Personal information

Surname: Sánchez
First name: Florencio
Born: 17 January 1875, Montevideo, Uruguay
Died: 7 November 1910

Biography

Florencio Sánchez was the eldest of eleven children.  He wrote for two newspapers in Montevideo, El Siglo and La razón where he earned a reputation for being an excellent journalist.  He was an anarchist and a humanist and he wrote over twenty plays, farces and comedies  which are canonical works within Latin American Theatre.

Themes

Florencio Sánchez’s concerns are fundamentally social.  His recurring themes examine the experience of immigration on both sides of the River Plate, the changing role of the Gaucho in modern liberal society, the subsequent loss of power and lack of will power in the face of alcoholism and gambling, the family, racial intolerance and, above all, the spiritual degradation of humans as a result of poverty.

Style

Florencio Sánchez’s theatre has been described as realist, in the sense that it depicts archetypal social groups and their circumstances.  His stagecraft, however, relies heavily on traditional dramatic structures as well as a heightened stage language which evokes an intense aural experience through the deformation and truncation of words, a quality closely associated with the grotesco criollo.

Plays in the database

• Barranca abajo (c.1905) / Downhill

Other works

• Sánchez, Florencio.1903.M'hijo el dotor (My Son, the Doctor) (in Spanish)

• Sánchez, Florencio.1904. La pobre gente ( The Poor People) (in Spanish)

• Sánchez, Florencio.1904. La gringa (The Foreign Girl) (in Spanish)

• Sánchez, Florencio. 1905. Mano santa ( Holy Hand) (in Spanish)

• Sánchez, Florencio. 1905. En familia (In Family) (in Spanish)

• Sánchez, Florencio. 1905. Los muertos (The Dead) (in Spanish)

• Sánchez, Florencio. 1906. El conventillo ( The Tenement) (in Spanish)

• Sánchez, Florencio.1907. Moneda falsa ( False Coin) (in Spanish)

• Sánchez, Florencio. 1908. Nuestros hijos (Our Children) (in Spanish)

• Sánchez, Florencio. 1908. Marta Gruni (in Spanish)

Useful reading and websites

• Ramirez, Manuel D. 1966. ‘Florencio Sanchez and His Social Consciousness of the River Plate Region’, Journal of Inter-American Studies , 8, 585-594.

• Richardson, Ruth. 1975. Florencio Sánchez and the Argentine Theatre. New York, Gordon Press

Entry written by Gwendolen Mackeith. Last updated on 17 May 2012.

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