En La Sangre

Resumen del Libro

By the end of the 19th century, successive waves of immigration had modified the booming Argentine society at a vertiginous pace, violently shaking its structures. The undesired side effects of the massive immigrant flow forced readjustments in the free-thinking, free-enterprise, liberal line of thought, pursued until then by the aristocratic but progessive ruling classes. The contradictions in their ideology surfaced, steering official discourse towards an often xenophobic, racist, conservative and defensive stance. Within this context of socio-political skepticism boiling underneath the euphoria of material progress, a small group of gentlemen-writers of the 1980s started to question the decadence caused by the lust for luxury mixed with hypocrisy and speculation, which they viewed as foreshadowing disaster. Eugenio Cambaceres belonged to this first generation of the liberal ruling class gifted with a clear awareness of the predicament that threatened them, and, in 1887, in the midst of the liberal apotheosis brought by the Juarez Celman administration, his finely honed class-conservation instincts led him to write En la sangre, a novel that clearly describes patrician distrust towards immigration, portraying the criollo oligarchy-controlled spaces as stolen or lost. Genaro Piazza, the son of a Neapolitan tinker, is the novels main character, but stigmatized right from the beginning he becomes a source of infectious disease within the plot. Cambaceres makes no attempt to conceal his hatred of his own character, and adorns him with all the stereotypes of the social climbing immigrant, so often depicted in 80s argentine elite paranoia, and which continued to figure in the countrys nationalistic thought in the 20th century. En la sangre is a loud and sustained cry, an active attempt to rouse and activate the elite class, pampered and put to sleep by the achievements of General Julio A. Roca and his successors. Using techniques of naturalism, Cambaceres reveals…