About

Ariel de la Fuente is a Professor at Purdue University, specializing in Modern Latin American History, Literary Studies, and Intellectual History. His research is interdisciplinary and has written books, articles, and chapters that integrate history, literature, and art. He is the author of 'Children of Facundo: Caudillo and Gaucho Insurgency during the Argentine State-Formation Process (1853-1870)' and 'Borges, Desire, and Sex.' Currently, he is preparing an anthology with commentary of Argentine poet Baldomero Fernández Moreno and a book on Domingo F. Sarmiento's 'Facundo'.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Humanities
• Computer Science
• Literature
• Law
• Art
• History
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Children of Facundo Caudillo and Gaucho Insurgency during the Argentine State-Formation Process (La Rioja, 1853-1870)

  Duke University Press eBooks · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Computer Science

  In Children of Facundo Ariel de la Fuente examines postindependence Argentinian instability and political struggle from the perspective of the rural lower classes. As the first comprehensive regional study to explore nineteenth-century society, culture, and politics in the Argentine interior-where more than 50 percent of the population lived at the time-the book departs from the predominant Buenos Aires-centered historiography to analyze this crucial period in the processes of state- and nation-building.La Rioja, a province in the northwest section of the country, was the land of the caudillos immortalized by Domingo F. Sarmiento, particularly in his foundational and controversial book Facundo. De la Fuente focuses on the repeated rebellions in this district during the 1860s, when Federalist caudillos and their followers, the gauchos, rose up against the new Unitarian government.

  DOI

• Literature and Political Corruption

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Political Science
  • History

  General Juan Facundo Quiroga’s terrible reputation did not begin with Domingo F. Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845).1 Actually, it was started by his Unitarian enemies in the late 1820s and early 1830s and preceded the famous book by many years.

  PublisherDOI

• FIDDIAN, Robin W. "Postcolonial Borges: Argument and Artistry": Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2017. x + 222 pp.

  Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Reviews of Books

  Bulletin of Spanish Studies · 2019-05-28 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  [no abstract]

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Making Citizens in Argentina

  Hispanic American Historical Review · 2019-10-29

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Diseño y evaluación de primers in silico del gen E1 del virus de chikungunya para Real-Time PCR (qPCR)

  Revista CON-CIENCIA · 2018-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: A Cultural History

  Hispanic American Historical Review · 2018-02-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The purpose of this book is to offer a “general synthesis” and “an accessible introduction” to the cultural history of Spanish America in the nineteenth century, in itself an ambitious and challenging goal (pp. 13, 21); yet Christopher Conway succeeds and gives us with concision and clarity a very convincing overview of the subject. In accord with the declared objective of the volume, the author has avoided dwelling on the specific debates that have animated the field in the last few years (which may be appropriate for journal articles or monographs but not for general works like this one) and, concurrently, has also spared readers the jargon common in more specialized projects.The period under study here is a rather shorter nineteenth century that goes from roughly 1830 (after the end of the wars of independence) to 1910 (the beginning of the Mexican Revolution). The book is comprised of an introduction and five chapters. In the first chapter, titled “Cities,” the author explores questions such as the urbanistic ideologies behind cities' transformation, monuments as pedagogical tools of nationalism, spatial and class segregation, street prostitution, and places of sociability like clubs and cafés. The second chapter investigates print, and in it we learn about the changing meaning of reading in a gradually secularized society, the importance of the costumbrista genre in postindependence societies, and major literary works that serve to illuminate transnational cultural patterns (Jorge Isaacs's María) and the hybridity of new genres (José Hernández's Martín Fierro and gauchesque poetry). The third chapter, “Theatricality,” studies highbrow and popular theater but also other collective cultural practices and entertainments such as carnival, bullfighting, and cockfights. The fourth chapter, titled “Image,” explains academic painting (by men and women) as an expression of nationalism and covers popular and costumbrista art such as the watercolors by Afro-Peruvian Pancho Fierro and new technologies like the daguerreotype and paper photography that made possible the cartes de visite. The fifth and final chapter (“Musicality”) explores associative institutions that promoted “civilizing” music (the filarmónicas), high- and middlebrow musical theater (opera and zarzuela), dances, and popular music. After the conclusion, there is a detailed and useful bibliography compiled by the author.According to Conway, in the period under study “Spanish American culture was forged through the opposition and intertwining of tradition and modernity,” but he does not see the first term of the relationship as “a uniform or organized resistance [to modernization] but rather an authentic expression of a different way of living and seeing the world” (p. 3); the author detects a “coexistence” and a “convergence” between elite and popular culture that gave way to processes of “transculturation” (pp. 2, 4–5). This interaction occurred with more frequency in the cities, and most of the evidence that historians have today regarding such phenomena comes from urban life; thus it is logical, the author argues, that the study focuses mainly on the cities of Mexico City, Lima, Bogotá, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Havana. For somewhat related reasons, it is noticeable that the book (and the secondary literature it relies on) offers better explanations when it deals with phenomena from the second half of the period under study (ca. 1870–1910) than it does when the question under investigation pertains to the early and mid-nineteenth century (ca. 1830–1870).The overview of the continent reveals, of course, wide differences and contrasts among nations, but the author also identifies patterns of “cultural continuity” that justify projects of synthesis like this one (pp. 13–14). Among those patterns he points out the “shared colonial past,” the process of independence, the idea of nation, the struggle between liberalism and conservatism, the reading of the same authors and books, and the inclination of the peoples of these different nations for similar pastimes (p. 13).This introduction is intended mainly for upper-division and graduate courses in American universities; however, there are reasons to think that such synthesis will be welcomed also by Latin American students. The rapid and extended professionalization of historical research in the continent has also led to an increasing specialization in the respective national histories, which sometimes makes it difficult to keep up with the literature on other countries of the region; the translation of this book into Spanish, then, could contribute to the communication of relevant historiography on nineteenth-century Spanish American culture.

  PublisherDOI

• Borges, Desire, and Sex

  Liverpool University Press eBooks · 2018-11-21

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  and the "Grill Nighters"

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Borges’s Erotic Library: The Poetry Shelf

  2018-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Un Texto Erróneamente Atribuído a Jorge Luis Borges: "La Sórdida Casa de los Millones"

  Purdue e-Pubs (Purdue University System) · 2016-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDF

Frequent coauthors

• María Morrás

  2 shared

• Evelyn Fishburn

  University College London

  1 shared

• Hilaire Kallendorf

  Texas A&M University

  1 shared

• Eliot Raynor

  Princeton University

  1 shared

• Oscar Cárdenas Alegría

  1 shared

• Nigel Griffin

  1 shared

• Mariano de la Campa Gutiérrez

  Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

  1 shared

• Jan E. Evans

  1 shared