Ethnography of uneasiness. Violence and religion among the Guarani of the Andean foothills in the 1970s, Argentina

MARIANA ESPINOSA

religion: Anthropology of Christianity in Lowland South America

Palgrave Macmillan

Año: 2022; p. 197 - 218

This chapter focuses on the uneasiness present in the memory of current Guarani Evangelicals about the dismantling of the Cherenta Church in the La Esperanza sugar mill and its relocation to the town of San Pedro (Andean foothills). The church had been built in the first decade of the twentieth century, and in the early 1970s, it was “erased,” in the words of an informant. The chapter is divided into three parts. First, it considers the formation of the Cherenta mission in order to get a more complete understanding of the mark it made on the identities and subjectivities of La Esperanza’s inhabitants. Second, it introduces the Guaraní’s arguments, reviewing the social context of the 1960s and 1970s, namely the restructuring of the sugar mill which led to dismissals and forced displacements of the Guaraní, the end of the British mission, and the strengthening of the American Baptist mission. Meanwhile, Argentina was undergoing years of extreme political violence and adopted a neoliberal economy that accelerated poverty and the concentration of wealth. At the same time, conservative Catholicism was reinforced thanks to its strong roots among the civilian-military elite that imposed de facto governments in Argentina between 1966 and 1973 and between 1976 and 1983. The third part focuses on the dismantling of the Cherenta Church, its transfer to San Pedro, and the rebuilding of a new Evangelical Church for the believers who remained in La Esperanza. The chapter demonstrates that this process was affected by legal provisions that regulated the practice of minority religious organizations. Specifically, in 1978, the military government created the Registro Nacional de Culto (National Registry of Religions) to regulate the country’s religious minorities. I will show that the demands of this new regulation forced the Indigenous churches into a process of denominationalization .