The long journey of the Family Silver

e long journey of the Family Silver Uruguay is a young country: it did not experience Antiquity, did not undergo the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, and only two hundred years ago it woke up as a by-product of Spanish imperialism.What today is the República Oriental del Uruguay (meaning "Eastern Republic of Uruguay", being Uruguay a river) was formerly called Banda Oriental (literally, the "eastern bank of Uruguay river"), and it was a Spanish colony in South America.To Uruguayans, 1811 is the starting point of a revolutionary time, during which a series of seemingly unrelated events prepared the ground for the fight against the Spanish Crown: the armed opposition against England's invasion (still as a colony) and the emergence of rural warlords, leading socially and politically marginalized people.e actual process of emancipation is culmination of a chain of historical events that includes federalist experiments (1811-1816), a period of Portuguese-Brazilian domination (1817-1828), an insurrection against the latter in 1825, and, finally, the declaration of independence and its first Bill of Rights (1830).Brandishingtheirlyres, poets also joined the fight for independence.A seasoned and universally known cooperation between pens and swords, that means that, like any war, this one was fought both on the battlefield and in the most abstract field of ideas, through two main aesthetics: Neoclassicism and gaucho poetry.Although we will return to the latter from time to time, I will focus here on the classical muse.She is the bearer of what in Spanish we call las joyas de la abuela ("grandma's jewelry").e saying has an English equivalent in " the family silver", referring to objects or beliefs of immensurable and everlasting value, things that are part of the very essence of any