"Finisterre": María Rosa Lojo's novel celebrates its 20th anniversary and updates its perspective on displacement.

A short story can serve as a meeting ground between fiction and many years of academic research. This is the case with the novel Finisterre , by writer and researcher María Rosa Lojo , which was published two decades ago and, after being translated into several languages, including Bulgarian and Thai, remains relevant with its story of migration, exile, and displacement in 19th-century Argentina.

On the Argentine pampas, the novel features Rosalind Kildare Neira and Oliver Armstrong, who bond for a time after being taken prisoner by the Ranquel Indians . There, the woman begins her own "Road to Finisterre," a metaphor that alludes to the limits and extremes of human nature, a journey facing the unknown and terrifying within oneself.

On the British side, decades later, we find the other female protagonist: a young woman, Armstrong's daughter, who begins to retrace the path of her own origins thanks to the letters of Rosalind, the correspondent who writes to her from Finisterre, Galicia.

Two decades after its successful publication , this novel continues to challenge readers with its perspective on cultural heritage and uprooting, addressing the internal and geographical journeys of those seeking their own place in the world.

The Ricardo Rojas House Museum was the epicenter of this encounter between the writer and her readers. Also present were María Laura Pérez Gras and actress María Héguiz , who presented a literary critique of Lojo's work and a performative reading using excerpts from the novel, respectively. Meanwhile, writer Elsa Drucaroff, the third guest, was unable to attend due to health reasons.

Clarín spoke with Lojo (Konex Award for Literature 1994-2003, Grand Prize of Honor from the Argentine Writers Society 2018, and Outstanding Cultural Personality of the City of Buenos Aires 2023, among numerous awards) about her book and the importance of the 20 years of Finisterre in her career as a writer and researcher.

–Why the Ricardo Rojas Museum?

–There are many reasons. The main one is that Ricardo Rojas, writer, researcher, and professor, is a “landmark figure” in our culture. We owe him the first systematic history of Argentine literature, a fundamental work in several volumes, which began publication in 1922. He coined the concept of “Eurindia” to refer to Latin America, to what we are: a combination of European (not only Hispanic but also European through immigration from all over Europe) and the indigenous substratum. Rojas leads a movement of researchers and intellectuals willing to rescue and integrate this deep-rooted contribution of indigenous cultures into the national imagination.

–What does Finisterre have to do with it?

– Finisterre has a lot to do with all of this, with the often conflicting intersection of cultures, producing a reality that ultimately leads to the current one. We are who we are because of this confluence of worlds that collided and also formed a new unity within that struggle.

–It's been 20 years since Finisterre . What does this work mean to you and your career as a writer?

–This is a book I came across after years of research, a passionate reading of 19th-century Argentine history, which was marked by decades of violence: the wars of independence, the civil wars, the border wars. The matrix that forged the current country. Finisterre also refers to the origins of my own world, to Spanish tradition, and Galician tradition in particular. Incidentally, Galicia was the region of Spain that sent the most migrants to Argentina.

–How long did it take you to write it?

–Many years. Sometimes novels begin one way and end another. In this case, since 1999 I had the idea of writing a novel about Manuel Baigorria, who is a secondary character in Finisterre, but at that time I saw him as a protagonist. Baigorria was a historical figure, although not a leading figure. He was a countryman of Unitarian affiliation who had joined the Army and fought alongside General Paz. For political reasons, he was forced to flee his province, San Luis, where the Federalists had won, and take refuge among the Indians. Not all Unitarians emigrated to Chile or Montevideo. There were others who weren't necessarily intellectuals, like Baigorria, who went with the Indians. He lived among them for two decades.

–He's not doing badly. His life there is successful: he achieves significant influence in the community, becoming respected, almost a chieftain. They called him "the white chieftain." He later played a key role when Rosas fell and the Argentine Confederation and the power structure in the country were rebuilt. That long story is partly set in Finisterre. Although I wrote a draft and several pages from the perspective of Baigorria (who left a fundamental source in his own Memoirs), I later found it more interesting that the main character in the pampas be a woman, even though Baigorria never disappeared from the novel. In fact, she's a driving force behind the action. Virtually nothing is known firsthand about the history of women in captivity. The accounts that do exist are generally told by other people, by authority figures who may be military officers or priests, but they themselves aren't the ones who speak directly. That's why, as a narrator, I wanted to approach that experience from a feminine perspective.

–Why were you interested in writing about women as protagonists?

–Because we haven't finished seeing them; perhaps we haven't even truly begun. We know they were there, but we don't know what they thought, what they felt. That has to do with the fact that at that time, it was a very sexist era in which men played a major role and women occupied a secondary role. It was a secondary role, especially in rural and warrior environments, although it was an important role because, ultimately, that female network sustained life, the home, and caregiving. They were also involved in politics alongside men, but they didn't narrate themselves. They didn't narrate themselves from within, beyond what some key emerging female writers of the 19th century (Gorriti, Mansilla, Guerra, Manso, among others) did, who were visible at the time but later faded into obscurity and weren't incorporated into our literary canon. That's why I thought it might be very interesting to tell an experience similar to Baigorria's, from a female perspective. Rosalind, the character who remains captive within the Ranquel community, doesn't fare so badly in the end either: just as Baigorria becomes a military leader, a respected strategist for the Ranquel, she becomes the assistant to a machi, a shaman, who is a very important figure in the community. Baigorria and Rosalind are figures who had to develop a demanding survival strategy; they had to adopt other ways of thinking, other life practices: they had to retrain in order to survive in that environment. For her, all that time spent among the Ranquel involves a transformation through learning.

–Why did you choose Finisterre as the title of your work?

Finisterre is a geographical location within the novel. But it's also a symbolic place. It's a geographical location because the first term refers to Finisterre in Galicia, the extreme point where the ancients believed the world ended. After reaching that extreme point, it seemed like there was nothing left, only an abyss. However, today we know there's another world beyond. This, in the lives of the characters in the novel, is very significant: they have to leave their place of origin, cross over "the abyss of the Ocean Sea," and see what they find. When Rosalind and her husband arrive, and especially when she is captivated and thinks she'll never return to her homeland, it's an agonizing, intolerable situation. It also feels like this: What am I doing here? How do I continue my life? Is there life here after this? However, there is. Life goes on in a different way.

–There were also changes in exile, in migration. How do you view it now compared to when you wrote Finisterre ?

–I experienced uprooting as a first-generation Argentine. I experienced exile, especially with my father and also, to some extent, with my mother. In some ways, they are there, in the characters of Baigorria and Doña Ana. As the daughter of emigrants/exiles (or “exiled daughter”), I myself suffered early on from an experience of discomfort and unease, because I didn't fully accept my birthplace. During my childhood, I received the message that the real world, the real life, had been left somewhere else and that this one, on this side, was like a temporary substitute. But over time, I discovered and fully assimilated that this (Argentina) was my world, where I was born and where I truly lived, without the other world ceasing to be mine as well, but on a different plane. The inherited feeling of uprooting was precisely what led me to try to understand where I was, to put down roots in that place where my parents had been thrown by the violence of history. It was what led me to research, to become passionate about Argentine history, to discover its literature (I began, dazzled, with Lucio V. Mansilla), and later to become a writer. Lack, the feeling of exile, the feeling of deprivation and uprooting were the impulses that moved me to create a homeland. Leopoldo Marechal spoke of a child homeland. For me, the homeland is a daughter; I had to gestate it within myself.

–Did you think about making a second part?

–I don't know. I never say no. It was a lot of work, it was in the making for many years. What I could do, perhaps, is a sequel. There are other characters who meet, I'm not referring to the generation that was captivated and is represented by Rosalind and the Englishman, but rather the descendants: Elizabeth Armstrong and Barrymore, who is an Englishman with a Creole mother; both are going to stay in Argentina. That could be an interesting avenue: telling how they lived and what happened to them. I would also be very happy to write a script about Finisterre, but the big problem with historical film production is that it's very expensive and there aren't many options.