Fray Mocho - Literary Achievements

Literary Achievements

The period in which he flourished was a heady time in Buenos Aires. The nation of Argentina had finally come together with the uniting of the city of Buenos Aires with the rest of the country, the great Sarmiento and Mitre were still alive, and Buenos Aires was striving to become the “Queen City” of South America.

He was the founder and first editor of the Argentine Magazine Caras y Caretas (Faces and Masks). The magazine featured a mixture of cartoons and illustrations along with national and foreign subjects taken from social news, notes of general interest and fashion. The magazine also published literary and rural literature. Its contributors include some of the leading lights of Argentine letters: Roberto Payró, Horacio Quiroga, and José Ingenieros, among others. He was the first professional writer of Argentina. In his descriptions of regional customs, the narrator is a watching observer. He wrote at times in the different modes of Buenos Aires speech including the “lunfardo” (the argot or slang of Buenos Aires which still exists). His writing was part of a movement of “modernism” which was a reaction against the prevailing romanticism and the rigidity of the Castilian Spanish language and literature before his time, and which had a counterpart in the Paris of the same period.

One of his most interesting works was the book En El Mar Austral (On the Southern Sea). This is a tale of a year spent traveling on a whaling boat around the southern tip of Chile and Argentina (Tierra del Fuego) beginning in the town of Punta Arenas in Chile. It describes in great and loving detail the scenery and life in the southernmost tip of South America. It does not appear that Fray Mocho ever got within 500 miles of Tierra del Fuego and yet his descriptions are extremetly accurate, and the source of his information is still not known.