This first full-length biography brings into focus a quixotic, defiant, and noble figure who is not well-known today. The virile Argentine poet and social reformer, Alberto Ghiraldo, died in Chile in 1946 at an advanced age. He spent much of his life fighting for the recognition of the working man’s rights in the Argentine labor movement around 1900. Author Cordero’s study is not intended as an objective evaluation of social or esthetic ideas; instead, it presents simply and sympathetically the struggles and triumphs of an idealistic partisan hero whom the author calls “one of the outstanding men of the generation of ’98.”
Ghiraldo’s influence on the idealistic youth of Argentina is incalculable. He founded the short-lived El Obrero in 1896, the first labor daily in Latin America with significant impact. He was not a socialist, but he supported Alfredo L. Palacios, the socialist deputy, and was supported by him in turn. Ghiraldo was greatly influenced by Leandro N. Alem and by Rubén Darío, a friend of his bohemian days in Buenos Aires. Ghiraldo was interested in international anarchism and was preparing to go to the London congress when the war intervened in 1914. He spent much of his later life in Spain.
Cordero relies on Ghiraldo’s own writings, including the partly autobiographical novel, Humano ardor (Barcelona, 1928), as well as upon contemporary accounts, news items, and the recollections of personal friends. The result is a chronicle of a life rich in anecdote and specific detail. Cordero presents the colorful, blond, muscular, and indignantly articulate Ghiraldo not as a saint but as a romantic hero who hated the tyranny of hypocrisy and who struggled valiantly against social wrongs.
