In El Gaucho Martín Fierro, the central figure endures the imposition of military service.
At the core of José Hernández’s epic poem, first issued in 1872, lies a deeply libertarian question: what occurs when the state claims ownership over your life?
Fierro narrates the tale through a memory-filled lens, beginning with his life as a hired cattleman who has a wife, children, and dreams of living “as free as a bird up in the sky.” During a festival, he is seized, drafted into the army, and sent to the frontier to fight Indigenous peoples. There he faces brutal conditions: scant provisions, defective gear, and unscrupulous officers who seize his horse and compel Fierro to work on their private farms. A brief assignment swells into a protracted three-year ordeal, and the promised wages never come in full.
Fierro deserts and returns home. His ranch is ruined. His cattle have been sold off. His wife and children are missing, their futures uncertain. With nothing left to his name, Fierro resolves to become a gaucho matrero, an outlaw who will “roam the plains like a tiger on the trail, whose cubs have been stolen.”
By turning Fierro into a tool for its own violent purposes, the poem suggests, the state undermines the very social fabric it professes to defend.
