Irish Roots in Graciela Gabal's Story "Gualicho"

Graciela Cabal (1939-2004) was an Argentine children’s writer and an important and active figure in the consolidation of a youth literature in Argentina in the 1980s. She descended from two large Irish families who settled in Suipacha (Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina). Cabal lends her marvelous literary voice to those sheep raisers in the short story “Gualicho”, about a failed wedding and a bewitched groom in the Irish community around 1850, in which even Father Fahey is present to bless the ceremony. What at first sight appears as a beautiful children's story turns into a narrative of migration with intertexts from Jorge Luis Borges and from Argentina's national poem Martin Fierro. Cabal’s “Irishness” (also present in Secretos de Familia, her autobiographical novel) has never been studied and her texts are probably the only ones in Argentine children's fiction which make reference to the early Irish community