2 - Jews and Gauchos in Rural Argentina

Summary

In spite of the fact that most Jewish immigrants, drawn by the advantages of urban life, sojourned only briefly in the Argentine countryside, the image of the gaucho a nd t he r ural s etting h ave b een f avoured b y fi lm-makers t o cinematically recount the story of Jewish migration to Argentina. The feature films Los gauchos judíos, Un amor en Moisés Ville (A Love in Moisés Ville; Daniel Barone and Antonio Ottone, 2001), La cámara oscura, and the documentaries Herederos (Heirs; María Mercedes Prelat, 2004), Legado (Legacy; Vivian Imar and Marcelo Trotta, 2004) and De Bessarabia a Entre Ríos (From Bessarabia to Entre Ríos; Pedro Banchik, 2005) all revolve around Jews and their bond with rural Argentina. As a way of legitimising the Jewish settlers’ argentinidad, documentary and narrative films alike exalt these settlers’ rapid and successful assimilation into the rural milieu and their quasi-innate gaucho features. As such, these cinematic portrayals recreate the romanticised, but nevertheless controversial, figure of the Jewish gaucho, who emerged in Alberto Gerchunoff's 1910 classic work Los gauchos judíos.

Of particular importance is that the cinematic representation of the Jewish gaucho has not remained static over time; on the contrary, this figure has undergone a significant transformation that can be clearly observed through the comparison of two films, Los gauchos judíos and La cámara oscura. Both films capture the lives of Jewish immigrants in the agricultural colonies of the north-eastern province of Entre Ríos at the close of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries, respectively. Besides documenting the historical past, these films marry the image of the gaucho to that of the Jewish settler and, as a result of this Jewish-gauchesque fusion, one of the themes that surfaces is the masculinity of the Jewish gaucho and the sub-themes of male bonding and the patriarchal figure. While Los gauchos judíos, released in 1975, seems to endorse traditional masculinities, La cámara oscura, a film from 2008, interrogates the validity of patriarchy in an era where traditional masculinities seem to be problematic.

In this chapter, I examine the figure of the Jewish gaucho in the abovementioned films by drawing on the concept of masculinity as a social construct.