“Who Killed Rosendo?”: Vanguard, Popular Literature and Dialogue with the Working Class

Abstract

Our research proposes to analyse the investigation ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (Who Killed Rosendo?), published by Rodolfo Walsh in the weekly paper Semanario CGT (a publication run not by the CGT but by the CGT de los Argentinos). The investigation comprises a series of articles published between May and June of 1968, and one last article published in May of 1969, all of which address the murder of two anti-bureaucratic rank-and-file militants and a hierarch of the union bureaucracy after a group altercation that ended in a shoot-out. Our aim is to unravel the way in which the dialogue with the working class influenced the way Walsh approached his literature and how he recounted events. We will thus be framing these articles within the context of the debate over the legitimacy of literary styles and standards that unfolded in Latin America during the ’60s. Our analysis will focus on the different views regarding the crisis of the novel, as well as the ideas on popular testimony and literature as conceived by Walsh throughout the ’60s and ’70s.