Abstract

DI LISCIA, María Silvia. The Far West: Juan Monticelli's Journeys And Stories About The Pampas During The Crisis. Rev. Pilquen [online]. 2008, n.10. ISSN 1851-3123.

This paper explores the imaginary constructed about the Pampas from the stories of the Salesian priest and doctor of natural sciences, Juan V. Monticelli during different journeys in the first decades of the 20th century. The misional task in the Territory is combined with flora reconnaissance, following a tradition that the Catholic Church and science had begun long before the 20th century. In several scientific and popularization works, Monticelli presented a permanently changing environment due to exhaustive soil explotation. Thus, the writing of the voyager explores the possibilities and limits of Pampas, with a picture that reflects its very fertile plains with abundant wheat fields as well as native forests' drains; the thriving populations on the agricultural frontier, and the abandonment of the immense regions of the thorny West. A population of selfsacrificed immigrants, the hard life of the woodcutters at native forests, and the difficulties for institutional operation at the start-up of a productive space within the critical context of the Thirties, are shown in this Far West constructed for entertainment of readers who admired the exotic and wanted to inquire as well as admire themselves.

Keywords : Journeys; La Pampa; Imaginary; 1930 crisis.

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