature. I. Title.
pq7081.d2155 2007
860.9'98—dc22 2006102642
To my wife and colleague,
Susan R. Hallstead
Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction | Nightmares of the Lettered City 1

The Foundation of National Identities | e Bandit as Other


1 El periquillo sarniento | Banditry as the Non Plus Ultra 43
2 Facundo | Banditry and the State as Nomadic War Machine 54
3 El Chacho | Banditry and Allegories of Legitimation 74
4 O Cabelleira | Cangaceiros, Sacarocracy, and the Invention of
a National Tradition 84
5 El Zarco | Banditry and Foundational Allegories for the
Nation-State 99
6 Criminology | Banditry as the Wound of History 111

Between Conservative Nostalgia and Radical Politics | e Bandit


as Instrument of Critique
7 Astucia | Banditry and Insurgent Utopia 129
8 Zárate | Banditry, Nation, and the Experience of the Limits 146
9 Martín Fierro | Banditry and the Frontiers of the Voice 165
10 Juan Moreira | e Gaucho Malo as Unpopular Hero 176
11 Alma gaucha | e Gaucho Outlaw and the Leviathan 190
12 Los bandidos de Río Frío | Banditry, the Criminal State, and
the Critique of Porfirian Illusions 199

The Triumph of the Nation State | e Bandit as Devious Brother


and as Suppressed Origin
13 Os sertões | Original Banditry and the Crimes of Nations 215
14 La guerra gaucha | Bandit and Founding Father in the Epic of the
Nation-State 229
viii | Contents

15 Los de abajo | e Feast, the Bandit Gang, the Bola (Revolution


and Its Metaphors) 241
16 Cesarismo democrático | Banditry and the Necessary Gendarme
(e Shadow of the Caudillo I) 261
17 Doña Bárbara | Banditry and the Illusions of Modernity
(e Shadow of the Caudillo II) 270
Conclusions | Representational Strategies and Paradigms 285

Notes 295
References 333
Index 371
Acknowledgments

is book would not have been possible without my wife and col-
league, Susan R. Hallstead. It owes its existence to her support and encour-
agement, as well as to her intelligent reading of the manuscript and innate
sense of style. e book is therefore dedicated to her. I hope that the prod-
uct is worth the time and love she devoted to it (and to me).
Nightmares of the Lettered City was conceived in Pittsburgh. Later, I sub-
stantially developed the project in Boulder during my first four years there
as an assistant professor. Now it returns to Pittsburgh to start another trip.
Many people in both cities are to be thanked for making its journey possible.
I would like to thank the professors and mentors who transformed me into
a Latinoamericanist and a scholar: Mabel Moraña (who gave me the initial
opportunity to pursue a graduate career in the United States, and showed
me the intellectual and personal challenges of being a Latinoamericanist),
Reid Andrews, Gerald Martin, John Beverley, and Alejandro de la Fuente, all
at the University of Pittsburgh. It has been an enormous privilege to learn
from them, and their legacy will be with me for the rest of my academic ca-
reer. Also, I would like to thank the friends and colleagues who shared those
years with me, in particular Carlos Jáuregui, Federico Veiravé, Susana Ro-
sano, and Ignacio Sánchez-Prado.
e Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh (in
particular Shirley Kregar and John Frechione) gave me the opportunity and
funding to travel repeatedly to Latin America and Europe to collect data
relevant to this research. Also, they provided me (and many, many other
hopeful and inexperienced young Latinoamericanists) with invaluable guid-
ance and support. e Andrew Mellon Foundation allowed me to devote a
year exclusively to writing. I want to thank Sara Castro-Klarén and John
Beverley, editors of the University of Pittsburgh Press series “Illuminations:
Cultural Formations of the Americas,” and Peter Kracht, the press’s editorial
director, for giving this book a chance and helping to make it a reality.
In Boulder, colleagues at the University of Colorado’s Department of
Spanish and Portuguese provided me with a warm and encouraging environ-
ment in which to work and live. My friends Emilio Bejel, Peter Elmore, Leila

ix
x | Acknowledgments

Gómez, and Luis González del Valle discussed and patiently read this manu-
script. Ricardo Landeira, chair of the department, friend, and mentor, gave
me the support I needed to work toward my professional and personal goals.
Several chapters of this book were conceived and developed in graduate
seminars. To the graduate students who participated in them, my heartfelt
thanks.
e dedication, generosity, and knowledge of Sean Knowlton, bibliogra-
pher for comparative, Spanish, and Portuguese literatures, and of the out-
standing staff at the Interlibrary Loan office at Norlin Library (Jane o-
mas, Marty Covey, Betsy Gould, and Karen Taylor) were essential to this
research, to a degree I do not think they realize. Doreen Delisle, administra-
tor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, devoted many hours of
patient work to helping me handle all aspects of my professional work. Fi-
nally, the Council on Research and Creative Work and the Graduate Com-
mittee on the Arts and Humanities at the University of Colorado at Boulder
provided me with funding to travel to Latin America and Europe to develop
and finish the research for this book.
Introduction
Nightmares of the Lettered City

Anyone who fights with monsters should take care that he does not in the process
become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back
into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Toward a Cultural Teratology


e Latin American lettered city is haunted by monsters.1 ese monsters
turn the lettered city’s noble dreams into nightmares. Inescapable and ur-
gent, these nightmares are conveyors of an enigmatic truth. Hence the chal-
lenge of the Latin American cultural critic: to reinvent our practice not as
the memory of founding fathers (cultural or military ones), heroes, or popu-
lar practices (humble albeit respectable) but rather as a sort of cultural tera-
tology. is teratology is diverse. It comprises bloodthirsty bandits that give
the rural frontier a hellish quality; rebellious peasants that burn, rape, and
destroy apparently without a second (or first) thought; Indians that bind
their victims with the intestines of their victim’s slaughtered sons; hunger-
stricken, harpy-like black females that fight in bloody mud much like
dogs—and with dogs—for lard or scraps of animal entrails; disease-ridden
immigrants whose deceitful promise of new blood becomes the ominous
threat of atavism; prostitutes whose pestilence corrupts the minds and bod-
ies of wholesome family boys—the future of the nation; cannibals; mad-
men; gays; Jews; communists.
ese monsters are formations of the national political unconscious
(Jameson 1981), and as such, they are the visible product of transactions
between “desire” and “repression.” ey are floating signifiers (Laclau 1996)
that are key to an understanding of the diverse regimes of representation
that define national identities. erefore, this cultural teratology can be
thought of as a genealogy of the nation. Instead of reconstructing a multi-
secular narrative of emancipation, achievement of self-consciousness, and
exertion of the potentialities of the origin, I propose a genealogy that will
trace the piecemeal cultural conflicts of which national imagined communi-
ties are an effect, not a primum mobile. In other words, it will specify the


 | Introduction

ways in which these monsters, understood as identities differing from the


man of letters (letrado) who is masculine-literate-“white”-proprietor-urban-
Europeanized, were less a threat to Latin American national cultures than
the secret dynamo that drove their definition. Said genealogy brings to light
many of the family ties between heroes and monsters and between the fa-
thers of the nation and its outcasts and many of the dangers that the mon-
sters’ furtive lurking in the dark margins comes to metaphorize.2 ese
monsters are not the children of a bizarre “Latin” imagination but urgent
political responses to real conflicts. One of the most prominent characters
within this cultural teratology is the (in)famous Latin American bandit, the
dark hero of Latin American rural history.

Bandits
Plateado, bandido, cangaceiro, gaucho malo, llanero, jagunço, bandolero, abigeo,
desertor, cabra, vago, malentretenido, insumiso, salteador, fanático, guerrillero,
gavillero, agavillado, forajido, malhechor, cimarrón, muchacho del monte, mon-
tonero, malandro, Hermano de la Hoja, matrero, malebolo. ese are a few
among the many names for those engaged in a particularly pervasive form
of violence in rural Latin America. Bandits are much more than rural thieves
(ladrones en despoblado) or cattle rustlers (abigeos, cuatreros). Although the
figure of the bandit is primarily associated with robbery or an attempt
against private property (kidnapping for ransom, blackmailing, protection
rackets, cattle rustling, jacquerie), brigandage may comprise such diverse
offenses as resisting authority, smuggling, homicide, conspiracy to commit
crime, possession of prohibited weaponry, vagrancy, desertion, rebellion,
and poaching. Any challenge to state rule could be and frequently was, at
one point or another, labeled “banditry.” is protean character of the ban-
dit is one of the reasons for its continued political relevance and cultural
productivity, and a determination to understand both of these aspects is
what gave rise to this book. Bandits and rural insurgents are among the bet-
ter known characters in Latin American history, from Tupac Amaru to Emil-
iano Zapata and Che Guevara through, of course, Pancho Villa (all four la-
beled as bandits at one point or another in their careers). However, little has
been done outside the realm of historical studies to examine in a compre-
hensive fashion (beyond particular cases or particular regions) the ways in
which banditry has been depicted in elite discourse, and how this represen-
Introduction | 

tation has been crucial to the constitution of Latin American national cul-
tures as we know them today.
Although I draw upon the works of Adolfo Prieto, Josefina Ludmer, and
Nina Gerassi-Navarro, I intend for this book to fill a void in Latin American
cultural criticism. is work is particularly timely because in the academic
and political agendas of Latin American studies, the inquiry into the inter-
actions between elite culture and subaltern culture occupies a central posi-
tion.3 As such, part of my goal in writing this book was that it would be rele-
vant beyond literary criticism. I want it to be read as part of a series of
studies that map foundational tropes in Latin American national cultures of
the nineteenth century. Indeed, the exploration of the symbolic mecha-
nisms of construction and negotiation of identities—Latin American “fa-
bles of identity” (Ludmer 1999, 470)—has led to important works in the
field of cultural and literary studies that have “tried to articulate the founda-
tional period of national literatures with the nation-state process of forma-
tion and institutionalization in Latin America, trying to focus on the com-
plex process of mediations and representational strategies through which
social actors try to define themselves” (Moraña 1984, 42). e contention of
this book is that the rural rebel labeled a bandit by the state was among the
foremost cultural Others of Latin American modernity. As such, it is essen-
tial to our understanding of the form that said modernity assumed, as well
as its contradictions and shortcomings.4
As John Beverley states, the bandit (together with the Indian or the run-
away slave) was the “main demoniacal force in the liberal epic” of the nine-
teenth century (1987, 102). e meaning of this statement is twofold. e
bandit-as-demon (a topic that the European gothic novel took quite literally,
as in the case of e Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Count Jan Potocki)
can mean the bandit as “adversarial force” of liberal discourse. Additionally,
through the form of possession, the bandit is regarded as the evil, hidden
“driving force.” is ambiguity points to the constitutional split of the ban-
dit trope and its changing relationship to hegemonic identities.5
As an adversarial force, the bandit as Other is essential in the constitu-
tion of the citizen as Self. As Jean Baudrillard points out, “Power exists
solely by virtue of its symbolic ability to designate the Other, the Enemy,
what is at stake, what threatens us, what is Evil” (1990, 82). e cultural his-
tory of Latin American banditry amply proves this postulate. e letrado
 | Introduction

elite excluded certain rural practices and rural subjects. is exclusion cer-
tainly had a crucial material dimension, since “bandits” were targeted for
suppression, but it was at the same time a rhetorical one, since it was made
possible by the mobilization of the trope of banditry.6
is labeling played an integral part in the legitimation of an elite-led
project of nation-state building in Latin America and thus was a defining
feature of the Latin American historical experience. As Miguel Ángel Cen-
teno brilliantly proves, Latin America “lacked [the] identification of an ex-
ternal enemy that encouraged the development of a national identity. As far
as state elites are concerned, the greatest threat to their power has not come
from competing elites across the border, but from the masses below. . . . e
enemy of ‘la patria’ was not perceived as the nation next door, but as those
in the population who threatened the social and economic status quo”
(2002, 90). Banditry is born as a trope when, from the state’s viewpoint,
popular illegalities are represented as crimes and its subjects as criminals
(Foucault 1975, 83, 292).7 is labeling is faced with resistance (cultural or
otherwise) from below, which is why, in the protracted debate on the exis-
tence and nature of social banditry, it has been hard to reach a concrete defi-
nition of what the bandit does (that is, the exact nature of his offense). e
bandit is not the thief, the smuggler, the poacher, the cattle rustler, or the
vagrant. ere would be no banditry without one of these offenses, how-
ever, and since no particular action is deemed banditry, any action could be
(and was) deemed banditry, a catchall word used much in the way that “ter-
ror” is currently used in the United States. Because of this, Gilbert Joseph
states that the term belongs to the “metalanguage of crime” (1994, 160).
is impossibility of defining banditry once and for all would account for
the conspicuous absence of banditry as a codified offense in penal codes, in
spite of the fact that we find the term everywhere in literary works, journal-
istic sources, travelogues, and memoirs. Mid-nineteenth-century Mexico
was, by all accounts, the golden age of Latin American banditry. In certain
areas, gangs numbered in the hundreds, waging war much like regular
armies, celebrating unofficial treaties with governments and controlling sig-
nificant tracts of territory (Vanderwood 1992). One would imagine that leg-
islation would reflect this situation, since banditry amounted to a formida-
ble challenge to state building. However, in the Mexican penal code of 1871,
the brainchild of liberal penal thought, banditry is not defined as a crime
(Vanderwood 1992, xxxv). Actually, the very word banditry does not appear
Introduction | 

at all in the more than three hundred pages of the code. Different offenses
associated with banditry do indeed appear (such as highway robbery [robo
en despoblado], association to commit crime [asociación para cometer robo],
kidnapping for extortion [plagio], and rebellion), but banditry does not.
Similar situations are found in other Latin American penal codes of the
nineteenth century.
In any case, it is safe to say that a bandit is he who maintains through his
actions (which may not form part of a conscious “political program”) his
“right” (usually uncodified) to engage in certain practices that collide with a
legality-in-the-making that portrays such actions as out-and-out crimes.
Since banditry is the name for a conflict revolving around representation, it
does not name an essence but an identity in constant flux. Banditry is the
product of the encounter between a hegemonic effect of identification (La-
clau 1996, 3, 6) and popular illegalities. Each appearance of the bandit in the
text of a culture is the trace of a conflict, “not the majestic unfolding of an
identity but the response to a crisis” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 7).8
Rafael Muñoz, author of ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (1931) and one of the
best writers of the genre called the novel of the Mexican Revolution, offers
an excellent example of banditry considered as a mark and a signifier. After
being defeated by the Carrancista general Álvaro Obregón, the División del
Norte (Villa’s famous army) was a shadow in constant flight and was limited
in resources and human support. In fact, the División del Norte was no
longer an army; it had become a “gang.” Tiburcio, the main character of the
novel, is loyal to Villa to the bitter end (until death), and unlike so many oth-
ers, he refuses to desert his chief. Tiburcio muses,
And now, what are we? . . . Tiburcio’s mind plunged into an abyss.
—We are bandits.
All of us? No! But there is a sign that makes us all the same, a mark that dis-
tinguishes us from the rest of humankind, a sign that separates and stops us. We
are bodies destined to the gallows. Once we are rounded up, once we are captured,
we are going to die. ose of us who do not get away will hang from the trees.
Anyone who sees us there will rejoice upon discovering the sign, the word
branded on our foreheads. Not all of us are bandits, but those who are captured
will not have time to say it, or even to implore clemency. (Muñoz 1931, 110)

With a lucidity arising from his utter hopelessness, Tiburcio realizes that he
and his fellow fighters have become bandits. ey are bandits indeed, but
not because they are more violent, greedy, or corrupt than before. Tiburcio
 | Introduction

realizes that banditry is a mark (señal), a word that sets them apart from
the rest of humankind. (After the defeat, Villa, formerly the “Mexican Napo-
leon,” becomes a bandit who is hunted down like a wild animal, and as such
he hides in a cave to lick his wounds.) Being bandits is not something that
they do; in this case, they are just running away from their enemies and liv-
ing off the land much like they did before. Instead, it is an identity effect em-
bedded in a political conflict, a position before the law, like the outlaw in the
Anglo-Saxon tradition (Prassel 1993).
I mentioned that the bandit-as-demon was also a driving (possessing)
force. As such, it shows the lack of suture in the tissue of the social body.
at is, it exposes the precarious and contested character of all dominance
and all identity. Tiburcio clearly realizes that banditry is not a practice but a
“mark” (a signifier) branded on a practice and as such, it brings the practice
under the gaze of the state. erefore, contingency, or the lack of a “natural”
relationship between mark and practice, is its defining character. ere was
nothing that Tiburcio or Villa did differently to cause their demotion from
liberators to bandits. What was different was their position in a precarious
interplay of forces.9 However, for the same reason that the bandit trope
marks what needs to be excluded, subordinated, or suppressed, it also
marks what escapes the material and symbolic control of the elite. It is what
exceeds its paradigms. is excess denaturalizes the hegemonic identity and
its mechanisms of representation, since it shows the fissures that tear it. As
an “imagined” identity the bandit is a testimony of domination as well as of
resistance and of the anxiety that such resistance triggers within the elite.
erefore, the bandit can embody the mythopoetic power of the elite, as
well as the mythopoetic capabilities of what Pier Paolo Portinaro refers to as
“savage powers” (1999, 11), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), as
“constituent power,” or Baruch Spinoza as the “multitude.”
e bandit trope is, within the text of Latin American culture, both the
product of and the arena for the struggles between the lettered city and the
various social sectors that challenged its dominance. Banditry defines, in
a contingent, ever-changing fashion, the identities of the adversaries with-
in this struggle. In Latin America, banditry defied what Michel Foucault
called “the rule of optimal specification” as the cornerstone of the semio-
technique that defined the modern approach to the “power to punish.” is
rule, as Foucault reconstructs it, states that “for penal semiotics to cover the
whole field of illegalities that one wishes to eliminate, all offenses must be
Introduction | 

defined; they must be classified and collected into species from which none
of them can escape. A code is therefore necessary and this code must be suf-
ficiently precise for each type of offense to be clearly present in it” (1975,
98).10
Banditry is crucial in the constitution of the paradigms of bandit/citizen
and outlaw violence/state violence. At the same time, however, it is what
makes those paradigms unstable and ultimately untenable. erefore, our
reading of the vast literary tradition dealing with banditry in the so-called
“long nineteenth century” will always be twofold and traceable to Derridean
deconstructionism. To begin, we should identify the operations through
which the letrado, in specific conflicts, carries out a mapping of the social
terrain in which the opposition between lawful and outlaw violence is the
defining feature. In addition, we should show the ways in which this very
opposition is interdicted and erased (again, in the Derridean sense) and how
letrado thinking is brought to its own limits.
e bandit is perhaps the most important in a series of dramatis personae
that in postcolonial Latin American culture function as frontiers between
“domains of sovereignty” (Chatterjee 1993, 6). is character is particularly
fit to embody the many unresolved ambiguities of Latin American moder-
nity. As such, an in-depth examination of the bandit trope would allow us to
“write into the history of modernity [i.e., Latin American modern culture],
the ambivalences, the contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and
the ironies that attend it” (Chakrabarty 1997, 288).
In addition to being a problematic juridical figure, the bandit is a literary,
historical, and scientific figure that makes conflict visible within the social
realm. is conflict has an economic basis, but it goes well beyond this no-
tion. e vast plains of Venezuela (llanos) and Argentina (pampas) offer im-
portant cases in point. Transforming the Venezuelan llanero bandit and
the Argentine gaucho malo, respectively, into totalizing metaphors for the
whole rural population was a strategy the elite used to intervene in a multi-
secular struggle for the appropriation of resources (wild cattle and horses).
is metaphor also highlighted alternative concepts of property (the liberal-
landowner concept versus the traditional community-oriented concept of
the seminomadic hunter-shepherd), alternative concepts of violence (the
state monopoly on violence versus the individual ownership and adminis-
tration of it), and alternative concepts of citizenship, community, and
rights. Following this “original” scene of formation of the bandit trope,
 | Introduction

many quarrels in Argentine or Venezuelan culture were depicted (i.e., nar-


rated) using the rural bandit as “conceptual persona” (Deleuze and Guattari
1991). Banditry is thus what Josefina Ludmer has termed a difference effect
between two orders in conflict and reciprocal transformation (1988, 16). As
a difference effect, the bandit trope appears initially from the state gesture
of expulsion. It is important to remember that the etymology of forajido is
precisely salido afuera, whereas that of bandido is not thief, but rather pros-
cripto, from the Italian bandir (Corominas 1954, 487), and that the canoni-
cal lexical definition is that of the “fugitivo llamado por bando“ (Diccionario de
la Real Academia Española 1992, 260). e Tesoro de la lengua castellana o es-
pañola (1611) makes this connection even closer. It includes the notions of
bandido and bandolero within the entry bando, defined as “the proclamation
ordering a criminal who has dropped out of sight to appear before the au-
thorities.” From this derives the use of the names bandidos and bandoleros (el
pregón que se da, llamando a algún delincuente que se ha ausentado, y de aquí se
dijeron “bandidos” y “bandoleros”) (Covarrubias Orozco 1611, 162).
e proclamation or bulletin (bando) was not initially intended to be read
to the bandit, who would have been busy running away from the looming
gallows. It was meant for those who were not bandits, for those who did not
(openly) support them, and for those who obtained a collective identity vis-
à-vis that Other who was just (symbolically) “thrown out.” (“Cast aside,”
“thrown down,” or “thrown out” are some of the etymological meanings of
“abject,” past participle of the Latin word abicere.) erefore, the bandit was
the occasion for a state-lettered performance of exclusion (the reading of
the proclamation or bulletin). is performance creates a public sphere. e
axes of this public sphere are the letter (the written document that enforces
the law) and the state (the public official who reads the proclamation). Its
exterior limit is precisely the bandit, lurking frightened or defiant in the
neighboring countryside.
However, this image is an oversimplification since the bandit is never
a simple criminal. Popular appropriations of the bandit appear in ballads,
yarns, and oral traditions (e.g., corridos, folletines, and cordel literature in
Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, respectively). ese appropriations trans-
formed the outlaw into a hero for communities that resisted the advance of
capitalism as well as the diverse forms of coercion and disruption that it im-
plied. In these cases, bandit narratives are a form of negative reciprocity (as
defined by James Scott) that allows a given community to voice a desire or a
Introduction | 

challenge without risking a reprisal. ese popular appropriations of the


bandit figure belong to an intermediate zone between public transcript and
the hidden transcript (see Scott 1990).11 Bandit narratives are thus public
performances that are admitted only with suspicion and apprehension by
elites. An excellent example of this in-between, dangerous condition is the
cultural war that erupted in turn-of-the-century Argentina around bandit
narratives known as folletines criollistas (see Prieto 1988) or the recent wide-
spread debate on the banning of narcocorridos in Mexico (Wald 2001), both
of which are forms of popular expression considered out-and-out incite-
ments to crime.
Although the cases presented above may give the impression of a false
ideological purity, elite-concocted tropes or popular appropriated tropes are
rarely mutually exclusive options, since the bandit lives and preys on his vic-
tims at a crossroads. Often, the brigand figure stands for changing military,
political, or cultural alliances between popular sectors and the elite, exam-
ples being the gaucho genre in Argentina or the regionalist and social novel
in Brazil (e.g., the works of Jorge Amado). In other cases, bandit narratives
may represent what Raymond Williams in 1991 termed the “selective appro-
priation” of traditions of rural insurgency (e.g., the novel Astucia by Luis In-
clán on tobacco smugglers in Mexico known as the “Brothers of the Leaf”).
A remarkable illustration of this complex dynamic is the figure of Jesús
Malverde, the “angel of the poor.” Jesús Malverde’s existence is still debated,
but tradition has it that he was a peasant bandit from the Mexican state of
Sinaloa. He met the fate of most peasant bandits: capture and summary ex-
ecution. Also, like many peasant bandits, he posthumously became an ob-
ject of popular devotion. He is now the patron saint of drug dealers (el
narcosantón), and the Culiacán chapel dedicated to him is cluttered with vo-
tive offerings (exvotos), some bearing surnames that appear in the police
chronicle: Quintero, Gallardo, Félix, Carrillo. According to legend, the ini-
tials “R.C.Q.” on one of the engravings bear witness to a donation by none
other than Rafael Caro Quintero, a Mexican drug lord (Wald 2001, 616–24).
Malverde thus connects multiple cultural lines. On the one hand he con-
nects the traditions of insurgency deeply embedded in local culture, such as
the stories on Heraclio Bernal, a.k.a. “El Rayo de Sinaloa” (who is remem-
bered, as is Malverde, in corridos, legends, and old wives’ tales across Mex-
ico), with the new Mexican American culture.12 (Malverde is well known—
just like the narcotics that are cultivated in or transported through Sinaloa
 | Introduction

—in Los Angeles or Chicago as well as in Culiacán.) In addition, Malverde


connects popular traditional Catholicism with modern icons of consump-
tion and mass culture. Furthermore, he ties the old rural corrido de bandidos
or corrido de valientes to the postmodern urban-rural narcocorridos hip
among Mexican and Mexican American youth affiliated with the culture of
violence. Finally, the example of Malverde shows the “deep Mexico,” with its
intact myth-producing capacity, juxtaposed against the postmodern, “for-
export” image of Mexico.
Another outstanding example of the bandit figure playing on both sides
of the divide is the cultural history of Joaquín Murieta, described by Ireneo
Paz, one of his early biographers, as “the most celebrated California bandit,”
a phrase that became the subtitle of the first novel about Murieta. e story
of Murieta is paradigmatic in its incidents, since it pertains to a particularly
relevant contact zone (Pratt 1992) and since it came to represent the
conflict-ridden frontier between the United States and Mexico in the imme-
diate aftermath of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1846–1848. As such it was
mobilized by Anglo Americans, Mexican Americans, Europeans, and Latin
Americans alike. Murieta also offers a rare case study of the Latin American
bandit whose cultural career spans from the 1850s to the present. ere are
countless variations of Murieta’s biography, but most agree on some basic
facts. Murieta was a hard-working, American-friendly Mexican miner and
rancher in California shortly after its conquest by the United States. In spite
of his intentions to advance in the newly formed Californian society, he falls
prey to endless abuse by Anglo Americans. He is forcibly displaced from his
claim; his brother is lynched after a false accusation of horse stealing; his
sweetheart is gang-raped. Murieta is driven to a point at which he vows re-
venge against all Americans, and, in classic social bandit fashion, he be-
comes an avenger set out to right wrongs. However, he wants to right not
only the wrong done unto him but also the injustices committed against his
“kind”: the Californios and Mexicans under American rule. In some versions
of the story (see Paz 1904), Murieta is even portrayed as a leader with the
long-term goal of leading a general uprising of Mexicans and Californios so
as to return California to Mexico.
Murieta was the first and most prominent in a series of Mexican Ameri-
can outlaws that includes Tiburcio Vázquez, Gregorio Cortéz, Juan N. Cor-
tina, and Eligio Baca and whose last individuation in this series is the legion
of drug dealers, both big and small, of the Mexico-U.S. border who have be-
Introduction | 

come heroes in the epic of the narcocorridos. Murieta’s head—decapitated,


displayed in freak shows, later lost in some bizarre turn of history—is a
macabre metaphor that for Richard Rodriguez represents Hispanic Califor-
nia’s violent and suffering past (Rodriguez 1992).
In spite of this lurid story, scholars now agree that Murieta never existed
(Leal 1999; ornton 2003). He was born of both fear and greed: the Anglos’
fear as they faced the violence of Mexican rebels and outlaws and the greed
of the California Ranger Harry Love and his men. e rangers invented
Murieta to justify the killing of a Mexican whose name will be forever a mys-
tery and to claim the reward money offered by the state of California for the
capture of the bandit(s) that roamed Calaveras County (Leal 1999, 14).
Maybe there were several men who could have been Joaquín Murieta; may-
be there was no such person at all. For some, Murieta is a fiction written
into history by the state of California and the Anglo American press in order
to label as criminal the threat (more or less imagined) of an interclass al-
liance between Mexicans and Californios struggling for land, cattle, and
mining rights in Southern California (Leal 1999, 2; Jackson 1955, xxiv). e
first example of the unruly Mexican bandit (later termed “greaser”), Murieta
was a tool in a campaign of counterinsurgency, land occupation, and cultural
discrimination that encompassed the whole Southwest, as evidenced in the
sad history of the Texas Rangers (the infamous rinches) and the cinemato-
graphic stereotype of the greaser (Woll 1987).
Murieta was far more than a badge of infamy upon Hispanics in the
United States, however. He was “stolen” by Hispanics from the Anglos as
bounty in a cultural war that is still raging. After the popularization of his
figure by Cherokee American writer John Rollin Ridge (a.k.a. Yellow Bird) in
the novel e Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California
Bandit (1854), Murieta embodied several types of heroes: a popular hero in
the corrido tradition (“El corrido de Joaquín Murieta”); a cultural hero of
Hispanidad versus Anglo culture in Ireneo Paz’s Vida y aventuras del más céle-
bre bandido sonorense Joaquín Murieta (1904); a class hero in Pablo Neruda’s
Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta, bandido chileno injusticiado en California el
23 de julio de 1853 (1966); an anti-imperialist hero in Antonio Acevedo
Hernández’s play Joaquín Murieta (1938); a totalizing icon of the “Chicano
nation” in Rodolpho “Corky” Gonzales’s epic poem I Am Joaquín (1967); and
finally a model for Chicano resistance in Oscar “Zeta” Acosta’s e Revolt of
the Cockroach People (1973).
 | Introduction

On the opposite side of this cultural war is Bruce ornton’s excellent


book Searching for Joaquín (2003). ornton argues that the mobilization of
the image of Murieta by Chicano militants and intellectuals implies a funda-
mental fallacy: their denial of the fact that the Murieta myth was avidly con-
sumed by Anglos and people of many different ethnicities alike (a statement
that he backs up with an impressive amount of scholarship). For ornton,
Murieta embodied the nostalgia for a simpler, more bucolic California in the
face of accelerated transformation and social tensions and not the battle cry
of a humiliated Hispanic California.
is enumeration, lengthy as it is, does not take into account the count-
less repetitions, perversions (e.g., Zorro) and plagiarisms of Murieta’s his-
tory in the novel, drama, and cinema of both the Americas and Europe, in
Spanish, English, and French.13 Like Martín Fierro, the desperado contempo-
rary of Murieta at the other end of the continent, Murieta “can be every-
thing for everybody, because he is capable of almost endless repetitions, ver-
sions, perversions” (Borges and Guerrero 1954, 537). us, on one side or
the other of the social divide—from El periquillo sarniento (1816) by José
Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi to Mexican hip-hop—narratives on banditry
serve to map essential segments of the heterogeneous discursive and geopo-
litical space that we call Latin America.14

The Bandit Debate


e classic definition of banditry was coined by Eric Hobsbawm in 1969 in
the first edition of his book Bandits.15 Bandits “are peasant outlaws whom
the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant soci-
ety, and are considered by their people as heroes, champions, avengers,
fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders for liberation, and in any case men
to be admired, helped and supported. is relation between the ordinary
peasant and the rebel, outlaw and robber is what makes social banditry in-
teresting and significant. It also distinguishes it from other kinds of rural
crime” ([1969] 1981, 17). Bandits are subjects of rural violence that are per-
ceived as a threat to the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence because
they either enjoy (or are perceived to enjoy) more or less voluntary support
from a group beyond the gang itself or they share (or are perceived to share)
certain values with a larger community. Because of this support, they go be-
yond mere criminality.16 Although obtaining a “booty” is always a para-
mount goal, it is not the only one. It is essential that the bandit be recog-
Introduction | 

nized by the rural community, by the state, or by a sector of the state as a


bearer of violence (or what the state considers to be violence).
Unlike the social bandit, the criminal does not know any affiliation
beyond his gang. e criminal may be employed by someone, but this rela-
tionship belongs to the market of violence—and it implies violence as a
commodity—and therefore cannot be properly termed an “affiliation.” e
bandit’s group of affiliation can be extremely diverse: peasantry, small to
large landowners, family or patronage networks, ethnic groups, alliances
across class and/or regions, or combinations of all of the above. ese al-
liances are never, at least from a Hobsbawmiam point of view, “subcultures,”
but rather they are part of a fully developed rural culture. ey vary greatly
in their solidity and capacity to withstand time and challenges and stand
more or less successfully against and beyond the state definition of politics,
since they do not have state takeover as their main goal, unlike other forms
of peasant insurgency, such as the Marxist-inspired guerrilla of the twenti-
eth century.
is relationship between bandit and group of affiliation opposes state
law and may be a principle of legitimacy for the use of violence based upon
nondominant codes (oral or traditional: family ties, patronage, neighbor-
hood ties, etc.) or in heterodox appropriations of dominant codes (property
or conceptions of authority belonging to political systems already extinct,
religious syncretism, etc.). erefore, the bandit’s capacity to claim a partic-
ular kind of sovereignty and/or extract resources from civil society on a
more or less regular basis (sometimes in collusion with, sometimes in oppo-
sition to analogous efforts by the state) is just as important—if not more
important—than the existence of desired valuables. In the ideal model of
social banditry, the material or cultural solidarity between bandit and com-
munity of affiliation is the feature that separates the bandit’s actions from
mere criminality. However, Alan Knight, one of the most prestigious sup-
porters of the social banditry model in the Latin American case, points out
that the distinction between bandits and criminals, although analytically
relevant, is extremely problematic when confronted with historical facts
and specific cases, because it is highly relative in time and space. Latin
American bandits inhabited fluid and changing situations, unlike, for exam-
ple, the Irish rapparees of the seventeenth century, who practiced robbery
following pre-existent and well-defined distinctions between friend and foe
(Catholic Irish/Protestant English). In Latin America, the social bandit of
 | Introduction

one region is the criminal of another. e social bandit of today, enjoying


widespread peasant support, is the criminal of tomorrow, opposed by the
same peasants who once may have supported him (Knight 1986, 2:354–55).
is fluctuation returns us to our initial assertion of the impossibility (and
the ultimate inappropriateness) of providing a positive, essentialist defini-
tion of banditry, or of deciding, once and for all, if a certain peasant rebel is
a criminal or a social bandit. It is only possible to analyze bandit narratives
as ephemeral, conflict-embedded effects of difference.
In Hobsbawm’s initial formulation, epidemic social banditry is opposed
to endemic banditry, permanent in all rural societies to the point of becom-
ing a sort of natural fact of life. As an example of endemic banditry, in Akira
Kurosawa’s film Seven Samurai (1954), a wailing female peasant enumerates
the evils that plague peasant existence. In no particular order, she mentions
taxes, draft, war, drought, famine, and bandits (the last being the theme of
the movie). Epidemic banditry, on the other hand, occurs in contexts of ac-
celerated social transformations, such as the one occurring in Mexico to-
ward the end the colonial period, with its collateral effects on population
growth, land scarcity, inflation, and increased trade and opportunities for
robbery (Taylor 1982, 56). In this case, it is a form of both resistance and
adaptation to the advances of commercial agriculture and the modern state.
It could also be a symptom or product of a generalized crisis (e.g., revolu-
tion, war, or dynasty change) in the legitimacy of an established order. Rele-
vant historical examples include banditry during the French Revolution (see
Andress 2000), during the European irty Years’ War (see Danker 1988),
during the Mexican Revolution (see works by Knight as well as Frazer
1997), during the war for Cuban independence (see Perez 1989), or in Re-
publican China (see Billingsley 1988). Epidemic banditry could also respond
to ecological changes such as droughts or to crop failures (see Archer 1982,
68).
Hobsbawm took up the notion put forward by Friedrich Engels, who re-
garded criminality as a form of “primitive protest” (1845, 149, 242–43,
309), and adopted Fernand Braudel’s idea that banditry was an “incomplete
revolution,” that is, a revolution carried out by a group lacking class con-
sciousness in a landscape of widespread peasant rebellions in the Mediter-
ranean Basin (1949, 738–39). According to Hobsbawm, banditry, mafia,
millenarianism, and labor sects are all forms of “primitive rebellion.” He in-
cludes in the spectrum of “primitive rebellion” all archaic or pre-political
Introduction | 

peasant movements that depend upon the material and cultural resources
of the peasant communities whose universe they express or defend (hence
the social character) but that are doomed to extinction with the advent of
modernity (Hobsbawm [1969] 1981, 10; 1973, 20).
Hobsbawm identified four varieties of social bandit: the noble robber
(e.g., Robin Hood), the avenger, the haiduk (or what Christon Archer aptly
called “guerrilla bandit”), and the expropriator.17 In Latin America, the
“guerrilla bandit” (Pancho Villa, Manuel Lozada) and the avenger (Lampião,
Juan Moreira) were the most prominent examples of the social bandit.
However, Latin American literature is also well populated by noble robbers,
even if they are not the most prominent figures in national imaginaries.
Among the better known bandits are Fiero Vásquez, champion of the in-
digenous community of Rumi in El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941) by Ciro
Alegría; Lucas Arvoredo in Seara vermelha (1946); and Lampião in Capitães
da areia (1937) by Jorge Amado; “Ñato Eloy,” Chilean brigand and popular
poet killed by police in 1941 (and hero of the 1960 novel Eloy by Carlos
Droguett); Heraclio Bernal from Sinaloa and Chucho el Roto, heroes of cor-
ridos and countless novels and movies; the Argentines Mate Cosido and the
Velázquez brothers (from El Chaco province); and Vairoletto (from the dry
pampas [pampa seca]) and the bandits who lead the Andean comuneros in
their struggle against the abuses of the Cerro de Pasco Corporation in
Manuel Scorza’s Redoble por Rancas (1970). To my mind, however, the most
clear-cut example of the noble robber is the commendable Tuerto Ventura
in Los días terrenales (1949) by José Revueltas (1914–1976). Ventura, a cat-
tle rustler and indigenous community leader, represents the dreams for jus-
tice of “Acamapichtli or Maxtla, of Morelos or Juárez” because of his face,
scarred by violence. e charismatic leadership of this bandit had no limits
since “everybody loved him, and everybody was ready to plunge with him
from a cliff” (1949, 14).
Some scholars, without flatly denying the relevance of the “social bandit”
model, understand particular occurrences of epidemic banditry as struggles
that revolve around different lines of conflict. For Pat O’Malley (who re-
searched the case of the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly) banditry is a form
of class struggle between the rural proletariat and rural bourgeoisie. Even
though such struggle happens outside the channels of institutional politics,
it still happens in a fully formed class society and not, as Hobsbawm pro-
poses, in a context of transition toward capitalism (O’Malley 1979, 494–
 | Introduction

99). Other scholars, such as Ralph Austen (for the African case) or Alberto
Flores Galindo (for the Andean case) consider banditry a form of racial
struggle whereby banditry is part of a larger dispute over economic re-
sources or political predominance, where class is not necessarily the most
relevant category of analysis (Austen 1986; Flores Galindo 1990). Fernando
Ortiz, for his part, considers banditry in Cuba a byproduct of runaway slav-
ery (cimarronaje). erefore, he does not deem it a phenomenon related to
the displacement of “traditional peasants” by sugar plantations (since “tra-
ditional peasantry” was nonexistent in Cuba). Rather, he regards it as a phe-
nomenon of resistance with its origin in the plantation system itself, which
is to say he understands banditry not as a phenomenon triggered by the
transition toward capitalism but as a byproduct of rural capitalism (Ortiz
1995, 190).
In the latest edition of his book Bandits (2000), Hobsbawm acknowledges
the existence of social banditry in history before the rise of capitalism, as in
the case of rural societies that resisted the advances of other rural societies
(e.g., sedentary peasants raided by nomadic shepherds or rural communities
resisting the advances of rural empires). He also points out that banditry
can thrive in late capitalism, such as the contemporary banditry associated
with the demise of nation-states, Afghanistan, countries that comprised the
former Yugoslavia, and Chechnya all being examples (Hobsbawm [1969]
2000, 9).
Postnational, globalized banditry is also analyzed by Steven Sampson
(2003) vis-à-vis the contemporary process of reformulating the nation-
state. In Sampson’s account, this new form of banditry articulates the con-
flicts in a globalized arena, whereby banditry interacts and competes for
sovereignty not (or not only) with traditional nation-states but also with
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), international peacekeeping forces,
mercenary private security outfits, and so forth. He mentions “northern Al-
bania, eastern Bosnia, sections of Kosovo, the northern Caucasus [including
Chechnya], [and] large portions of Africa” as places where the fragmentation
of traditional political units (e.g., communist states) are “hot spots” for this
new form of insurgency (2003, 314).
In some cases, banditry is not really a symptom of a crisis (a meaning em-
bedded in the term “primitive rebellion”). Rather, it may be part of a process
of negotiation either among segments of the elite or between rural elites
and sectors of the rural poor. For Hobsbawm, Ethiopian banditry offers a
Introduction | 

case in point: it did not emerge as a sign of crisis; rather it was an accepted
venue of political competition for positions within the political order and
was therefore integrated into the social fabric. Ottoman banditry, as su-
perbly analyzed by Karen Barkey (1994), represents a rather different case.
In the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, bandits entered into complex
arrangements with Ottoman rulers. Under this arrangement, bandits did
not challenge the centralizing efforts of rulers; rather they became timely al-
lies in these efforts. In this way, bandits were able to mollify threats of peas-
ant unrest, which in the Ottoman Empire were kept to a minimum when
compared to similar situations in other regions of the Mediterranean Basin.
As a final example, in northeastern Brazil the cangaceiros functioned as re-
tainers for landowners (coronéis) or as the fighting force in decades-long
family feuds, and they were an accepted and appreciated way of conducting
politics in the absence of a strong state presence.
Hobsbawm’s model continues to inform many recent and current ap-
proaches to the problem. Examples include Gonzalo Sánchez and Donny
Meertens’s Bandoleros, gamonales y campesinos: el caso de la violencia en Co-
lombia (1983), Knight’s e Mexican Revolution (1986), Ana María Conta-
dor’s Los Pincheira: un caso de bandidaje social: Chile, 1817–1832 (1998), and
Hugo Chumbita’s Jinetes Rebeldes: historia del bandolerismo social en Ar-
gentina (2000). However, in the Latin American context, critiques of Hobs-
bawm’s model are abundant. e so-called revisionist school flatly denies
any social character to banditry (the main thrust of Hobsbawm’s model).
is line of thought is brought forth by the remarkable volume Bandidos, ed-
ited by Richard W. Slatta (1987), which was intent upon discussing (and
debunking) Hobsbawm’s thesis as applied to the Latin American case. Revi-
sionism objects to the very existence or at least relevance of the bandit-
peasant link, which is essential in the “social” character of banditry. In ear-
lier editions of Bandits (1969, 1972, 1981), Hobsbawm tended to emphasize
this horizontal link, based on material and cultural commonality and soli-
darity, either real or symbolic (vis-à-vis the landowning classes or state offi-
cials). It is in this way that banditry may become a forerunner of full-fledged
class struggle (hence the “primitive” in “primitive rebellion”). Revisionists
such as Paul Vanderwood, for Mexico, or Linda Lewin, for Brazil, deny this
link and emphasize the vertical alliances that bandits forged and preferred.
ese vertical alliances could cross class lines (as in the case of patronage
networks), or they could link bandits and landlords or local politicians, thus
 | Introduction

denying the “social” content to banditry and making it synonymous with


out-and-out criminality or even with one of the means of landowners’ social
control. For Vanderwood, banditry is a means of upward social mobility or
an alternative to accepted means of profit, as he defines bandits as “mainly
(but not only) self interested individuals and their followers who found
themselves excluded from the possibilities and opportunities, not to men-
tion the benefits, of society at large, and who promoted disorder as a lever to
enter a system reserved for a few” (1992, xv). Literary examples of these ver-
tical alliances between bandits and landlords, designed to keep subalterns in
check, are present in two of the most important novels of twentieth-century
Latin America: Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955) and Jorge Amado’s Terras
do sem fim (1943). In the first case, the local landlord (Pedro Páramo) re-
cruits (literally buys) a band of insurgents who had come with the original
intent of plundering his hacienda. Instead, he puts the group under the com-
mand of his own retainer, the trusted Damasio, a.k.a. El Tilcuate. While offi-
cially revolutionaries, these guerrilla-bandits have the unofficial task of pro-
tecting Páramo from any possible advances by the real revolutionaries. In
Amado’s case, the bandits ( jagunços) are the essential manpower that allows
the landowners to maintain and increase their holdings, either by violently
dispossessing (and sometimes assassinating) peasants and smaller land-
owners or by fighting against other large landowners. In both cases, bandit-
ry is a means of social mobility. El Tilcuate is given a ranch and cattle as a
payment for his loyal services, the jagunços earn many times the pay of reg-
ular rural workers, and they are entitled to certain deferences both by their
masters and their subordinates.
A number of critiques of Hobsbawm’s model focus on the paramount
place that he assigned to oral testimonies or literary reconstructions of past
bandits as he put together his model. is debate relates to another one in-
volving the remarkable uniformity of banditry as it appears in songs, tales,
and written testimonies. is uniformity is an essential element in Hobs-
bawm’s model. An important question in this debate then becomes, Should
this uniformity be considered a trait of banditry per se, as emanating from
peasant culture, or should it be considered a posteriori reconstruction by in-
tellectuals? Revisionists deflate the value of Hobsbawm’s oral and literary
sources, and they stress the importance of police and court records, which
they regard as more reliable.
is critical current of historical thought, sometimes a little too intent
Introduction | 

upon refuting Hobsbawm’s model, has indeed produced some of the most
important case studies in the field.18 Revisionism considers banditry as just
another form of criminality. (Paul Vanderwood even coined an expression
counter to “social bandit”: the Mexican “profiteering bandit.”) Its social ef-
fects, if any, are not (as the legend goes) emancipatory; quite to the con-
trary, banditry favors the status quo since it may become an alternative way
of climbing the social ladder and an informal instrument of elite control of
the peasantry. For revisionists, banditry is, in the final analysis, compatible
with the interests of the elite.
Rosalie Schwartz makes another good point against the “social bandit”
model in her analysis of Cuban banditry. She opposes Louis Perez’s take on
Cuban banditry, which closely follows the “social bandit” model. Schwartz,
investigating class origins and regional patterns of nineteenth-century
Cuban banditry, shows that banditry was more intense in the most devel-
oped regions of Cuba and that the bandits were far from being destitute
peasants; rather they were sons of somewhat well-to-do ranchers and small
landowners. us, as Schwartz explains, banditry in the Cuban case lacked
any true “social” (in the Hobsbawmian sense) thrust and much more closely
resembled the profiteering banditry mentioned by Vanderwood (Schwartz
1982, 1989).
e distillation of this critical current can be summarized in the deliber-
ately terse definition provided by Slatta: “Banditry is the taking of property
by force or by the threat of force” (1994, 76). It should be noted that this def-
inition limits banditry to robbery, as conceived, for example, during the sev-
enteenth century in e ird Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England
(1634): “ ‘Robbery is a felony by the Common law, committed by a violent as-
sault, upon the person of another, by putting him in fear, and taking from
his person his money or other goods of any value whatsoever’ ” (Coke quoted
in Spraggs 2001, 1). e attack on property, as mentioned before, is a key el-
ement in the definition of banditry, but a definition limited to that aspect
leaves unexplored several factors crucial to the understanding of banditry.
e first factor is that, until the twentieth century, “property,” in the
Latin American context, was not an obvious and unequivocal concept. In-
deed, the concept was undergoing profound transformations. e bloody
struggles between liberals and conservatives in core zones of the region
were an expression of this phenomenon, because the ancestral corporative
rights of the peasant communities and of the Church were being challenged
 | Introduction

by the new liberal concept of individual property. Even less clear was the
concept of property in frontier zones such as both banks of the Río de la
Plata or the Venezuelan llanos. In these regions the claim to property was
not established before the struggle. To impose a certain notion of property
rights was the ultimate goal of the struggle, since cattle (cimarrones or ore-
janos) often did not have a clear proprietor (Storni 1997). erefore, “crime
against property” was not a crime that was easily defined.
Secondly, as Centeno summarizes the situation, Latin America, with the
exception of the income related to foreign commerce, did not have a fully
functioning central tax system for most of its postcolonial history (2002, 6).
is lack of a revenue base made state support for armies and police forces
practically impossible. Due to this fact, “the taking of property by force or by
the threat of force” was one of the main activities of all armies and state
armed forces well into the twentieth century. e only differences between
banditry and army expropriations were the scale of plundering as well as the
inherently dubious state sanction of the army’s actions. erefore, unless
we agree upon the fact that Slatta’s definition applies to most armed forces
throughout the “long nineteenth century” (something that would not be
completely far-fetched, as the Mexican Revolution shows), one cannot ac-
cept Slatta’s definition unequivocally.
In 1968 Roberto Carri analyzed the case of the Argentine bandit Isidro
Velázquez (who thrived in El Chaco province in the 1960s), and he offers the
opposite critique of Hobsbawm. (He does, however, recognize the funda-
mental soundness of Hobsbawm‘s model.) Carri acknowledges the “social”
character of banditry but resists its definition as “pre-political.” For Carri,
the term has an unavoidable Eurocentric connotation because pre-political
means diverging from what qualifies as politics (e.g., party politics, unions,
NGOs, etc.) in a European (or Europeanized) perspective. Instead, he pre-
fers the term “pre-revolutionary,” which endows the bandit with a fully po-
litical character or at least gives a political aspect to the community’s per-
ception of the bandit’s actions. In Carri’s model, the bandit is not considered
primitive, although his actions are not yet fully articulated as a revolution-
ary awareness. us, Carri’s position was an early expression of the third po-
sition in the banditry debate. is position was adopted by historians spe-
cializing in Latin America who incorporated the contributions of Ranajit
Guha (1983) and James Scott (1985). Gilbert Joseph, Daniel Nugent, Flo-
rencia Mallon, and Rosalie Schwartz, among others, do not examine ban-
Introduction | 

ditry as mere criminality or as a rudimentary form of peasant resistance but


as a form of peasant politics fully articulated into a peasant consciousness.
In their approach, banditry belongs to a continuum of resistance that runs
from gossip to open rebellion.19 e Venezuelan historian Lisando Alvarado
also provided an early formulation of this position when he proclaimed that
the brigands of the Federal War “were not the predecessors of the February
Revolution, but the revolution itself” (quoted in Matthews 1977, 168).
Furthermore, these scholars focus their epistemological and ethical con-
cerns on the impossibility of translating peasant conceptions of politics into
a nationalist-statist notion of politics. Both can negotiate and even collude,
but they remain essentially heterogeneous. A revealing literary illustration
of this distance between forms of lettered national politics and peasant pol-
itics is the despair of the pro-Indian engineer Fernando Ulloa, the main
character in Oficio de tinieblas (1962), a novel by the Mexican writer Rosario
Castellanos (1925–1974). Ulloa does not understand why the Chamula In-
dians, whom he helped to rebel, now wander aimlessly in the mountains pil-
laging haciendas instead of attacking the cities, hunting down landowners,
and organically promoting an agrarian agenda. is situation highlights the
fact that the political struggle is also (and in some cases mainly) a struggle
to define the dominant conception of what will be understood as “politics”
(Lechner 1995). Banditry has not only an economic meaning but also a cul-
tural, identity making meaning for peasants and for those implicated as
bandits.20 is affirmation of identity is a key component of all popular ban-
dit narratives and has found expression in literature as well. Gringo viejo
(1985), by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, offers a good example. In this
novel, the revolutionary gang of Tomás Arroyo plunders and meticulously
destroys a hacienda. Only one room of the hacienda escapes their fury: the
hall of mirrors. For these guerrilla-bandits, the mirrors of this Chihuahuan
Versailles allow them their first opportunity to see the image of their entire
bodies. Arroyo confesses,

Not my men. ey had never seen their bodies in full before. I had to give them
that great gift, that feast: now, look at yourselves, move about, lift your arm, you,
dance a polka, get even for all the dark years in which you lived blind toward your
own bodies, groping in the dark in order to find a body—your own body—so
alien and silent and distant as all the other bodies that you were not allowed to
touch, or that were not allowed to touch you. ey moved in front of their own re-
flection in the mirror and the spell was broken, gringuita. (Fuentes 1985, 119)
 | Introduction

A no less dramatic example can be found at the other end of Latin Amer-
ica. e sapukay is the distinctive yell uttered as a sign of joy or defiance, and
it is characteristic of the rural populations of the Argentine northeast (Cor-
rientes and Chaco provinces). In 1967, the region’s state police attempted to
ambush Isidro Velázquez, the famous bandit of the region. When he was
about to escape from his pursuers, he could not help but utter his cry of de-
fiance and contempt: “the last sapukay.” is act of pride made him a target
and ultimately led to his demise. Had he not cried out, he might have
slipped away. is act of rebellion and affirmation of his identity vis-à-vis
state violence is celebrated in Argentina to this day in the very famous
chamamé (a genre of popular music) entitled “El último sapukay,” by Oscar
Valles.21
omas Gallant has proposed a new notion of banditry with a twofold
goal: to mediate between those who, like Hobsbawm, link epidemic banditry
with the transition to capitalism and those, like O’Malley, who emphasize
the presence of epidemic banditry in fully developed agrarian capitalist
economies (e.g., nineteenth-century Australia and the post–Civil War Amer-
ican Midwest); and secondly, to mediate between those who see in banditry
a clear political thrust and those who see in it an exclusively economic moti-
vation (Gallant 1999).
In order to accomplish the first goal, Gallant turns to Emmanuel Waller-
stein’s model in e Modern World-System (1974), arguing that it is fruitless
to limit critical research to the development of a single, all-encompassing
model of banditry. Instead, Gallant proposes that several models must be
devised according to the different societies in which they emerge: core soci-
eties (such as England), semiperipheral (such as O’Malley’s Australia), and
peripheral societies (such as Ethiopia, the nineteenth-century Balkans, or
northeastern Brazil, Hobsbawm’s favorite cases). In order to accomplish the
second goal, Gallant coins the apt expression “military entrepreneur” (fol-
lowing Anton Blok’s Sicilian “violent entrepreneurs” and Volkov’s “violent
entrepreneurship” in Russia), thus capturing the ambiguous relationship
between banditry and the law (sometimes enforcing the law, sometimes
breaking it), and banditry and economic profit. He explains that “by ‘mili-
tary entrepreneur’ I refer to a category of men who take up arms and who
wield violence or the threat of violence as their stock in trade. I use ‘military’
here not in its contemporary common connotation of a national army, but
in an older, more ambiguous form referring only to the use of arms and
Introduction | 

weapons. ey are entrepreneurs in the sense that they are purveyors of a
commodity—violence. ey may act in the employ of others or as agents in
their own right” (Gallant 1999, 26). e notion of violence as a commodity
has the particular advantage of helping us to avoid a common intellectual
mistake: that of speaking about violence as if it were a purely negative no-
tion. is mindset was the target of Hobsbawm’s critique of the liberal no-
tion of violence in his essay “e Rules of Violence” (1973).
My position is less about the history of banditry per se. I am concerned
more with the history of its representation within selected national cul-
tures. is depiction is always a site of conflict and contested meanings
where the state struggles with urban and rural sectors of civil society to im-
pose particular agendas through the “invention” of banditry. From this
point of view, and without giving in uncritically to the much-reviled (and of-
ten misunderstood) postmodern “textualism,” I maintain that the represen-
tation of banditry is as important as banditry itself. Furthermore, the dis-
tinction between these two elements is frequently difficult to perceive. e
dispute on meaning as being central to the definition of banditry appears
even in Hobsbawm’s classic definition, in which the double perspective (the
state’s view versus that of the peasantry) is what makes banditry relevant
for social history.
We know that the lexical meaning of bandido implies a state performance:
the calling by proclamation or edict. e dramatic (semiotic) element is not
accidental, and, as Foucault (1975) illustrates, it is one trait that existed well
before the penal reforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it
lasted long afterward. Imperial Rome offers an interesting example. One of
the punishments reserved for bandits was to force them to take part in the-
atrical representations of a historic or mythological nature. e character
played by the convicted bandit died at the end of the play. e twist in this
case was that the death was not a special effect or a dramatization: the
actor-executioner really executed the bandit on stage (by crucifixion or ex-
posure to bears) when the plot so indicated (Harries 1999, 151). Today, the
punishment of criminals is something shrouded in secrecy, at least in West-
ern culture. Cheering, awe-stricken crowds no longer gather to witness exe-
cutions. However, what if not theaters of law are the many Cops-like reality
shows (including its Mexican counterpart, Policías) in which the drama of
crime and punishment is reenacted time and again, for the thrill and educa-
tion of an eager public?
 | Introduction

Focusing on this dramatic metaphor is not arbitrary; it emphasizes the


element of performance involved in any act of domination. us, by focus-
ing on bandit narratives as performances of domination I connect this study
with those on state formation, in which, as Philip Corrigan puts it, “Key
questions then become not who rules but [also] how is rule accomplished. . . .
No historical or contemporary form of ruling can be understood (1) as or in
its own discursive regime or image repertoire terms; (2) without investigat-
ing the historical genealogy, archaeology, origination (and transmutation)
of those terms as forms” (1994, xvii–xviii, emphasis in original).
is dramatic component was clearly present in Latin America. Although
rarely reaching the extremes of punishments meted out in Spain, where
bandits such as Jaime el Barbudo were quartered and fried, Latin American
bandits were not simply executed: they were hanged from conspicuous
trees, publicly shot, decapitated or quartered, exposed at crossroads, in mar-
kets, on pikes, on fences, in squares, and even photographed in order to ob-
tain maximum publicity from the punishment. is very public form of exe-
cution can be called a “theater of law” (Blok 1998, following E. P. ompson
1975, 105) through which dominant classes symbolically restore or confirm
their dominance after it is called into question by the bandit. ese domi-
nant classes also establish a counterpoint between the body of the bandit
and the body of the sovereign (under the species of his armed officials).22
e theater of law is what Alfredo Ebelot called a “good end” when referring
to the death of a bandit of northeastern Argentina, “understanding by this
word an ending that satisfactorily conciliates our hunger for adventure with
our instincts of security” (1889–1890, 105).
Without overextending the application that Blok gave to the notion, I
maintain that the theater of law comprised a continuum of symbolic prac-
tices that encompassed both scaffold and poem and that was clearly in-
tended as a “pedagogy of terror” (Salvatore 2001, 310). e collusion of the
theater of law and banditry has given the West its most important symbol
and story. I am referring to the Cross of the Passion that joins the highest
order—God—and the most abject—the robbers (latrones) through the infa-
mous punishment that Roman law reserved for the worst class of criminal
that the Digesto defined. Robbers were condemned to death by exposure as
part of the theatrical version of state-sponsored terrorism of which Rome
was so fond (Shaw 1984). e second major trope of Christian morality, the
Introduction | 

martyr ad maiorem gloria Dei, originated in another of the punishments re-


served for brigands: death in the circus arena, devoured by wild beasts.
Perico, the rogue protagonist of El periquillo sarniento, by José Joaquín
Fernández de Lizardi (1816), understands the inner workings of the theater
of law very well. Perico redeems himself of his many vices and crimes when
at a crossroads (literal and metaphorical) he sees the rotten corpse of Janu-
ario, an old friend and accomplice. Januario was executed as a brigand chief.
Perico understands that this meeting has not occurred by chance but is a
“lesson” (416) that “Januario, although lifeless, loudly announces from that
tree trunk” (417). Fittingly, Perico reacts by composing a sonnet (417), thus
showing the live link between legislating (legislar) and reading (leer) (Gon-
zález Echevarría 1990). is relationship between letrados and bandidos
took an even stranger turn (because of its extreme literality) in 1910, when
the poet Salvador Díaz Mirón (1853–1928) was commissioned by Porfirio
Díaz to direct the persecution of Santana Rodríguez Palafox, a.k.a. “San-
tanón,” a bandit who roamed the sugar producing areas of Veracruz. El im-
parcial, the newspaper of porfirismo, instituted a column entitled “e Bard
and the Bandit” (El bardo y el bandolero) devoted to these rocambolesque se-
ries of events, as part of the celebrations of the nation’s centennial (Barrera
Bassols 1987).

Banditry and the State


A new ruler is always stern.
Prometheus, referring to Zeus, Prometheus in Chains

Banditry and its relation to the state constitute a topic that goes to the core
of Latin American identity since it has been argued repeatedly that the
Spanish conquistadores, the founders of one of the most formidable and en-
during empires the world has ever witnessed (and of the social formation
now called Latin America), were little more than bandits (Hobsbawm 2000,
42). In fact, nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and historiogra-
phy, perhaps picking up on the Lascasian theme in which conquerors are
persistently deemed cannibals and impious plunderers, abundantly express
this motif: from Félix Varela’s Jicoténcal (1826), the first Latin American
historical novel, to romantic novels (Miguel Cané’s Esther, from 1858) to
positivistic criminology (Julio Guerrero’s La génesis del crimen en México,
from 1901) to modernist essays (Leopoldo Lugones’s El imperio Jesuítico,
 | Introduction

from 1904), to indigenist novels (Mauricio Magdaleno’s El resplandor, from


1937).
In any case, in nineteenth-century Latin America a central feature of the
desire called modernity was the constitution of nation-states enjoying sov-
ereignty and territoriality, instead of segmentarity (i.e., a low reach of the
administrative political center, thus creating internal frontiers) and het-
eronomy (discontinuous control over the territory) (Giddens 1985, 16, 53,
65, 160). e successful constitution of the nation-state implied at least two
conditions. In the first, there would exist a monopoly on both ownership
and allocation of violence, resulting in control of populations and resources
vis-à-vis multiple forms of private violence. e states that stemmed from
the independence wars in Latin America did not meet this condition since
they were, as Centeno puts it, “fragments of empire” and not unified states
(2002, 25). is situation was not unique since traditional states—city-
states, agrarian empires, feudal orders, absolutist states—or empires such
as the Spanish empire did not have the capacity to hold a territorial monop-
oly over violence (Giddens 1985).23 Perhaps most importantly, these politi-
cal syntheses did not construe their relationship with violence in terms of
a monopoly in a continuous and perfectly (or sufficiently) delimited terri-
torial realm (Tilly 1975b, 27; Giddens 1985; omson 1994, 9). e elite
intent on nation-state building, modernization, and social engineering
agendas made monopoly of ownership and allocation of violence a priority
against groups that either actively resisted that monopoly or that wanted to
negotiate from a position of force. us, the expropriation of the means of
coercion from individuals, groups, and organizations within the territory
that the state claimed as its own was (and in some cases still is) a matter of
contention.
e second implied condition consists of a social consensus on the legiti-
macy of the monopoly on ownership and allocation of violence. is consen-
sus is reached through the imposition and validation of narratives that
would make the expropriation of violence by the state “natural” and “neces-
sary.” Social narratives are crossed by hegemonic practices in which it is pos-
sible to find a disciplinary/pedagogical impulse (Leps 1992). It is in this
sense, as Dennis K. Mumby points out, that these narratives are forms of
social control and spaces from which an image of the social takes shape and
naturalizes itself. In this book, naturalization follows Stuart Hall’s defini-
tion: “a representational strategy designed to fix difference, and thus secure
Introduction | 

it forever. It is an attempt to halt the inevitable ‘slide’ of meaning and to se-


cure discursive or ideological ‘closure’ ” (1997, 245, emphasis in original).
Among these hegemonic practices, literature was one of the most impor-
tant during the nineteenth century, at least from an axiological point of
view. In general terms, this is the theoretical position from which I address
literature: as a legitimating tool for the state monopoly of violence but, at
the same time, as a place where inevitably the contradictions and impossi-
bilities related to that monopoly surface now and again. (In this volume,
“literature” is understood in the broad use of the term pertaining to the
nineteenth century, which included criminological treatises, journalistic
pieces, and doctrinaire essays as well as a novels, poetry, and drama.)
roughout the long nineteenth century, bandits had a constantly
changing role in the drama of the nation-states and the latter’s struggle for
the monopoly of violence. At times, bandits were able to place their signi-
ficant means of violence at the disposal of the central government, as was
the case of the Plateados of Salomé Plasencia, who sided and fought with
the Liberal Party during the Mexican wars of reform. It was also the case of
the bandits who became part of the rural police in porfirian Mexico and the
core of the famous Rurales. is collusion prompted Vanderwood to coin
the term bandit-Rural in his book Disorder and Progress. Conversely, bandits
were a mighty force in containing efforts toward centralization. In some
cases, banditry hindered and even prevented the functioning of state offices
or the convening of legislative bodies (mid-nineteenth-century Mexico is
the best example). It was in this role that bandits acquired their most popu-
lar image.
Under other circumstances, the bandit gang could itself become a state-
like organization or influence the state in a very definite way and thus be-
come a model of political organization for later generations. A paramount
example of this situation is Pancho Villa’s governorship of Chihuahua,
which Alan Knight described as “institutionalized social banditry” in his
classic work, e Mexican Revolution. Another case is the agrarian legislation
devised by José Gervasio de Artigas, the founding father of Uruguay who
began his career as an outlaw and cattle smuggler in the northern frontier of
the Banda Oriental (present-day Uruguay). Yet another is the popular revo-
lution of José Tomás Boves, a royalist caudillo of the Venezuelan plains who
recovered the Capitanía General de Venezuela territory for Fernando VII of
Spain in 1814. e less illustrious cases of the Plateados of Morelos, of
 | Introduction

Manuel Lozada in Tepic, or of Inés Chávez García in the Bajío (all of these in
Mexico) could also be mentioned. Perhaps even more illustrative than these
examples is that of Antônio Conselheiro and his jagunços. Conselheiro es-
tablished a fully functioning, autonomous, and prosperous community (by
northeastern Brazilian standards) in the remote Bahian sertão. e authori-
ties of the fledgling Brazilian republic clearly understood the implications of
the success of this “opting out,” and the consequence was a massacre that
still haunts the Brazilian national imagination.
A brief discussion of the Argentine gauchos will give us a clear idea of how
this “naturalization” of state violence functions. In narrative, essay, and
journalistic works (mainly La guerra gaucha [1905] and El payador [1916])
Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), an organic intellectual of the Argentine oli-
garchy at the peak of its power, turned the gaucho, or vagrant Argentine
outlaw, into “the prototype for the modern-day Argentine” (1916, 66), the
only Argentine epic hero (1916, 170). Lugones regarded El gaucho Martín
Fierro (1872) and La vuelta de Martín Fierro by José Hernández (1879)—the
two-part poem that best told of the misfortunes of the gauchos at the hands
of state (in)justice—as the Argentine equivalent of Homer’s Iliad in its role
of expression and promotion of nationhood (Lugones 1916, 163–88). How-
ever, the epic interpretation of this bandit narrative is based upon two types
of forgetting. First, the gauchos did not have a clear notion of nationhood
in the modern (i.e., Lugonian) sense of the word that equated nation with
nation-state. e fatherland (patria) was most commonly the pago, that is,
the county, or the province at best, as many of these narratives show
(Guerra 2003, 32; Salvatore 2003, 128; de la Fuente 2000), or it intersected
with partisan identities in such a way as to make partisan affiliation more
important than nationality (Halperín Donghi 2003; de la Fuente 2000).
Also, the modes of political affiliation corresponded more closely (although
not completely) with the patron-client model than with the republican
model of the citizen in arms. In the second forgetting, the gaucho, as a chal-
lenge to the state’s monopoly of violence, was outlawed, dispossessed,
jailed, used as cannon fodder, and forced into labor by the same landowning
and commercial elite that would later elevate him to an heroic status. To
place the gaucho malo as a prominent figure in the state pantheon is to build
it upon paradoxical foundations: the state is paying eternal homage to those
whom it purposefully eliminated in order to achieve its monopoly of vio-
lence, “founding the nationality with their blood” (Lugones 1916, 81) and
Introduction | 

then expropriating the voices of these victims in order to sing the patriotic
songs of the centennial of the May Revolution (the main thrust of La guerra
gaucha). is forgetting, as Benedict Anderson points out (1983, 1992), is
represented as a “reassuring fratricide,” crucial in the construction of the
nation as imagined community. In Lugones’s case, then, the bandit was uti-
lized as a dramatis persona in letrado fables of self-legitimation and the legit-
imation of his class against the “zoological tidal wave” (aluvión zoológico) of
immigrants from Central Europe and the Mediterranean Basin, which had
begun to threaten the hegemony of the landowning oligarchy. To oppose
this new enemy, Lugones did not hesitate in calling to duty the old enemies
who were now newly discovered brothers. He did this by inventing a selec-
tive tradition that allied the current masters and old subalterns (gauchos)
against the new subalterns (the European immigrants).
Banditry developed another relationship to state-making when the
threat of banditry was used as an excuse to increase state centralization (or
to stage a coup within internecine elite struggles). e repression of ban-
ditry was used as an instrument of legitimation for the establishment of
forces of direct control over regions and individuals. Several historical ex-
amples spring to mind: the “Santa Hermandad” in medieval Spain was cre-
ated with the overt purpose of finishing off the bandit epidemic that was a
collateral effect of civil war, but it was actually conceived by the Catholic
kings primarily as part of an effort to create a centralized state, erect a royal
monopoly of violence, and strip local lords of power (Lunenfeld 1970; Storni
1997, 75). In eighteenth-century rural Mexico the “Tribunal de la Acordada”
and in the second half of the nineteenth century the Rurales were not only a
police force but also tools used by the executive branch of government to by-
pass such institutions of control over the use of violence as the Audience,
the courts of law, and the congress, and to balance the power of regional
elites or disaffected corporations such as the army (MacLachlan 1974; Van-
derwood 1992).24
is paradox, in which banditry comfortably plays both sides of the law,
appears time and again in Western political thought. Writing in e City of
God in the fifth century, Saint Augustine of Hippo wonders,
Justice removed, then, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers? What are
bands of robbers themselves but little kingdoms? e band itself is made up of
men; it is governed by the authority of a ruler; it is bound together by a pact of as-
sociation; and the loot is divided according to an agreed law. If, by the constant
 | Introduction

addition of desperate men, this scourge grows to such a size that it acquires terri-
tory, establishes a seat of government, occupies cities and subjugates peoples, it
assumes the name of kingdom more openly. For this name is now manifestly con-
ferred upon it not by the removal of greed, but by the addition of impunity. It was
a pertinent and true answer which was made to Alexander the Great by a pirate
whom he had seized. When the king asked him what he meant by infesting the
sea, the pirate defiantly replied: “e same as you do when you infest the whole
world; but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber, and because you
do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.” (1998, 58)

In the Greek novel bandits are a staple of the narrative (much as in the
later Gothic novel). In e Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles
Tatius, the same word used for “king” is used for “bandit chief” (basil°a).
eory on the state, from so-called conflict sociology (proposed by Randall
Collins) to contemporary philosophy (e.g., Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari)
has picked up on this trope of the collusion between banditry and state-
making. Charles Tilly, in his pathbreaking work “War Making and State
Making as Organized Crime” (1985), considers the nation-state to be very
similar to a protection racket. In this and other works, Tilly places banditry
in a “continuum of state-making” whose “defining feature . . . is the extent
to which control over the use of force is concentrated in a single organi-
zation.” In his view, then, there is not a difference of quality but of degree
between the rural Sicilian mafia, banditry, the nation-state, and empire
(1975a, xx–xxiii).25
e risk of this intertwining and eventual conflation of banditry and the
state made it even more urgent for Latin American elites to impose a limit
between these two forces, in order to create the conditions and scene for
the foundation of a nation-state. If the nation is, as Anderson maintains,
an imagined community, then “imagined” necessarily means “knowable”—
stretching Williams’s notion (1973)—and as such it asks for a strict demar-
cation of its symbolic limits. Much of the fictional literature written on the
Mexican Revolution may be understood as an attempt to draw these limits,
to draw distinctions between the bandit, the true revolutionary, and the
corrupt representative of an oppressive state (who also calls himself a revo-
lutionary), in order to understand the Revolution as either the inaugural
event of Mexico as a modern nation or an opportunity forever lost. Some
early works (e.g., Los de abajo, by Mariano Azuela, first published in 1915–
16) as well as some later ones (e.g., El corrido de Juan Saavedra, by María
Introduction | 

Luisa Ocampo, from 1929), show that these distinctions are difficult and at
times even impossible to make.
us, the most dangerous challenge posed by banditry was not chaos or
what passed for chaos in the eyes of the elites.26 e most dangerous chal-
lenge was symbolic. In its most developed forms, banditry did not challenge
a law or a right but rather the state as law-giver and ultimate source of legit-
imate violence (what Vanderwood called the “idea of banditry” as opposed
to its reality). Using the distinction proposed by Walter Benjamin between
law making violence and law maintaining violence (1921, 283), I am in-
clined to say that banditry presents the state with a form of violence that,
just like that of the state, creates law, albeit of a different nature (that is, one
that is local and oral). Its presence challenges not only the letter of the law
but also the position of enunciation that supports it (i.e., the judge as origin
of the sentence, the lawmaker as the origin of the law). is distinction has
of course the ambiguous nature of any statement concerning banditry. e
challenge that banditry poses, not necessarily in a self-aware fashion, and
that may be (and usually is) only the perception of the state (unlike modern
Marxist guerrilla warfare, where that challenge is deliberate) is a cause of
deep uncertainty and repulsion by the lettered city. In fact, the scene of the
personal encounter between the letrado and the bandit is a motif in and of
itself in Western narratives. e tone of this encounter ranges from the
warm brotherhood between bandit and lawyer in Alexandre Dumas’s Les
Frères corses (1844) to the happy acquaintance in which bandits and letrados
hit it off through mutual respect (as in Don Quijote’s encounter with Roque
Guinart on the outskirts of Barcelona or Rob Roy’s enduring and efficacious
protection of Francis Osbaldistone during his northern adventures in Wal-
ter Scott’s novel) to the somber destiny of the letrado in Antonio Di Bene-
detto’s Zama (1956), who has his hands cut off by a bandit.
Aside from these trusting or anxious fantasies, the real and theoretical
collusion between banditry and state formation during the nineteenth cen-
tury called for the ferocious repression of banditry. e Ley número 19 sobre
jueces de camino y persecución de ladrones en despoblado, passed in Mexico in
1852, established that the penalty for robbery with violence or the threat of
violence was death, regardless of the amount stolen or whether violence was
actually exerted. In the Ley general para juzgar a los ladrones, homicidas, heri-
dores y vagos, also from Mexico (1857), a clear distinction is established be-
tween rural robbery (robo en despoblado), punished with the death penalty,
 | Introduction

and urban robbery, punished with hard time. Banditry deprived the culprit
of the rights and guarantees derived from citizenship. From the times of the
Acordada, brigands were subjected to special tribunals that held summary
trials without appeals, pardons, or amnesties, and the usual sentence was
immediate execution (Vanderwood 1992, xxxiv–xxxv).27
e forgoing of the rights entailed in citizenship in the case of bandits was
even a matter of pride for state officials. Ernest William White, in Cameos of
the Silver-Land, or the Experiences of a Young Naturalist in the Argentine Repub-
lic (1881), tells us the following about his experience in San Juan: “Until the
present Governor assumed office, the city suburbs lay at the mercy of a gang
of highwaymen. As lawless and daring, but not so merciful, as Dick Turpin:
black-mail was levied and submitted to by all travelers, under pain of death,
so that at last, locomotion beyond civic bounds became well-nigh impossible.
. . . [T]he Governor issued the order to his soldiers. ‘Go out, capture and slay
those ruffians without benefit of clergy!’ and forthwith ten of them slept and
San Juan became as peaceful as quackerdom [Quakerdom]” (396).
For Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an Argentine intellectual and father of
the famous civilization versus barbarism binarism, bandits were “enemies
of humankind” and to kill them on the spot, without due process, was a
“natural right” previous to laws and constitutions:
A man, because of revenge, rage, or any other cause, kills another man, just like
because of need or deprivation he steals something. is is a common crime, with
a name, a place, and a jurisdiction. Banditry targets anybody outside cities and
the protection of the law. Banditry victimizes not a particular individual, but
everybody, society as a whole, the human race as a whole. e highway robber has
as his backdrop the desert and the mountains, and in order for travelers to be safe
it is imperative to declare that the robbery outside urban areas is a crime against
humanity [delito contra la humanidad] and that the culprit is outside the common
law. is is why nations are expected to turn over famous bandits, even though
there may not be extradition treaties. A pirate on the sea and a bandit on land are
outside the law and can be killed, put to death, by anybody, anytime. is is at the
same time natural and public law, which supersedes any constitution, and there-
fore these constitutions cannot annul it. (1899, 206)

Sarmiento is following a well-established tradition, one that has been


clearly stated in colonial legislation, as follows:
We order and command that any criminal or highway robber who roams the
countryside as part of a gang, robbing highways or populated areas, and who hav-
Introduction | 

ing been called by a proclamation . . . does not appear in front of the judges [be]
declared an incorrigible and publicly condemned rebel, and we allow that any per-
son . . . freely offend, kill or catch said criminal, without fear of any reprisal . . .
bringing him in front of the court dead or alive [having either] dragged them, or
hanged, or quartered and exhibited on the roads or places where he committed
his crimes. (Tomo tercero de autos acordados, que contiene nueve libros, por el orden
de títulos de las Leyes de recopilación, Madrid, A expensas de la Real Cía. de Impre-
sores i libreros del Reino, 1775, 3:405, in Solares Robles 1999, 144–45)

Sarmiento suggests that banditry is not a problem to be solved within


the institutions created and regulated by law because it touches on the prob-
lem of the origin of law itself. e distinction between bandit and lawful cit-
izen is the primal scene where the distinction between human and nonhu-
man takes place. In this scene, defined by law making violence, the division
that gives origin to the social takes place, thus defining the locus and possi-
bility of legitimate (human) association. Literature repeatedly echoes this
primal division. For example, Guillermo Prieto (1818–1897), a Mexican
writer and liberal general, wrote a series of romances on Manuel Lozada, a
bandit of Tepic. e most important is “Grande y chispeante romance de las
dos furias (Rojas y Lozada).” In this poem Lozada is a Fury, a monster, a wild
beast, a miasma bubbling up from the social mud, and a satyr, as well as the
hallucination of a disturbed mind, a demon, and a natural wonder. For Pri-
eto, Lozada is not a human product embedded in a specific social situation
fighting a human fight. He is beyond (or before) the human and the social
since he is alien and he preceded the social contract. In the case of Lozada,
the state as the embodiment of the social contract is charged with the ex-
plicit task of erasing him. However, paradoxically enough, if the bandit is a
monster, the most important metaphor of the state (that of the leviathan)
also makes the state a biblical, inscrutable monster. is metaphorical con-
tamination, in which monstrosity can be the interior or the exterior of the
social, lies at the core of my investigation.

Bandit Narratives
e purpose of this book is to reflect upon a number of narratives produced
throughout the nineteenth century following the numerous articulations (a
term defined by Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 105) of the bandit trope as an
arena of negotiation and conflict for the imagining of the nation-state and
its “others” in Latin America. I am particularly interested in the representa-
 | Introduction

tion of banditry (or any form of peasant insurgency called banditry) by the
letrado elite as a decisive and urgent expression of the desires, contradic-
tions, and conflicts that define the “heterogeneous Latin American moder-
nity” (Herlinghaus 2000). We now recognize that banditry was key in the
definition of some of the founding paradigms in Latin American national
development (e.g., civilization versus barbarism, order versus chaos, mod-
ern liberalism versus colonial corporatism, city versus country capitalism
versus pre-capitalism, free market versus socialism), and Sarmiento seems
to give expression to this intuition in a particularly forceful way. While
speaking of the decisive showdown that would embody (and resolve) the Ar-
gentine riddle, he says, “In my opinion, a war that is possible (and even de-
sirable, if our fatherland cannot be spared that evil) is a war that would pit
freedom against caudillaje, a war that would have strategy and military sci-
ence on the one hand and banditry [bandalaje] and compulsive rural insur-
gency [alzamiento compulsivo de campañas] on the other; a regular army on
the one hand and irregulars wearing the red chiripá on the other; civilization
in the means on the one hand and barbarism in the ends on the other”
(1852, 301).
As Hall points out, “e nation state was never simply a political entity.
It was always also a symbolic formation—a ‘system of representation’ ”
(2000, 38). us, we must pay attention to the ways in which the European-
minded, lettered, Creole, male, urban elite depicted, through literature, a
form of nonstate rural violence in societies that were at that moment over-
whelmingly rural, illiterate, and nonwhite and followed rules of life that dif-
fered markedly from those of the dominant culture. By maintaining this fo-
cus, we can reconstruct a crucial segment of that “system of representation”
and of the conflicting conditions under which modernity took hold in Latin
America.
e term “bandit narratives,” which I use throughout the book, refers to
the vast corpus of writing that deals with bandits or with forms of peasant
violence called banditry. is corpus comprises novels, short stories, crimi-
nological treatises, essays, poems, and film. Beyond specific differences con-
cerning each format, the narrative form is common to them all, and they
share a paradigm of representation that I attempt to outline. Bandit narra-
tives are, to my mind, an essential part of the theater of law, and they take
the form of an allegory of the violent constitution of the nation-state. I fol-
low Fredric Jameson’s proposal in the opening pages of e Political Uncon-
Introduction | 

scious when he disavows the distinction between cultural texts having a po-
litical resonance and those devoid of it. For Jameson, this false distinction is
“a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of con-
temporary life” (1981, 20), a political fact itself. Angus Fletcher maintains
that there is an inherently political character in all literary allegories, since
they enact “a conflict of authorities” (1964, 22), while Gordon Teskey shows
the nexus between allegory and state violence in the cultural history of the
West (1996, 137–38).
e relationship between allegory and theater of law is captured with
eerie precision in the anecdote of Remirro de Orco in e Prince (1513) by
Niccolò Machiavelli. (I am following, to a certain extent, Teskey’s superb ac-
count and interpretation of the scene.) Cesar Borgia had commissioned
Remirro to pacify the Romagna, which he did at the price of extreme cruelty
and the loss of Borgia’s popularity and prestige. In order to regain the good-
will of the citizenry and to placate any discontent, Borgia ordered Remirro
to be secretly abducted. One fine morning, Remirro’s body appeared at Ce-
sena Square chopped in half, a bloody knife by his side. “e ferocity of this
scene left the people at once stunned and satisfied,” Machiavelli recounts
(22). is ferocity did not reside exactly in the quartered body but rather in
the bloody knife. e knife was not (and could not have been) the murder
weapon, since a knife does not easily cut a human torso in half, bone and all.
Soaking the knife in blood and setting it by the corpse was an intentional
plus of meaning, an indication that in that death there was a message and
that the message went beyond treason and punishment: it was an allegoric
staging of the power and the violence of the sovereign (Teskey 1996, 137–
38). Bandit narratives are like that bloody knife: they are at the same time
traces and signifiers of state violence, documents of culture as well as of bar-
barism, similar to the “cultural treasures” of which Walter Benjamin speaks
in “esis on the Philosophy of History” (2006).
Doris Sommer (1991) proposes allegory as the privileged signifying
mode of nineteenth-century Latin American writing (or at least of narra-
tive). Sommer’s central thesis is that love that crosses racial, class, linguistic,
or legal boundaries was a metaphor with which the lettered city depicted its
utopia of national integration, or conversely, its malaise regarding the lack
thereof. Jameson, in his article “ird-World Literature in the Era of Multi-
national Capitalism” (1986), argues that the national allegory does not be-
long to a differentiated fictional corpus of a specific period but that it is a
 | Introduction

feature pertaining to literature of the so-called third world (69). is idea
has triggered numerous criticisms and revisions, some of which are quite
powerful.28
At the same time, Sommer’s approach can be criticized on several
grounds, in particular because there is no theoretical attention paid to vio-
lence being as important a signifier as romance (even when violence is oc-
curring within romances). It may be argued that romance was her focus, but
then we would be forgetting that many (perhaps most) foundational ro-
mances are to some degree mixed with violence, and that violence is there-
fore the other side—an inseparable element—of the national romance.
I agree with Fletcher when he indicates that beyond allegory as a specific
literary genre, all fictions have an allegorical component to a certain extent.
He distinguishes between allegory and allegoresis, the latter partially inde-
pendent from the author’s intentions and based upon the act of reading
(1964, 4, 12). I offer several arguments in favor of the notion that “national
allegory” is continually productive. In Latin America a certain brand of liter-
ature finds its political dimension in the erasure of the distinction between
public and private, or the symbolization of the former in the terms of the
latter. (Nineteenth-century literature is exemplary of this fact.) In addition,
the literary allegory does not necessarily imply a closure of meaning in favor
of a pre-existent ideology. Quite to the contrary, allegory can question that
ideology, thus distinguishing allegory from pedagogy. is is the meaning of
allegory as it is put forth by Marthe Robert in her reading of Kafka, or by
Benjamin in e Origin of German Tragic Drama. Also, the national allegory
has a self-referential dimension that has to be read as an interrogation on its
instance of enunciation—a questioning of the role of the “national letrado.”
Finally, many of the cases I analyze locate the problem of rural violence in a
specific region (e.g., the northeastern Brazilian sertão, Morelos or Jalisco in
Mexico, the pampas in the Río de la Plata region, or the Venezuelan plains).
However, as Gerald Martin points out (1989), the region in Latin American
literature does not function as a strictly subnational unit but rather as a na-
tional or supernational trope. us, the pampas in Facundo o civilización y
barbarie by Sarmiento (Argentina, 1845) or the Arauca Valley in Doña Bár-
bara by Gallegos (Venezuela, 1929) are metaphors of Argentina or Vene-
zuela as well as of a Latin America torn apart by the conflict between civi-
lization versus barbarism. is link is created by means of the national
allegory.
Introduction | 

Time Frame
is book analyzes representations of banditry during the long Latin Amer-
ican nineteenth century, running roughly from late colonial times to the
late 1920s. is period marks the incorporation of Latin America into global
markets based upon an export-led growth model (Bulmer-omas 1994).
is model, which had a clear colonial precedent, was imposed toward the
middle of the nineteenth century and secured the hegemony of a commer-
cial and/or landowning class that obtained maximum political and eco-
nomic benefits from it. is so-called neocolonial pact (Halperín Donghi
1997) implied a peculiar model of capitalism focused on the production of
agrarian commodities for global consumption (e.g., sugar, wheat, coffee, co-
coa, beef, and bananas), highly concentrated landownership, and a modestly
centralized state. Such an arrangement progressively expanded legal and
judicial systems, economic and administrative infrastructures, national
armed forces, and police that coexisted easily with less prestigious institu-
tions: debt peonage, the company store (tienda de raya), restrictions on
peasant mobility, forced military service, and out-and-out genocide. It also
coexisted with precapitalist modes of production such as the Indian com-
munity in its role as a provider of cheap labor (Mallon 1983). e dual
process of state building and establishing a particularly ruthless mode of
agrarian capitalism implied struggles and negotiations between local, re-
gional, and national elites. It also implied pitched struggles between elites
and popular sectors intent upon preserving landownership or autonomy
(Joseph and Nugent 1994, 3). It is rather easy to see how the bandit trope
acquires particular relevance during a period focused on land and popula-
tion control.
e Great Depression marked the end of this period as well as the begin-
ning of the so-called crisis of the neocolonial pact as a model of growth.
Even when banditry and rural unrest persisted well after this period (up to
today, as Sendero Luminoso in Peru, the endless Colombian civil war, and
the zapatism of the Chiapas region exemplify), all of these expressions are
qualitatively different from the phenomenon that I examine in this volume.
From the mid-1920s on (or later, depending on the case), most expressions
of peasant unrest and its representation were inspired (or were charged
with being inspired) by Marxism, which determined to varying degrees the
self-perception of the participants, the relations between rural and urban
 | Introduction

insurgency, and the cultural character that the whole process acquired. is
political movement adds a whole new dimension to the “bandit problem,”
and therefore any analysis of post-1920s banditry should form part of a dif-
ferent project. Also, from the 1920s onward, the social landscape in rural
Latin America (particularly, the presence of the state) was more or less es-
tablished along lines fashioned by the elite, dramatically changing the ways
in which agrarian struggles were fought. Banditry thus changed its place in
the political and cultural arenas.

e reader will note that I devote little attention to the Mexican corrido, the
Brazilian literatura de cordel, the Río de la Plata payada, or the Argentine fo-
lletín criollista, which are the cultural expressions that first come to mind (in
part, due to media popularity) when one thinks about Latin American ban-
ditry. My decision to focus on the elite perspective of banditry was based
upon both methodological and theoretical motives. is perspective of ban-
ditry in cultural discourse (as different from police and court reports) has
received scant attention, although there is a well-established body of schol-
arship on the elite perspective on urban criminality. Moreover, to analyze
corridos or folletines from a purely textual perspective (the only one avail-
able to those with professional training as literary/cultural critics) would be-
tray their political-cultural specificity, thus creating a mere spectral counter-
point between popular and lettered culture. e political dimension in these
art forms is lost in formal textual analysis, since they exceed the protocols
that characterize literature (and upon which literary criticism methodolo-
gies are built). In some cases, the political dimension is distorted in a mere
folklorization. (ere are, however, brilliant works, such as Daus 1982, that
engage in textual analysis of popular culture.) Corridos, cantigas, and popu-
lar songs require specific multidisciplinary analyses that take into account
highly local contexts (e.g., communities of production and interpretation,
migration patterns of styles and motifs, complex interactions between pop-
ular, high, and mass culture). An additional difficulty is that many of these
expressions deal with transient entities that are sometimes not even well
defined—an advancing army, a famous trial or execution, an election, an
assassination—thus making the need for a grounded and detailed analysis
even greater. A classic example of this approach is found in Américo Pare-
des’s With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958). Paredes
Introduction | 

analyzes the “Corrido de Gregorio Cortés,” exploring its deep connections


with the struggles on Texas’ southern border during the first half of the
twentieth century. Other examples are Adolfo Prieto’s examination of Ar-
gentine folletín criollista in El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argentina
moderna (1988), Candace Slater’s study of the literatura de cordel in Stories on
a String (1989), or Elijah Wald’s Narcocorrido (2001).
Furthermore, even though “popular” and “elite” are entirely relative
terms and are constituted through mutually modifying conflicts and negoti-
ations (and I am aware of the fact that this important factor in the cultural
dynamics will not be part of the analysis), they do not always have the same
periodizations, they do not operate within the same units, they do not fol-
low the same protocols of representation, and they are not inhabited by the
same narratives. (For example, Villa and Artigas were suppressed or dis-
tanced from elite discourse for decades, which allowed for their flourishing
in popular and mass culture.) In any case, an analysis of popular depictions
of bandits would require not only another book to consider the large num-
ber of examples but also to cover the method, theory, chronology, and the
political and cultural conflicts involved. I am confident, though, that what I
have lost by denying each of my analyses a more grounded examination I
have gained by providing insight, for the first time, into a cultural phenom-
enon encompassing the entire continent.
My focus is bandit narratives from Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, and
Brazil. Of course, epidemic banditry was not restricted to these countries;
Cuba during the wars of independence, the Andean region during the post-
independence period, and twentieth-century Colombia had more than their
fair share of large-scale banditry. However, in the four previously men-
tioned countries, a tradition of bandit literature had a prominent place in
the national literary canon and in the larger national imagination. is is
not as apparent—so far—in the other countries of Latin America.
e texts considered in the following pages will not be organized chrono-
logically or by national traditions. Rather, each part groups a number of case
studies according to their different takes on banditry vis-à-vis the national
projects: the bandit as Other, the bandit as instrument of critique, and the
bandit as devious brother and as suppressed origin.
Part I examines cases in which banditry is addressed as the unequivocal
demon of national, modernizing projects and the suppression of the bandit
is a paramount (and essential) moment in the narrative. I devote this part to
 | Introduction

analyzing foundational texts of Latin American culture such as the pica-


resque novel El periquillo sarniento (1816), by José Joaquín Fernández de
Lizardi (1776–1827); the essay Facundo (1845); the doctrinarian piece El
Chacho: último caudillo de la montonera de los Llanos (1867), by Domingo
Faustino Sarmiento (1810–1888); the novel El Zarco (1885–1888), by Igna-
cio Manuel Altamirano (1834–1893), as well as criminological works by
Raimundo Nina Rodrigues and Julio Guerrero’s La génesis del crimen en Méx-
ico (1901).
Part II examines cases in which banditry is mobilized as part of variously
oriented critiques of the modernizing path that Latin American countries
were following toward the second half of the nineteenth century. is part is
devoted to the novel Astucia: el jefe de los Hermanos de la Hoja o los charros
contrabandistas de la Rama (1865) by Luis Inclán (1816–1875); the Venezue-
lan novel Zárate (1882) by Eduardo Blanco (1839–1912); the celebrated
poem Martín Fierro (1872/1879), by José Hernández (1834–1886); as well
as Juan Moreira (1879), the hugely popular serial novel by Eduardo Gutié-
rrez (1851–1889); and Alma gaucha (1906), the play by Alberto Ghiraldo
(1874–1946), who rewrites Martín Fierro by fashioning his main character
as an anarchist avant la lettre. e last chapter of this part deals with the
novel Los bandidos de Río Frío (1891) by Manuel Payno (1810–1894).
Part III examines the role of banditry as the suppressed origin of the na-
tional community, a tropic use that takes the ambiguity that characterized
the bandit figure to an extreme, since it includes and puts tension on the
two previous uses of the bandit figure. Because of this, the first chapter of
Part III is devoted to perhaps the most complex work of the corpus, Os
sertões (1902), by Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909). In addition, this part
examines La guerra gaucha (1905) and El payador (1916), both by Leopoldo
Lugones (1874–1938), the novel Los de abajo (1915) by Mariano Azuela
(1873–1952), the essay Cesarismo democrático (1919) by the Venezuelan
Laureano Vallenilla Lanz (1870–936), and finally Doña Bárbara (1927), the
novel by Rómulo Gallegos (1884–1969).
e conclusion of the book summarizes some of the main topics visited
throughout these pages and establishes a number of categories that I con-
sider useful for further analysis.
e Foundation
of National Identities
e Bandit as Other

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