Posted by Miguel A. Balsa on March 23, 192003 at 16:06:12:
NOTES ON “JUAN MOREIRA”
From the very beginning, it becomes clear that the notion of fate occupies a central place in Juan Moreira’s story. The sequence of unfortunate events that constitute this drama are previously announced by Tata Viejo’s initial sentence: “It is useless, my child; when everything is against you and misfortune tosses you against the wall on your back it leaves you flatter than a pancake.”
Tata Viejo’s presage resonates throughout the play, echoed in different voices--Juan Moreira himself declares that “[t]he curse of fate is always with me”. The mournful refrain is present even in the guitar player’s song (“A gaucho treated like a thief / I languish in fate’s awful power...”), and it is spread all over the pampa by the same wind that brought to Juan Andrade’s ears “the whisper of a great grief,” and told him about “the sad misfortune of a humble and hard-working gaucho.” What all these voices seem to say is that any of Juan Moreira’s attempts to resist his ruthless fate are doomed to failure. Moreira’s fate, so to speak, appears as a mesh in which all attempts of resistence against injustice will inevitably be trapped.
Moreira’s fate, in brief, is to be an outlaw despite his will to the contrary. Even though he has good reason to distrust the law (he had to leave his beloved family in order to escape a false accusation of murder), he still maintains his faith in it (he appears before Don Fracisco to claim the payment of Sardeti’s debt). It is precisely his good faith (his firm belief in the legal system that has previously betrayed him) that originates the process that finally results in his death. That is to say, the ultimate cause of Moreira’s death is his loyalty to the system that repudiates him. Moreira’s fate is therefore to face a double doom to failure. In the first place, because the corrupt law representatives are determined to use their power for their own dark purposes and against him; secondly, because he is a man of honor, and for this very reason, an outright rejection of the law is simply unbearable to him.
In order to survive as a man of honor--or rather, simply as a man worthy of such name, since honor and life are synonyms for him--Moreira decides to take justice into his own hands and kills Sardeti becuase he knows that there is no space for justice within the established syestem. He recuperates his honor at the price of becoming an outlaw. In his case, however, being an outlaw is the same as opting for an interpretation of the law according to which “law is justice,” instead of the established and corrupt concept according to which “law is power.” Thus, Moreira’s story confronts two mutually excluding notions of law--and, by extension, two opposed conceptions of how order, justice, and power must be combined in order to organize life among humans.
Like any and all other plays, “Juan Moreira” can be read from innumerable perspectives. When read in relation to the construction of Argentina’s national identity and discourse of the 19th Century, this “National Drama of Life on the Pampas” becomes extremely interesting, since it arises basic and crucial questions in terms of a process of national construction. Some of these questions are: who gets to decide between different concepts of justice (that is, between different models of nation)? How would issues of race, class, and cultural tradition be dealt with in the national discourse of the newborn nation? How could the structures of power be transformed from the old colonial situation into the new independent nation?