Landscape Interpretation and Social Context in Juan José Morosoli

• In Event: Geographical Discourses and Territorial Representations in Latin American Writing

Abstract

Juan José Morosoli’s short stories and essays published in the 1930s and 1940s depict the special relationship between peasants and landscape in rural settings that undergo a rapid process of modernization. Similarly to geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer’s organic notion of landscape, where nature and culture converge, Morosoli’s campo is shaped by those that until that moment remained excluded from the national landscape: the peasants who, as a consequence of the modernizing process of the cattle industry and unsuccessful agricultural policies, were forced to emigrate to urban centers where they had to compete for labor with thousands of immigrants newly arrived from Europe.

Author

• Carla E Giaudrone, Rutgers University