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Focusing on the writer–statesman Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811–88), this essay examines the functionality of medievalization in Argentina's internal colonialism. The extent to which allocation of medievality was employed by this foundational political figure, identifies this temporal trope as a core element in the civilizational mapping of post-independence Argentina and Spanish America. Sarmiento's settler postcolonial writing proposed, as part and parcel of his political activity, the colonization of lands that were occupied either by Amerindian tribes judged anachronistic, or by medievalized rural subjects whose atavistic culture had to be successfully domesticated or eradicated from the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]