Nineteenth-century Argentine prose literature concerning the frontier articulates 'otherness' as a function of a broader textual strategy: the construction of an identifiable, explicit or implicit, normative subject. In Sarmiento's Facundo (1845), gauchos are posited as lacking access to social symbolism and, voiceless, they are depicted on the register of the Lacanian Imaginary. As such, they are inimical mirror images of a normative subject of equally absolute traits. The authorial voice is distinguished from its enemies by its possession and manipulation of language. In Mansilla's Una excursion a los indios ranqueles (1870), gauchos and Indians serve as masks or foils that disguise the authorial sense of exile from a source of power. The first-person narrator is a de-centered subject who recovers lost authority through the production of textual prosopons. His skepticism and irony establish a complicity with his readers and create an urbane 'we' that explores the naive world of the frontier inhabitants. In Gutierrez's Juan Moreira (1879-80), crime replaces geography as a distancing element in the construction of 'otherness' and isolates a traditional individualism pitted against modern impersonality. In spite of the protest element, the implied values are traditional and paternalistic. Zeballos, in Callvucura (1884), buttresses the subject behind a selective avalanche of documentary events, which results in a tightly argued proof of the need for the extermination of the Indians. His next work, the novel Paine (1886), achieves a degree of freedom to approximate the point of view of the 'other.' Consequently, and unlike the case of all the previous texts here considered, the subject is not split between the power of the logos and the powerlessness of the 'other,' but is instead a dialogic construct of whites living among the ranqueles and of Indians whose hardships those whites share. The trip to the 'other,' it seems, can recognize the frontier world only after the singularity of the frontier and its inhabitants has been historically vanquished