This volume is a collection of essays inspired by the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in 1988. Conferences organized by Georgette Magassy Dorn and Joseph L. Criscenti provided the forum for professors, students, and librarians of history, literature, and education to approach the great man’s numerous roles and accomplishments from the perspectives of their various disciplines. Although these essays are rather uneven in quality, taken together their very diversity speaks to the complex and contradictory nature of Sarmiento’s writings and public life.
The best contributions are those that address these complexities directly. Tulio Halperín Donghi offers a sophisticated (though awkwardly translated) reading of Recuerdos de la provincia that treats Sarmiento’s apparently paradoxical embrace of the colonial “old order” as he positioned himself for political leadership in the imminent post-Rosas period. Samuel Baily looks at the contradictions in Sarmiento’s writing on immigration, only some of which can be accounted for by the passage of time. William Katra presents a provocative analysis of the conflicting politics and philosophies that led Sarmiento to rewrite the early history of the Argentine nation.
Criscenti’s fine chapter on Sarmiento and Rosas before 1852 sorts out the events of that turbulent period, providing an important historical grounding for the discussion of “civilization and barbarism” that occupies many of the other essays. In addition, Efraín Kristal’s brief look at the literary polemics of Sarmiento’s early years in Chile is nicely balanced by Diana Sorensen Goodrich’s chapter on how a later contributor to national culture (Leopoldo Lugones) reinterpreted Sarmiento and his ideas.
Sarmientos dedication to the expansion of Argentine education, his admiration for the United States, his style, vision, and policies are also treated in this slim volume. Although several authors are dubious about his legacies in modern Argentina, many are uncritically celebratory, as perhaps befits a centennial commemoration. Much of this material will be familiar to Argentine specialists, but the collection serves to introduce these diverse offerings to the English-language reader, along with a select bibliography of published works by and about Sarmiento.
