Argentine history, as taught in schools and academies and disseminated in the mainstream media, is contaminated by the foreignizing liberalism of those who wrote it: the victors of the civil wars of the 19th century. This dependence on foreign interests has flourished and taken deep root in our identity. Not only in the perception that the political and economic leadership has of itself, which is its main beneficiary, but also in the culture of our society.
Although the importance of women, the working classes, the “cabecitas negras” (literally, “little black heads”, a pejorative term used to refer to the indigenous population of the Argentine pampas), people of African descent and indigenous peoples has been reluctantly incorporated due to pressure from historical revisionism – that is to say, national, federal, popular and Ibero-American historiography – this process has been slow and incomplete.
In El ADN argentino (Argentine DNA), Pacho O’Donnell sets out to recover the omitted parts of our history, to narrate what has been distorted or has been kept from us; to paint a more complete and true picture that identifies us and helps us understand ourselves. That is to say, to go through it with its lights and also with its shadows, without hypocrisy, without forgetting that the elites have always acted in their own interest and at the same time without washing the blood from the hands of our most authentic heroes.
These pages aim to tell the story of what we were not told or what we were told badly until the defining moment of the National Organization, as an essential step in deciphering our collective DNA and thus explaining the present and building the prosperous future that we Argentines deserve, despite our failings.