This study has attempted to pursue a twofold objective. The first of these was an examination of the discourse of cultural autochthony that has become virtually synonymous with cultural production in Latin America. In the first chapter I argued that the preoccupation with an autochthonous cultural expression represents a particular resolution to the difficult relationship that Latin America has consistently entertained with modernity. I argued that in the end this never-ending search for an indigenous cultural identity should be understood and addressed as an equally inexhaustible stratagem to empower rhetorically the Latin American writer in the fact of modernity's threat to undermine the authority of his discourse, given the incommensurability of Latin America's circumstances and the requirements of the modern.

My second intention was to analyze the particularities of a novelistic discourse that took as its project the incorporation of that presumed autochthonous essence into the literary text. Eschewing the fundamental assumption of both the novela de la tierra and most of the criticism on it, namely, the referential status of the autochthonous, I have undertaken to establish the discursive nature of “the autochthonous” through a description of the mutually confirming relations that connect its constitutive elements. The rhetorical figure that determines this discursive space can be seen at work in the three novels studied, irrespective of the fact that each proposes a different vision of autochthony founded on national idiosyncratic exigencies. Hence, although the gaucho and the llanero are not interchangeable, the discourses that propose each as a representative of autochthony are, as I have attempted to show, analogous.