New Spaces for Contesting and Negotiating land rights for Indigenous Peoples in Argentina

CASTELNUOVO BIRABEN NATALIA SABRINA

Dublin

Conferencia; CHAGs 13; 2022

University College Dublin

The present proposal describes and analyzes how land rights for hunter- gatherers, and in a broader sense, for indigenous peoples in Argentina, serve to understand land tenure and natural resources claims and disputes. In their contest against evic-tions and land dispossessions, many indigenous groups have adopted land rights discourse as a way to defend their territories and resources. In this sense, even though land rights are far from being implemented, their claims serve as a political platform to fight for their rights. Based on an ethnographic perspective, this paper refers to the case study “la ruta 86” (road 86), belonging to the San Martín Depart-ment, of the province of Salta, in Argentina. Cattle ranching and soybean planta-tions have radically transformed the Argentinian Chaco over the last decades into deforested areas, increasing indigenous dispossessions. Bringing together indige-nous experiences and memories about land use and practices with land grabbings -understood as a structure of social-spatial relations-, I argue, following Correia (2019), that this process, mediated through material objects and embodied infra-structure, creates new contesting and negotiating spaces for Wichí, Chorote, Tapie-te, Toba and Guaraní peoples to advance in their territorial claims.