After reading Esteban Echeverría’s “The Slaughterhouse,” it seemed to me that the main purpose of this story was to construct a dichotomy between the organized, urban centers and the pastoral inland provinces. The story seems to simplify the complexities of a young nation down to a struggle to find direction between ‘urban civilization’ and ‘savagery.’ Echeverría clearly broke it down this to present his readers with two visions of the country’s future, with one clearly being superior to the other.

The unfortunate hero of “The Slaughterhouse” is a young man described as a Unitarian, or a person who supports the political concept of a central government run from Buenos Aires. This upstanding man somehow finds himself where he shouldn’t be, surrounded by Federalists, or those who want more autonomy devolved to the hinterland provinces. The setting of the story plays an important role is defining the rural people as barbarous; a grotesque slaughterhouse where the savage people take pleasure in gruesome killings. If this story is meant to be an allegory for the establishment of a new country, then the message may be that Federalism is turning Argentina into a big slaughterhouse.

Although he was passing through a wild, seemingly ungovernable frontier, the Unitarian doubtless comes from an urban center. Cities are meant to impose order on the wilderness, and have long been the seat of authority in Europe. It seems that Echeverría intended for Argentina to be modeled in the same way. Perhaps in the settler cities of Latin America, which Echeverría might have seen as islands of proper European civilization in the savage wilderness of America, the complex notions of a social contract and republicanism have been accepted. It therefore would become their burden to forge a national identity and bring the rural provinces into civilization.

One thing that stuck out to me what the presence of a judge in the slaughterhouse. A judge would ordinarily indicate civil institutions and the rule of law, but in this story, the judge seems to mock the institutions of European civilization. In “The Slaughterhouse,” the judge seems to be a human manifestation of a rejection of a social contract and republicanism.

Echeverría’s portrayal of the Unitarian’s appearance as European points to the idea of following a this path of creating an orderly, European society in the still undomesticated Americas. The Federalist villains are seen as savages precisely because they are not part of this European tradition, but Echeverría’s clearest evidence of this race. This is an extension of established social hierarchies from the colonial era. Furthermore, the frequent biblical allusions (such as the Unitarian’s execution compared to the martyrdom of Christ) draw parallels to a pro-imperial narrative of colonial history where a Christian hero tames a race of savages or dies trying. From this, we can see that the invention of an independent nation-state was a long, turbulent process that took place much later than the actual date of independence.

My main question while reading this story is “Who was Echeverría’s audience?” How many of the rural people who turned to caudillismo—who Unitarians like Echeverría would want to convince of the value of their path—were literate? I imagine that most Echeverría’s readers would have been educated people already living in major cities. In that case, this entire story seems like an exercise in self-justification.