The Rural Woman Enters the Frame: A Visual History of Gender, Nation, and the Goodbye Mate in the Postcolonial Río de la Plata

Abstract

Abstract Around the turn of the twentieth century, the image of a rural woman handing a gaucho on horseback a drink before he trotted away began to circulate with increasing frequency in the Río de la Plata region. The drink the woman passed the man was the local infusion yerba mate, and, in earlier illustrations, it had been served by another man. This gendered shift occurred alongside a dramatic expansion of common peoples’ access to images via photographs and postcards. Tracing the social and visual history of the goodbye mate ritual from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth reveals the quotidian manner in which locals in this region constructed, consumed, and circulated overlapping visions of their nations. As the gaucho become a popular and contested national symbol in Argentina and Uruguay alike, the rural woman (then referred to as la china, but now largely unnamed) became a local one whose faithfulness to the gaucho and, by extension, the nation, was coveted by men across the sociopolitical divide. This article is, on the one hand, a microhistory of the goodbye mate ritual and, on the other, an argument about how centering visual sources and marginal figures, like the china, allows us to better understand the historical and hierarchical construction of national identities and icons.