Juan Baltasar Maziel wrote a series of poems in honor of the viceroy Cevallos for his victory over the Portuguese in 1777. Among them, stands the first gaucho poem. Despite being part of a larger corpus, when it was first noticed, it was read from the perspective of its aesthetic singularity, which places it as the first antecedent of the gauchesco genre. This critical operation ‘descontextualised’ the poem. Restituting it to its proper place, as proposed in this text, will open new reading possibilities for this genre, which is considered to be linked to 1810.