It's November 2007 and Western Folklife Center staff are in Brazil and Argentina with a group that includes cowboy musicians Sourdough Slim and Wylie & The Wild West, along with poet and filmmaker Gail Steiger. The group is being hosted by Sr. Luis Carlos Borges from Brazil and Sr. Armando Deferrari from Argentina, keepers of the gaucho spirit and lore in their respective countries, who traveled to Elko in January 2006 to perform at the 22nd National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.Click here to view the photos in Gail Steiger's online journal. Hal Cannon and his wife, Teresa Jordan, sent a Thanksgiving Day postcard from the city of Buenos Aires, before heading out to the countryside:
Dear Friends,
I thought I'd write this on this Thanksgiving from a country far distant from turkey and pumpkin pie. It is a hot day with a cool breeze coming off the Rio De la Plata.
A couple of weeks ago Teresa traveled to an old gaucho town called San Antonio de Areco with Eddy and Osvaldo Ansinas, our Argentine friends who organized the gaucho cooking demonstrations at this year's Gathering. San Antonio de Areco is 70 miles north of the capital, Buenos Aires. This place is best known for quality silversmiths, called plateros. It is also the home of one of the most famous gaucho poets, Ricardo Guiraldes. He died in 1927 but his work, "Don Segunda Sombra" is beloved by the Argentine people. Today his estancia is a museum full of wonderful gaucho painting, historic silver and braiding, and the furnishings of a turn of the century estancia. What brought the Ansinas' and Teresa to this town was the annual gaucho festival where hundreds of horsemen in fine regalia ride and show off their horsemanship.
While there, Teresa met the most famous of the plateros, Señor Draghi. She ordered a couple of pieces with her family brand on them and one reason I got to go back was to stay with the Draghi family as their guests and to pick up the pieces that Teresa ordered. The entire front part of the family business is devoted to a museum that displays the fine gaucho silverwork of the past. Behind this is the workshop where a crew of young silversmiths work. In the rear are five lovely guest rooms for people like us who want to see the pampas and explore the shops of as many as two dozen other craftsmen who craft silver, work in rawhide and leather.
We had a great couple of days walking around, looking at fine cowboy craft, gaucho style, and eating fine grass fed beef. There are also a couple of ranches that take guests here. I was very glad for Teresa's new language skills as I did not find much English spoken here. Perhaps I will get my fill of Gaucho life in the next couple of weeks on our Plains to Pampas Cultural Exchange but I don't think so. It is all so fascinating -- good grass, fat cattle and proud horsemen, always a winning combination.
-- Hal
