Gauchos in South America arose in present day Uruguay

South American gaucho communities arose for the first time in the territory of the present Eastern Republic of Uruguay The gaucho is originally from the Banda Oriental. Although the word "gaucho" or "gaucho" has been used in different circumstances with different meanings, with reference to both the inhabitants of rural areas in southern America, and a type of culture, in the early times it was used to designate a type of inhabitant of the Eastern Sierras of the Eastern Band of Uruguay. During the second half of the 18th century, the people who inhabited the wild and misnamed "no man's land" were called the "gauchos" the borders between the Spanish and Portuguese domains. These people, families and communities inhabited the vast Country Guenoa, an area of ​​prairies, mountain ranges, marshes and sandbanks, which had been, fortunately for its ancestral inhabitants, relatively free (although not entirely or much less) from the genocidal greed of empires Spanish and Portuguese The "gauchos" and their predecessors the "gauderios" and "changadores" managed to subsist, sharing with Guenoas and other native peoples, the natural resources of the area, and more especially, the abundant wild cattle that had been widely reproduced in the grasslands of the Banda Oriental. The herds allowed them to stock up on derived products such as meat, leather and tallow, and also, by circumventing the control of the Spanish patrols, they could sell the troops to the Portuguese. Originally the words vagabonds or bagamundos, changadores, outlaws, and later, gauderíos, were used for this social group "cimarrón" of the Uruguayan and eastern prairies. The name "gaucho" has only just begun to be used regularly in recent decades of the eighteenth century, naming a certain independent and rebellious rural type, which does not obey or accept the social and work routines imposed by the authorities. The word itself appears for the first time in a document written in 1771, referring to certain "criminals" who were hiding in the Sierra at a certain distance from Maldonado, probably in the Sierra Roche region, perhaps in the Sierra de los Rocha itself or its adjacencies. This is a communication from the Commander of Maldonado, Don Pablo Carbonell to Vértiz, dated October 23, 1771. It goes like this: “Very dear sir; With news that some gahuchos had been allowed to see the Sierra, send the militia lieutenants, Jph Picolomini and dn Clemente Puebla, to the Sierra with a party of 34 men among these some soldiers of the battalion in order to make a discovery in the expressed Sierra, to see if they could find the thugs, and at the same time see if he could pick up any cattle; and having practiced… ”In that same year a similar reference from Santo Domingo de Soriano (March 31, 1771) speaks of“ mountaineering gangsters ”to refer to similar characters without using the word gaucho. This denomination only appeared three years later in a written document referring to three men caught in the Puntas del Bequeló (about 40 km southeast of the current site of the city of Mercedes). Although we do not know exactly the geographical area referred to in the Maldonado report to which we referred previously, we think that the "Sierra" mentioned should be somewhere in the "Serranías del Este", which extend through the current departments of Maldonado or Rocha. Since they were smugglers, who sought shelter outside the reach of the imperial authorities in the border areas and needed free passage to the lands controlled by Portugal, it is likely that their shelters were located in the easternmost mountain areas, in the vicinity of the “Narrows” that allowed to facilitate the passage to Brazil. Another route used for the contraband of cattle went to Brazil near the tips of the Yaguarón (present department of Cerro Largo). Further south, the passage of cattle was more difficult due to the presence of the Merin Lagoon and the Yaguarón River, which were obstacles to tackling. Fernando Assunçao in his classic book "El Gaucho" interprets these events in an analogous way. According to this author, the gaucho formation process was "a continuous transformation" and that in this process it is inclined to locate the birth of the gaucho in "lands that today are our country (Uruguay) and the most adjacent border areas of Rio Grande do Sul ”. In particular, Assunçao points out that the old entrerrianos cowboys, the primitive changadores and the gauderios that Concolocorvo saw (in the 1760s) are different from "the gauchos of the Maldonado and Rocha mountain ranges", which, according to this author, would be the first gauchos themselves. Continues at daniloanton.blogspot.com From: Chronicles of Human Peripecia, D. Antón, Piriguazú Edic. Enviar comentarios Historial Guardadas Comunidad