José Hernández

José Hernández was born in 1834 on an estate near Buenos Aires; his mother died early, and his father was an estate manager. As a boy, sent for his health to the great southern plains, he lived among the gauchos, learning to ride, lasso and herd cattle, coming to know their speech, songs and customs, and seeing with his own eyes their frontier wars with the Indians. As a man he threw himself into the Argentine civil wars on the Federalist side and worked as a journalist, legislator and parliamentary secretary, more than once in exile in Brazil and Uruguay. He sympathised with the gauchos, conscripted by the government to serve on the frontier and cruelly oppressed. In 1872, hiding in a Buenos Aires hotel, he wrote the long narrative poem Martín Fierro, and seven years later its sequel. The poem spread widely through the countryside, and many gauchos who could not read knew it by heart.