"Invisible indians", "degenerate descendants": Idiosyncrasies of mestizaje in Southern Patagonia

RODRIGUEZ, MARIELA EVA

Shades of the Nation: Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina

Cambridge University Press

Lugar: Cambridge; Año: 2016; p. 126 - 154

By the 1930s populations across Latin America had embraced multiple, and at times competing, ideologies of mestizaje. Some national elites celebrated mestizaje as an official discourse of unity through mixture that would allow for national consolidation across racial and cultural divides. For others (including some people of color), mestizaje offered an intellectual tool to challenge narrow colonial and neocolonial constructs of race and ethnicity. For still other commentators, discourses of mestizaje dovetailed with eugenicist thinking that posited the need to "improve" national citizenries (in its most extreme form, through racist campaigns to gradually eliminate or even exterminate "inferior" populations). In Argentina, where dominant racial discourses emphasized the nation´s European descent, mestizaje operated in contradictory ways in the early twentieth century. On one hand, prominent narratives of the "crisol de razas" or melting pot described the creation of a revitalized nation from a variety of European immigrant ethnic groups. On the other hand, mestizaje between white creoles and indigenous groups was neither celebrated nor tolerated as a path to "whitening" (in contrast to several other Latin American nations). Instead, it was considered threatening both to the "white" nation and to indigenous groups themselves. Drawing on contemporary theories of racial purity, social commentators in the early twentieth century argued that Argentina´s indigenous groups were destined to become "extinct" because of the degenerative biological, cultural, and moral mestizaje to which they had been exposed for generations. These conclusions further justified the dispossession of indigenous-held territories, while resulting (somewhat paradoxically) in the "rescue" of those considered the "last pure Indians": a project that included seizing photographic portraits, burial goods, and human remains as heritage "collections" for display in museums. This chapter analyzes the historical processes by which state officials, scientists, and other national elites constructed and imposed ethno-racial classificatory categories in Southern Patagonia; a region where the author has conducted ethnographic research since the mid-1990s. It considers how these taxonomies rendered surviving indigenous groups "invisible" within dominant twentieth-century conceptions of Argentine nationhood. In recent times, however, indigenous groups and other actors have challenged these representations within a political context affirming inter-cultural rights. Drawing on a varied corpus composed of travelers´ accounts, religious and state documents, and oral narratives from different time periods, the chapter explores the shifting meanings of terms like "descendant" used by state representatives and by indigenous people in Southern Patagonia. It considers how and why, despite the clear presence of conceptions of mestizaje in these terms, the word mestizo itself is rarely used in the Patagonian context.