Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz

Who was Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz?

Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz was an Argentine writer, journalist, essayist and poet, friend of Arturo Jauretche and Homero Manzi, and loosely associated with the political group Fuerza de Orientación Radical de la Joven Argentina.

Scalabrini Ortiz was born in Corrientes, the son of the naturalist Pedro Scalabrini, who was the director of the museum of the city of Paraná, Entre Ríos. He studied in the Faculty of Exact Sciences and became a land surveyor; then he moved to Buenos Aires and got involved in the literary conflicts of the Boedo and Florida groups. In 1923 he started writing short stories, collected in a book, La Manga; he was then a journalist for the newspapers La Nación, El Mundo and Noticias Gráficas, and founded and directed Reconquista.

In his youth, Scalabrini Ortiz participated in a Marxist group called Insurrexit; he also travelled to several provinces for work reasons, and at 26 he visited Paris, France, from where he returned disappointed by the xenophobic attitude of its citizens. Like everyone in Argentina, he felt the effects of the Great Depression, and then saw the coup d'état against president Hipólito Yrigoyen that began the Década Infame, marked by conservative rule perpetuated by electoral fraud.