Querida Mara, cartas de un viaje por la Patagonia

Letters from a casual worker to his wife. Absent for six months to work on the large Patagonian farmsteads along the “Wool Road” he talks about his daily life: the endless journeys squeezed up in the back of a bus, travelling ever onwards into a bare, icy land to shear sheep and then more sheep for a paltry wage, sleeping in barns like an animal, the owners’ arrogance and greed, agreements between owners and intermediaries at his expense. He describes his chance companions, most of whom are from Corrientes, one of the poorest Argentine provinces. There are also a few descendants of the Mapuche Indians massacred by the Argentinian army in the 19th century and, being illiterate, easy to swindle. The journey, which is also the discovery of an immense territory and grandiose but inhospitable landscapes–from the coastlands to the snowy mountains, passing by the mind-boggling reconstruction of a Swiss chalet–is a journey into the settling of Argentina and its social struggles. It is above all a terrible statement of failure, of an immigration that has not kept its promises, that has ended up impoverishing families when it should have enriched them, and which now forces people to migrate yet again into the farthest corners of the country, with no hope of betterment. A minibus lost in a limitless, almost deserted landscape on a road leading nowhere. The desolation of an inner landscape is revealed in these letters. It is also the sadness of a haggard face… the face of Argentina at the beginning of this century. (Yann Lardeau)