The Competing Loyalties of Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson de Mendeville

In 1836, Juan Manuel de Rosas wrote to his old friend Mariquita Sánchez, complaining that she had transformed. She had once been a “good and faithful federalist,” but had now become a “blabbermouth Frenchie.” This exchange between governor Rosas and Mariquita Sánchez points to the complex questions of identity and loyalty that existed in early-national Argentina. This paper will examine the question of loyalty in Argentina through the life of Mariquita Sanchez, whose experiences paralleled the early struggles of Argentine nationhood, and who herself confronted many of the loyalty dilemmas of nineteenth-century Argentine history.

Mariquita Sánchez was the daughter of a peninsular Spaniard, but she battled him and her mother in order to marry the man of her dreams. She and her husband supported autonomy and independence from Spain during the May Revolution of 1810. In 1820, after her husband’s death, she married a Frenchman, who would later become the first French consul in Buenos Aires. This marriage shaped Mariquita’s identify and loyalty in distinct ways, as she was compelled to support her husband (and, thus, France) while attempting to maintain loyalties to her homeland. Mariquita was a moderate Federalist, but she went into exile during Rosas’ rule. While in exile, Mariquita supported foreign attempts, many supported by France, to overthrow the Rosas government. When Rosas was overthrown in 1852, Mariquita celebrated gleefully. Nevertheless, she supported General Urquiza’s new Confederation rather than Buenos Aires’ separatist stance.

Nicolas Shumway’s The Invention of Argentina argues famously that Argentina’s founding generation created powerful and divisive “guiding fictions” that would go on to characterize major developments in Argentine identity. Mariquita’s life provides a provocative case study to examine this approach. The resulting picture shows that the boundaries between various guiding fictions were porous and complex.