Symbolic frontiers against indigenous people in an argentinean community: social representations and prejudice.

ETCHEZAHAR, EDGARDO; BARREIRO, ALICIA; WAINRYB, CECILIA; UNGARETTI, JOAQUIN

Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires

Congreso; XIV International Conference on Social Representations (CIRS); 2018

Universidad de Belgrano

In Argentine, as well as in many countries, indigenous people have been the target of prejudice for centuries. This situation mostly dates to the ?Conquest of the Desert?, a military campaign waged by the Argentine government against the indigenous population during the late 19th century. That period of national organization and territorial expansion involved the genocide of the native populations, with thousands being killed or sold to wealthy landowners. That historical event along with the subsequent massive waves of immigration have functioned as a foundational myth of the ?White? and ?European? national identity, pitting Western civilization and indigenous ?barbarism? against one another. Although, in the last three decades indigenous groups? claims for reparation and equal social rights have increased in visibility, most still are victims of cultural segregation and poverty. With this historical context serving as the broad background, this chapter will analyze the relations among collective memory, intergroup conflict, social representations, and prejudice against indigenous people in a town in southern Buenos Aires that was founded by the Argentine military forces during the ?Conquest of the Desert?. In what has become today a small city, the descendants of both the founding military people and the European immigrants who arrived at the beginning of 20th century to settle the ?conquered? lands, live alongside descendants of the Mapuche indigenous groups who originally inhabited that same territory. Complicating matters further, and as has been the case throughout the rest of Argentina, this local indigenous community has started to organize, pledging for its rights and demanding compensatory actions and cultural recognition from both the national government and the town residents. Our analyzes suggest a contradiction in the attempts to vindicate the indigenous people while maintaining their subordinated and segregated status in the community. That opposition is reinforced by the imaginary borders settled by the organization of urban spaces and the representations of the relations between past and present that relegate indigenous people to past and place them into the poorest and most violent neighborhood, implicitly marking them as criminals. Hence, the SR may be at the basis of the subtle expressions of prejudice that are very frequent. However, when the inhabitants of the city have to face indigenous people who are not clearly different from them and when their claims become more visible, more blatant forms of expression become manifest.