The events of May were not a picture-perfect school scene with neat umbrellas, light blue and white ribbons, and council members trained by a textbook. It was, first and foremost, an act of political reclaiming of the territory. An enlightened municipality was not born around the Plaza de la Victoria; rather, a will to govern the entirety of the territory, inherited from the former Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, was born. That is why the Malvinas are not a sentimental later addition, nor a flag retrospectively placed over the “Revolution.” The Malvinas are at the heart of May because May did not merely mean changing officials, but rather affirming that, with the fall of peninsular legitimacy, power returned to these American peoples and should be exercised over their lands, their seas, their ports, their borders, and their islands.

The key lies in a word that liberal history often utters reluctantly: reversion. Faced with the crisis of the Spanish monarchy brought about by the Napoleonic invasion, the imprisonment of Ferdinand VII, and the dissolution of central power, the political doctrine available in the Hispanic world held that sovereignty reverted to the people. This was not a Creole prank nor a hasty imitation of Paris. It was a solution born within the very tradition of the Indies: if the legitimate king was absent, the political communities reassumed power to preserve order, jurisdiction, and territory. This is why Castelli could argue in the Open Cabildo that, with the expiration of royal power, sovereignty should return to the people; and this is why Saavedra agreed to politically cloak the Junta “in the mantle of Ferdinand VII,” not as servile submission, but as a prudent way to maintain revolutionary authority while the new political reality was being consolidated.

Just five days after May 25th, on May 30th, 1810, the First Junta issued a resolution that often goes unnoticed because it challenges the narrative of history written from the perspective of the port authorities. In response to Commander Gerardo Bordas's claim for payments related to the establishment of the Malvina Islands, the Junta resolved that “for expenses and payments, the Malvina Islands establishment shall henceforth be considered as a ship at sea, and all employees stationed there as dependents of that same ship.” This administrative formula possesses extraordinary political power: the Malvinas do not appear as foreign land, nor as an uncertain dependency, nor as a marginal detail, but as an establishment integrated into the system of government that Buenos Aires had just reassumed. Where the textbook sees an accounting record, national politics must see a jurisdictional act.

That act did not create a right; it projected it as a legal and political precedent for the future organization of the United Provinces. The Malvina Islands had been integrated into the Spanish territorial structure in the South Atlantic, and the resolution of the First Junta revealed that the new revolutionary power did not conceive of those territories as foreign, but rather as part of the jurisdiction inherited from the Spanish monarchy in the Río de la Plata. The Argentine State did not yet formally exist, nor was the doctrine of uti possidetis juris fully consolidated as the organizing principle of the new American sovereignties; however, the May decision already exhibited a territorial awareness that would later serve as a fundamental precedent for the United Provinces. May did not amputate the territory; it began to exercise a political authority over it that assumed itself to be a continuation of the viceregal spatiality. The nascent nation was not an abstract concept conceived at a desk or a doctrinal artifice imported from Europe, but a concrete historical reality, extending from Upper Peru to the South Atlantic. Understood from this perspective, the Malvinas cease to appear as a late or subsequent issue and recover their true dimension: that of territorial and historical continuity of the revolutionary process in the Río de la Plata region.

The figure of Cornelio Saavedra is crucial to understanding this dimension. Mitre's narrative reduced him to an opaque moderate, almost an obstacle to Moreno, as if the revolution had been the exclusive domain of the swift intellectuals and not also of the leaders who commanded troops, the people, and a sense of reality. But Saavedra was much more than the temporary president of a Junta. He was the head of the Patricios regiment, born from the resistance against the British invasions; that is, from the concrete experience in which Buenos Aires learned that sovereignty is not proclaimed: it is defended. His authority did not stem from a Francophile gathering, but from having seen the British invaders in the streets, from having organized militias, and from having understood that foreign policy begins when a people decides not to be a colony. In his memoirs, recalling the origins of his military career, he invoked "the imminent danger to the nation," an expression worth more than many imported theories: before the written Constitution, the nation was threatened, and before the abstract citizen, there was the armed people.

Therein lies the first major falsification of the May-Caseros narrative. For the official narrative, May was supposedly the luminous prologue to Caseros: the revolution as the inevitable prelude to port liberalism, to the Constitution understood as a fetish, to economic liberalization as destiny, and to colonial pedagogy as public morality. Jauretche dismantled this trap with surgical precision: in this interpretation, May was not fought to constitute a nation as an end in itself, but rather to arrive at the institutional system that Caseros enshrined. The consequence is brutal: the homeland is subordinated to institutions, and sovereignty becomes secondary to legal form. Thus, those who make pacts with foreigners in the name of liberty are absolved, while those who defend territorial expansion in the name of sovereignty are condemned.

That is the poison of the May-Caseros formula: it transforms an American territorial revolution into a prelude to a narrow, localized homeland. May, understood from the perspective of the colonial tradition, was not the negation of Hispanic America but its political reassertion under new conditions. Caseros, on the other hand, was interpreted as the victory of an anti-national policy that closed off the possibility of a greater Río de la Plata homeland. It wasn't just about Rosas, although Rosas was the linchpin of the dispute. It was about determining whether the nation was a historical continuity with territory, people, and destiny, or an institutional expedient available for external alliances. The entire Malvinas issue is encompassed within that distinction.

That is why it is important to reclaim May against its oligarchic-liberal caricature. The Revolution was not an ideological excursion of enlightened minorities, but an act of creative preservation: preserving the territory, preserving the jurisdiction, preserving the possible political unity, but now under American leadership. The American deputies in Cádiz also understood this; they did not see themselves as peripheral colonists but as members of a composite monarchy, with rights, representation, and political personality. The Constitution of Cádiz of 1812 attempted to order that world according to peninsular liberal categories, but the American conflict ran deeper: it was not only about parliamentary representation, it was about the recognition of an Indies political reality that refused to be reduced to a subordinate province of a liberalized Spain.

The subsequent Argentine presence in the Malvina Islands confirmed this continuity. In 1820, David Jewett formally took possession on behalf of the United Provinces; in 1829, Luis Vernet was appointed political and military commander; and that same year, May 25th was celebrated on the islands with salutes, a flag, and a traditional Argentine festival. Emilio Vernet's diary records that at sunrise, cannon fire was unleashed and the flag of Buenos Aires was raised; this was not a metaphor: it was an Argentine community celebrating the Revolution in the South Atlantic. Emilio Vernet's diary, as a testament to that material life prior to the British occupation of 1833, highlights the existence of a population that worked, traded, built, and lived on the islands before the usurpation.

San Martín also understood this political geography. In his letter of August 14, 1816, to the Minister of War, Antonio Beruti, he mentioned prisoners destined for “Patagones, the Malvinas, or elsewhere” so that they could be sent to serve the Army of the Andes. This reference is significant: the Liberator envisioned the continental war from a territorial perspective that included the southern reaches and the islands. Argentine official records themselves cite this letter as a historical precedent for Argentine sovereignty over the Malvina Islands.

May, then, cannot be separated from the Malvinas without being impoverished. The Revolution was also an awareness of space: of the port, yes, but also of the interior; of the rivers, but also of the sea; of the plaza, but also of the islands. Official history diminished May to fit it into Caseros; it made it liberal, municipal, regulated, and docile. But May was more unsettling: it was an American revolution, territorial, heir to the indigenous tradition, and open to its own sovereignty. The Malvinas are the southern proof of that truth. Where pedagogical colonialism sees a commemoration, the nation must read a mandate: there is no complete revolution if it renounces the territory that the revolution received as its destiny.