Esteban Echeverría Mamani

José Esteban Echeverría (Buenos Aires, 1805 – Montevideo, 1851) was an Argentine poet and writer who brought Romanticism to Argentine literature. He belonged to the so-called Generation of 1837, a group of young intellectuals who wanted to give their newly independent country a culture of its own. His importance lies as much in his organizing and political activity as in his poems and stories.

He spent five years in Paris, from 1825 to 1830, where he absorbed Romanticism at the height of its vogue in France. Back in Buenos Aires, he became one of its champions. In 1832 he published, anonymously and in a local newspaper, Elvira o la novia del Plata, usually considered the first Romantic story in Argentina. His collections Los consuelos (1834) and Rimas (1837), which contains La cautiva, mixed personal feeling with descriptions of the pampas and the frontier.

Politics took up much of his life. He took part in the group that gave rise to the Asociación de Mayo and led the Joven Argentina, founded in Buenos Aires in 1838 on the model of Young Italy. Opposed to the rule of Juan Manuel de Rosas, he was forced into exile in Uruguay, where he wrote El matadero. The story, quite different in style from his other work, was not published until years after his death.

His romantic liberalism drew on the nationalism of Giuseppe Mazzini and the ideas of Henri de Saint-Simon. His Dogma socialista, with the retrospective essay that accompanies it, is seen as an early text that helped inspire the Constitution of 1853. His name survives in Esteban Echeverría, a district in Greater Buenos Aires, and his collected works, edited by Juan María Gutiérrez between 1870 and 1874, remain the main reference for studying him.