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From the moment of its emergence, poesía gauchesca has posed the question of identity or being (Ludmer 120) in such a way that the text becomes a discursive battleground in which individuals confront each other while trying to define themselves. When re-writing a contemporary account of this genre's classic work El gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) by José Hernández, Paraguayan-Argentine poet Óscar Fariña (1980) inscribes his El guacho Martín Fierro (2011) within this tradition. Now, however, Tincho Fierro’s underworld fringe is located in Buenos Aires’s slums and cumbia’s rhythm provides an accompaniment. The following issues, that were pertinent to the nineteenth century, return updated to question Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s administration and political project: 1) whose bodies does the term “guacho ” conceal?, 2) what does it mean to be a “guacho" nowadays?, 3) what type of inclusion can be given to these individuals beyond prison or the slum? In order to explore these matters in Fariña’s work the trajectory drafted by the term “guacho ” is thoroughly examined as well as its connection with language itself and animalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the relationship between voice, body and law in José Hernández's Martín Fierro by confronting the first part or La Ida (1872) vis-à-vis the second and last part or La Vuelta (1879). I will argue that the problems of the law are intrinsically connected to the acquisition of a "voice" by the gauchos, which encompasses their physical vanishing (or transformation) by the end of the nineteenth century in Argentina. The relationship between the textual representation of the gaucho as a legal entity, a new status acquired simultaneously through its real transformation as an absent body, has been overlooked by the specialized critic and aims to contribute to the endless debate on the topic of Martín Fierros's regeneration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]