Cuerpo y territorio:

la frontera en Martín Fierro y “La cautiva”

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, Argentina gave rise to multiple narratives about the border, a complex and moving space that has usually been difficult to characterise. In both José Hernández's Martín Fierro (1872/1879) and Esteban Echeverría's "La cautiva" (1837) the border plays a central role. In this article, we propose to identify which characteristics the border area acquires in each of the aforementioned works, taking into consideration Hernández and Echeverría's representation of bodies and the historical context in which both texts were produced. Thus, our intention is to demonstrate that, in both cases, body, territory, and the concepts of ‘State’ and ‘nation’ interact to result in what is commonly known as the ‘border problem’.