The Argentinian pampa as a discursive landscape of the Promised Land

Abstract

The myth of the Promised Land is present in almost all the worldwide ancestral cultures and was carried along with the human emigrational movements. The present paper aims to show the Argentinian Pampa as a landscape that could be identified with ancient idea of the Promised Land. The Pampa biome is located in South America and covers an area of 750.000 km², occupying half of the Rio Grande do Sul (a southern Brazilian state), all the Uruguay territory and almost the 20% of the northeast Argentinian region. The Pampa was originated during the cretaceous period with the Andes Mountain upheaval, shortly before dinosaur extinction. Early from its origins, the Pampa biome showed no significant surface alterations and in the last 12,000 years, during Pleistocene, the first groups of hunter-gatherers arrived in these lands and lived together with the local megafauna. The descendants of these human groups had to face and fight against the Spaniards who came to seek for natural wealth and planning to settle in the New World. After centuries, once the republic of Argentina was consolidated as an independent country, the Pampa remained a challenge. In the last quarter of the 19th century, Father Jose Gabriel Brochero, known as “the Gaucho Priest”, decided to serve the needs of small towns neglected by the central Argentinian government authorities, building churches, schools and roads. He regarded the Pampa as an ideal place to restore the biblical Eden because the good condition of this biome allowed man a second chance to live in harmony with his creator. In the same way, a considerable group of Jews decided to leave Czarist Russia because of anti-Semite intolerance and persecutions, came to Argentina, and settled in the province of Entrerios. These people were known as the Gaucho Jews. Thus, the Pampa turned into a second Promised Land again, the New Jerusalem, as it was so announced in the synagogues built in the country. And in order to defend this thesis, this essay counts on a frame of reference based upon Mircea Eliade, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gaston Bachelard and Ezequiel Martinez Estrada studies and theories, together with the author´s own considerations.