Education in Early Twentieth-Century Argentina:

Representations of Güemes, Caudillos, and Gauchos in School Textbooks (1900–1916)

Abstract

This article seeks to examine the uses of the past as conveyed through school textbooks intended for common schools in the early twentieth century. Specifically, it focuses on how caudillos and gauchos—figures of crucial importance in Argentine politics and history were represented according to the context of their publication. A key dimension of the analysis is the strategic entry point provided by the figure of Martín Miguel de Güemes, whose presence in these sources serves to problematize broader issues.

Within the framework of the Centennial, public education became a tool of Argentinization,” aimed at tempering major social conflicts that emerged from the process of nation-state modernization. From this perspective, the use of the aforementioned figures in selected textbooks opens a window onto the intellectual and political debates of the time, in which different groups contested competing visions of citizenship and republicanism amidst electoral reform and the decline of the “conservative order.”

The study analyzes the corpus on three levels: Güemes, caudillos, and gauchos. From our standpoint, the figure of the Salta leader allowed for the recovery of certain aspects historically associated with caudillos and gauchos—long deemed pernicious by the ruling elite—that were reconfigured in the textbooks. In this way, elementary school manuals contributed to a broader revision of these phenomena, a process simultaneously unfolding in other educational spheres— secondary schools, universities—and in contemporary intellectual registers.