Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was born on February 15, 1811 in San Juan, a small city near the Andes in western Argentina, less than a year after the May Revolution that began the region's break from Spain ^[1]. His father, José Clemente Sarmiento, was a laborer and sometime soldier of modest means; his mother, Paula Albarracín, wove cloth on a loom under a fig tree to keep the household fed, an image her son later made famous in his memoirs ^[2].

The family could not afford to send him abroad or to a university, and San Juan had few formal institutions. He learned to read early, attended the local Escuela de la Patria from the age of five, and afterward educated himself with borrowed books, guided in part by his uncle, the priest José de Oro ^[1]. This self-directed schooling shaped his lifelong conviction that public education could remake a society.

By his mid-teens he was working as a clerk in a shop while reading everything he could obtain, including translations of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, which he took as a model of self-improvement ^[2]. The contrast between his own hunger for learning and the scarcity of schools around him became the central grievance and driving purpose of his career.

Sarmiento's political life began amid the civil wars that tore apart the young Argentine provinces. He sided with the Unitarians, who favored a centralized liberal state, against the Federalist caudillos, and he fought as a young officer in the conflicts of the late 1820s ^[3]. Defeat pushed him across the Andes into Chile in 1831, the first of two long exiles that defined his intellectual formation.

In Chile he worked as a schoolteacher, mining foreman, and shopkeeper before returning briefly to San Juan in 1836, where he founded a school for girls and a newspaper, El Zonda ^[1]. His open opposition to the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the Federalist strongman who dominated Buenos Aires from 1829 to 1852, forced him back to Chile in 1840. There he flourished as a journalist, writing for El Mercurio of Valparaíso and other papers, and in 1842 the Chilean government named him first director of the country's new normal school for training teachers, the earliest institution of its kind in South America ^[4].

In 1845 he published his most celebrated work, Facundo, o Civilización y Barbarie, a biography of the caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga that doubled as a sweeping indictment of Rosas and an analysis of Argentine society. The book argued that the vast, thinly settled pampas bred a violent rural culture hostile to cities, law, and letters ^[3]. Facundo is now read as a founding text of Latin American literature, studied as much for its prose and its mythmaking as for its politics ^[5].

The Chilean government sent him abroad between 1845 and 1848 to study school systems in Europe, North Africa, and the United States. He met the American educator Horace Mann and his wife Mary Peabody Mann in Massachusetts, an encounter that deepened his admiration for the New England common school model and produced a lasting correspondence ^[4].

When the entrerriano general Justo José de Urquiza rose against Rosas, Sarmiento joined the campaign as a military chronicler and was present when the dictator fell at the battle of Caseros in February 1852 ^[3]. He soon broke with Urquiza and aligned himself with Buenos Aires during the decade in which that province stood apart from the Argentine Confederation.

Back in Argentina permanently from 1855, he edited the newspaper El Nacional, served in the Buenos Aires legislature, and directed the province's department of schools, where he multiplied classrooms and pushed for teacher training ^[1]. In 1862, after national reunification under Bartolomé Mitre, Sarmiento became governor of his native San Juan. As governor he founded schools and a public library, promoted mining surveys, and made primary education compulsory in the province, though his heavy-handed suppression of the caudillo Ángel Vicente Peñaloza, known as El Chacho, drew criticism after the rebel was killed in 1863 ^[3].

Mitre then sent him abroad as minister plenipotentiary to Chile, Peru, and the United States. Sarmiento was serving in Washington when American admirers arranged an honorary doctorate for him from the University of Michigan in 1868, and he was still in the United States when word arrived that he had been elected president of Argentina ^[4].

Sarmiento took office on October 12, 1868, inheriting the costly War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay, which Argentina fought alongside Brazil and Uruguay until 1870 ^[3]. He brought the war to its close and then faced internal revolts, including the 1870 uprising in Entre Ríos during which Urquiza was assassinated, and an 1874 rebellion led by Mitre after a disputed election. A cholera outbreak and the devastating yellow fever epidemic that struck Buenos Aires in 1871 added to the burdens of his term ^[1].

His administration is remembered above all for schools. The first national census, carried out in 1869, counted roughly 1.8 million inhabitants and revealed that most Argentines could not read or write, a finding Sarmiento used to justify a massive expansion of public education ^[6]. His government built hundreds of schools, imported trained teachers from the United States (a group of several dozen educators, most of them women, recruited with the help of Mary Mann), and founded teacher-training colleges, beginning with the normal school at Paraná ^[4].

Education was not his only front. The presidency saw the extension of railways and telegraph lines, the founding of the Colegio Militar in 1869 and the naval academy in 1872, the creation of an astronomical observatory at Córdoba under the American astronomer Benjamin Gould, and encouragement of European immigration and agricultural colonies ^[3]. Sarmiento survived an assassination attempt in 1873 and handed power to his elected successor, Nicolás Avellaneda, in October 1874 ^[1].

In Chile in 1848 Sarmiento married Benita Martínez Pastoriza, a widow from San Juan, and adopted her son Domingo Fidel, known as Dominguito, whom he raised as his own. The marriage later dissolved, and Dominguito's death in 1866 at the battle of Curupaytí during the Paraguayan War was the great personal tragedy of Sarmiento's life; he later wrote a grieving memoir of the young man ^[2]. He also had a daughter, Ana Faustina, born in 1832 from an earlier relationship, who cared for him in old age.

Contemporaries described him as combative, vain, tireless, and impossible to ignore. He wrote constantly, in newspapers, letters, and books, and his collected works fill more than fifty volumes ^[5]. His autobiography Recuerdos de provincia (1850), composed partly to answer attacks from the Rosas press, remains one of the most read accounts of provincial Argentine life in the early republic ^[2].

Leaving the presidency did not end his public service. Sarmiento was elected a national senator for San Juan in 1875, served briefly as minister of the interior in 1879, and directed the schools of Buenos Aires province, quarreling with governments and rivals all the while ^[1]. In 1881 he became the first superintendent of the national education council, and his advocacy helped prepare the ground for Law 1420 of 1884, which established free, compulsory, secular primary education in Argentina, a landmark he championed in fierce public debate with Catholic opponents ^[6].

His last major book, Conflicto y armonías de las razas en América (1883), attempted a broader sociological explanation of Spanish America's troubles; it is generally judged a lesser work than Facundo, marked by the racial theories then current ^[5]. In failing health and seeking a gentler climate for his heart and bronchial ailments, he moved to Asunción, Paraguay, where his daughter joined him. He died there on September 11, 1888, at the age of 77 ^[1]. His remains were brought back to Buenos Aires and buried in Recoleta cemetery.

Few figures loom larger in Argentine memory. September 11, the date of his death, is observed as Teachers' Day in Argentina and, since a 1943 inter-American conference in Panama, across much of Latin America, a fitting monument for a man whose favorite title was schoolmaster ^[6]. Statues, schools, a city in Buenos Aires province, and countless streets carry his name, and his portrait has appeared on Argentine banknotes.

Anyone weighing Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's achievements confronts a double record. The educational system he built helped make Argentina one of the most literate nations in Latin America by the early twentieth century, and Facundo gave the continent an enduring framework, civilization against barbarism, that writers from José Martí to Jorge Luis Borges have argued with ever since ^[5]. At the same time, critics past and present fault his contempt for the gaucho and the indigenous peoples of the interior, his identification of progress with European and North American models, and the violence used against provincial rivals during his years in power ^[3].

That argument is itself part of his legacy. Sarmiento wanted Argentina to be a nation of readers, and he succeeded well enough that his own books, flaws included, are still read, taught, and disputed more than a century after his death ^[5].