After the publication of Eduardo Gutiérrez’s Juan Moreira (1879), its successful theatricaladaptation, and the numerous narratives about rebellious gauchos that followed, the set ofpractices and discourses that create a sense of belonging around the figure of the gaucho hascome to be known under the umbrella term of criollismo. Although recent research has shownthat criollismo did not disappear in the early twentieth century but converted to other nonliterary media, no approach considers the relationship between criollismo and cinema in thelong term and on a global level. In doing just this, this chapter focuses on the crossingbetween criollismo and cinema by looking at the images of the nation that gaucho-themed filmsbring into play. It explores how a repertoire of themes, characters, arguments, and landscapesdisseminated by criollista literature was adapted to film, projected globally in Hollywood movies, and then reappropriated by the local culture. Finally, it argues that this feedbackbetween criollista literature and film was fruitful until the late 1970s, when – after reaching a high level of violence – the political uses of criollismo became less massive and more sporadic.

The defamatory posthumous stories about Raúl explained his celebrity as accidental, an extension of Afro-Argentines’ supposed servility, imitativeness, and minstrel-like buffoonery. He was, in their view, nothing but a “broken puppet” of the city’s elite, who kept him as their personal buffoon. “Celebrity” uncovers a completely different story: one in which Raúl made himself into a charismatic Black icon of the city’s popular culture and bohemian nightlife – a Black legend. This feat of self-making – his gamble that being boldly and unapologetically Black would allow his star to rise – is Raúl’s astonishing and unsung achievement. Shortly after his release from the reformatory, Raúl began to live a life that made celebrity possible. He did so largely by tapping into countercultural currents in the city’s rich popular culture: a flickering fascination with Blackness, and a partial re-claiming of Argentina’s maligned Black roots as an emblem of nativist pride or bohemian outcast glamour. Using contemporary texts and images, the chapter reconstructs Raúl’s scintillating persona as "el murciélago" (the bat) – a stylish and mysterious “creature of the night” who played a starring role in many of the city’s after-hour hotspots, especially in the bohemian world of the tango, Argentina’s emerging national dance. Indeed, by tracing Raúl’s presence in early tango dances to which he brought the candombe of his ancestors and neighbors, I am able to tell a new history of the impact of Afro-Argentine dance and music on Argentina’s national rhythm, to show that it did not disappear in the late nineteenth century, as is widely believed. The chapter pays special attention to images (photographs for which Raúl posed, cover art of tangos named for him, and others), as well as to semi-fictional texts read against the grain, in order to paint a portrait of Raúl’s successful efforts at self-fashioning as a Black dandy and Black celebrity.

Throughout his career as a writer, Borges strategically strove to create an image of James Joyce as the artificer of intricately woven labyrinths whose sheer scope and encyclopaedic bulk both fascinated and horrified him. The chapter charts the twists and turns of Borges’s ambivalent relationship with Joyce, from his 1925 review of Ulysses and translation of a page of its final chapter, to the development of a more problematic attitude where he sought to reposition his own art of brevity as the antithesis of Joyce’s epic legacy.

Throughout his life, Borges was concerned with the identity of his nation. The model of the gaucho from nineteenth century letters was replaced by faith in the criollos, who Borges in the 1920s believed should join forces with immigrants to create a democratic and progressive model for the nation. In the 1940s and 1950s, Borges took up a position against right-wing nationalists including General Perón. Later, after he had declared support for the military coup of 1976, Borges acknowledged his mistake and expressed a utopian vision of a world modelled on the Swiss Confederation.

Back in Buenos Aires in 1921 after time spent in Europe, Borges set about creating a mythology for his native city in the throes of modernisation. The ideological dimension of this project was ’criollismo’: a reconstruction of a city half-imagined, half remembered. Through the workings of metonymy, Buenos Aires also doubled for the nation of Argentina. Key texts in this regard include ’The Complaint of all Criollos’ and the volume of poetry, ’Fervour of Buenos Aires’, also echoed in the later poem, ’The Mythological Foundation of Buenos Aires’. In a comparative context, Borges’s work is more in tune with contemporary architect, Alberto Prebisch, than the painter, Xul Solar.