Based on the hypotheses that the characteristics of the discourse and the competence of the social agents that produce it maintain a relationship that we call of coherency, we analyze the metaphor of the family used by Bartolomé Mitre in the Historia de San Martín y de la emancipación sudamericana to represent the nation. In that respect, we sustain that this figure allows for a naturalization of the bonds among the citizens, as well as those with their homeland and with Spain, that makes it particularly acceptable and, for the same reasons, facilitating the imposition of a national model that the cultured elite constructs. The trope bocomes a way to set limits that define inclusions and exclusions: the family is made up of the sons of spaniards adapted to the environment, thus eliminating the indigenous as "inert matter", the spaniards for not being adapted, and the immigrants that constituted, at the time the text was written, a threat to the cultured elite that exerted the control and administrated the representations of the nation