Gaucho

A gaucho or gaúcho is a skilled horseman, reputed to be brave and unruly. The figure of the gaucho is a folk symbol of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, southern Bolivia, and southern Chile. Gauchos became greatly admired and renowned in legend, folklore, and literature and became an important part of their regional cultural tradition. Beginning late in the 19th century, after the heyday of the gauchos, they were celebrated by South American writers.
According to the Diccionario de la lengua española, in its historical sense a gaucho was a "mestizo who, in the 18th and 19th centuries, inhabited Argentina, Uruguay, and Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, and was a migratory horseman, and adept in cattle work". In Argentina and Uruguay today, gaucho can refer to any "country person, experienced in traditional livestock farming". Because historical gauchos were reputed to be brave, if unruly, the word is also applied metaphorically to mean "noble, brave and generous", but also "one who is skillful in subtle tricks, crafty". In Portuguese the word gaúcho means "an inhabitant of the plains of Rio Grande do Sul or the Pampas of Argentina of European and indigenous American descent who devotes himself to lassoing and raising cattle and horses"; gaúcho has also acquired a metonymic signification in Brazil, meaning anyone, even an urban dweller, who is a citizen of the state of Rio Grande do Sul.

Etymology

Many explanations have been proposed, but no-one really knows how the word "gaucho" originated. Already in 1933 an author had counted 36 different theories; more recently, over fifty. They can proliferate because "there is no documentation of any sort that will fix its origin to any time, place or language".

Resemblance theories

Most seem to have been conjured up by finding a word that looks something like gaucho and guessing that it changed to its present form, perhaps without awareness that there are sound laws that describe how languages and words really evolve over time. The etymologist Joan Corominas said most of these theories were "not worthy of discussion". Of the following explanations, Rona said that only #5, #8 and #9 might be taken seriously.

#	Proposer	Alleged root and evolution	Objection	Discussed in
1	Emeric Essex Vidal	Same root as English gawky	Earliest theory, dismissed as "humorous"	Paullada 1961; Trifilo 1964
2	Monlau and Diez	French gauche > Argentine gaucho.	French little spoken in region.	Paullada 1961
3	Emilio Daireaux	Arabic chauch > Andalusian Spanish chaucho > guttural Amerindian gaucho	Sp. chaucho is unattested. That Indians could not have pronounced "chaucho" is untenable.	Groussac 1904; Paullada 1961; Trifilo 1964; Gibson 1892;
4	Rodolfo Lenz	Pehuenche cachu or Araucanian kauchu > Argentine gaucho	No proof that it was not the other way round	Paullada 1961; Hollinger 1928
5	Martiniano Leguizamón	Quichua huajcho or wáhča > colonial Sp. guacho > Arg. gaucho by metathesis	Guacho > gaucho is an improbable metathesis. Theory does not explain Braz. gaúcho	Groussac 1893; Groussac 1904; Paullada 1961; Rona 1964;
6	Vicuña Mackenna	Chilean Quichua or Araucanian guaso > guacho > gaucho	Same as #5.	Hollinger 1928
7	Lehmann-Nitsche	Gitano gachó > Andalusian gachó > Arg. gaucho or Braz. gaúcho	Transition unexplained	Lehmann-Nitsche 1928
8	Paul Groussac	Lat. gaudeo > Sp. gauderio > Urug. gauderio > derisive gauducho > gaúcho* and gaucho	Gauducho unattested, linguistically improbable. Unlikely transition to gaucho*	Groussac 1904; Paullada 1961; Hollinger 1928; Rona 1964
9	Buenaventura Caviglia, Jr	*Garrucho > gaúcho, "under negroid influence" > gaucho	Cattle pole origin implausible speculation; negroid theory untenable	Rona 1964
10	Fernando O. Assunção	Learned Sp. gaucho	Elite technical word unknown to the masses	Assunção 2011; Hollinger 1928.

The dialect frontier theory

A different approach is to consider that the word might have originated north of the Río de la Plata, where the indigenous languages were quite different and there is a Portuguese influence.
Two facts that any theory could usefully account for are:

The word actually exists in two forms: Port. gaúcho and Sp. gaucho, both long attested.
Gauchos are first mentioned by name in the Spanish colonial records for present-day Uruguay, often in connection with smuggling to Brazil. Thus Azara wrote :

Hence the Uruguayan sociolinguist José Pedro Rona thought the origin of the word was to be sought "on the frontier zone between Spanish and Portuguese, which goes from northern Uruguay to the Argentine province of Corrientes and the Brazilian area between them".
Rona, himself born on a language frontier in pre-war Europe, was a pioneer of the concept of linguistic borders, and studied the dialects of northern Uruguay where Portuguese and Spanish intermingle. Rona thought that, of the two forms — gaúcho and gaucho — the former probably came first, because it was linguistically more natural for gaúcho to evolve by accent-shift to gáucho, than the other way round. Thus the problem came down to explaining the origin of gaúcho.
As to that, Rona thought that gaúcho originated in northern Uruguay, and came from garrucho, a derisive word possibly of Charrua origin, which meant something like "old indian" or "contemptible person", and is actually found in the historical record. However in the Portuguese-based dialects of northern Uruguay the phoneme /rr/ is not easily pronounced, and so is rendered as /h/. Thus garrucho would be rendered as gahucho, and indeed the French naturalist Augustin Saint-Hilaire, travelling in Uruguay during the Artigas insurgency, wrote in his diary : The native Spanish-speakers of these borderlands, however, could not process the phoneme /h/, and would render it as a null, thus gaúcho. In sum, according to this theory, gaúcho originated in the Uruguay-Brazil dialect borderlands, deriving from a derisive indigenous word garrucho, then in Spanish lands evolved by accent-shift to gaucho.

History

The historical "gaucho" is elusive, because there has been more than one kind. Mythologisation has obscured the topic.

Origins

Itinerant horsemen, hunting wild cattle on the pampas, originated as a social class during the 17th century. "The great natural abundance of the pampa", wrote Richard W. Slatta, File:Portrait of Félix de Azara by Goya.jpg|thumb|upright=0.75|Spanish official Félix de Azara, by Goya
The original gaucho was typically descended from unions between Iberian men and Amerindian women, although he might also have African ancestry. A DNA analysis study of rural inhabitants of Rio Grande do Sul, who style themselves gaúchos, has claimed to discern, not only Amerindian ancestry in the female line but, in the male line, a higher proportion of Spanish ancestry than is usual in Brazil. However, gauchos were a social class, not an ethnic group.
Gauchos are first mentioned by name in the 18th century records of the Spanish colonial authorities who administered the Banda Oriental. For them, he is an outlaw, cattle thief, robber and smuggler. Félix de Azara said gauchos were "the dregs of the Rio de la Plata and of Brazil". Summarised one scholar: "Fundamentally was a colonial bootlegger whose business was contraband trade in cattle hides. His work was highly illegal; his character lamentably reprehensible; his social standing exceedingly low.
"Gaucho" was an insult; yet it was possible to use the word to refer, without animosity, to country people in general. Furthermore the gaucho's skills, though useful in banditry or smuggling, were just as useful for serving in the frontier police. The Spanish administration recruited its anti-smuggling Cuerpo de Blandengues from among the outlaws themselves. The Uruguayan patriot José Gervasio Artigas made precisely that career transition.

Wars of emancipation; independence

The gaucho was a born cavalryman, and his bravery in the patriot cause in the wars of independence, especially under Artigas and Martín Miguel de Güemes, earned admiration and improved his image. The Spanish general García Gamba, who fought against Güemes in Salta, said: Knowing "gaucho" to be an insult, the Spanish hurled it at the patriot militias; Güemes, however, picked it up as a badge of honour, referring to his troops as "my gauchos".
Visitors to the newly emergent Argentina and Uruguay perceived that a "gaucho" was a country person or herdsman: seldom was there a pejorative significance. Emeric Essex Vidal, the first artist to paint gauchos, noted their mobility :
Vidal also painted visiting gauchos from up-country Tucumán.. They are not horsemen: they are oxcart drivers, and may or may not have called themselves gauchos in their home province.
Charles Darwin observed life on the pampas for six months and reflected in his diary :