Mario Israel Etchechury Barrera
2023-2024
François Chevalier Fellow
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)
International Münchhausen”. Wandering Fabulators and Political Networks in the imagination of Contemporary Europe (1789-1914)
Biography
Mario Etchechury Barrera received his Ph.D. in History from the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) in 2013. He is now a researcher at the Regional Socio-Historic Research Institute (ISHIR) of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET, Argentina). From 2009 to 2013 he held a position as a junior researcher in the international project State Building Process in Latin America, 1820-1870 (European Research Council), directed by Juan Carlos Garavaglia, and in 2015 achieved a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Agency for Research and Innovation (ANII, Montevideo). His current project focuses on the transnational circulation of mercenaries, volunteers and adventurers in the 19th century, including an ongoing research into Garibaldi’s political and military activities in South America.
Research project
His MIAS research project analyses the formation and dynamics of a circuit of cosmopolitan adventurers who traveled through the main cities and ports of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic world, from the late eighteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century. Throughout their journeys, these transnational actors added and circulated in the public sphere a rich corpus of stories. In these narratives they introduced themselves as military and political figures, as descendants of noble families, all of whom had suffered the persecution of kings, czars or “tyrannical” sultans, forcing them to exile and the adoption of a wandering life, by fighting in wars and revolutions as their only survival mode. It is on the basis of these common practices, which combined permanent travels, wars (real or imaginary) and storytelling on aristocratic lineages, that we have designated these transnational actors as “wandering fabulators” that were part of a dense social networks —a kind
of “International Münchhausen“— which included tricksters, impostors and adventurers who moved in a wide range of urban spaces, and whose trajectories could reach an intercontinental-scale and go ahead for years, even decades.
Selected publications
- 2022. “Imaginarios culturales y debates políticos en torno al armamento de los extranjeros (Montevideo, 1843-1851)”, in Véronique Hébrard and Flavia Macias (coords), Milices et Gardes Nationales Latino-Américaines dans une perspective atlantique au XIXe siècle. Paris, Les Perseides, pp. 33-49.
- 2021. “Hijo del mundo y caudillo de partidarios: Garibaldi y la política de facciones en el exilio rioplatense (Montevideo, 1841-1848)”, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 32 (2), pp. 74-100.
- 2019. “Las milicias de voluntarios franceses en el Río de la Plata. Tradiciones bélicas, politización y diplomacia informal en tiempos de crisis (1829-1851)”, Historia Caribe, 35,pp. 85-118.
- 2017. “Aventureros, emigrados y cosmopolitas. Hacia una historia global de las guerras en el Río de la Plata (1836-1852)”, Polhis, Programa Interuniversitario de Historia Política, 20, pp. 20-52.
