It will be justice: Facundo Quiroga and Chacho Peñaloza in the historical memory of La Rioja, Argentina, during the 19th and 21st centuries

Abstract

In this work we will present some advances on the research that we started in 2020, on the presence of the popular leaders Ángel Vicente “Chacho” Peñaloza and Juan Facundo Quiroga the “Tigre de los Llanos” in the pantheon of heroes of La Rioja,
Argentina. The image of the Argentine rural chiefs was converted from savages and barbarians to symbols of provincial heroism with national scope. We understand this process of displacement as the product of a socio-political historical consensus, which
was consolidated during the 1930s and 1940s of the last century, through an intensive gravitation of a local intellectual elite, within the framework of the government of the radical Héctor María de La Fuente.
The creation of intellectual networks of revisionist orientation, a provincial government with a strong inclination to cultural promotion, combined with the relationship of kinship between the protagonists of the process of vindication and the leaders, the
professionalization of historiography and the inclusion of these in literature, theater, radio and mass media in general, allowed inaugurating and maintaining the favorable vision regarding the leaders as federal heroes. It was a condition of possibility for historiographic, political, cultural and family discourses to coincide with the active memories of the sectors of civil society about
Peñaloza and Quiroga, acquiring centrality in the public space. This pro-leader’s vision became hegemonic at the arrival of the 20th and 21st centuries; legitimizing itself through official devices, historiographic research, school demonstrations, etc., establishing a story of provincial unity and identity, founded on the figure of these rehabilitated heroes.