Re-founding the Latin American Identity in Argentina: Struggles of Indigenous Peoples and Afro-Descendants in a Globalized World

GELER, LEA; RAMOS, ANA; RODRÍGUEZ, MARIELA

Washington

Congreso; American Anthropologist Association, Annual Meeting SLAA; 2005

Annual Meeting SLAA

In Argentina, a melting pot ideology promoted by local elites worked efficiently for over a century to create a perception of the population as being homogeneous-European-White. This image veiled the interior disruptions produced mainly by indigenous peoples, border immigrants, and afro-descendants and symbolically moved the country away from the rest of Latin America. But throughout the last decades, after several periods of economic and political crises provoked by the neo-liberalism rules imposed on the country, some subaltern groups that were formerly silenced have started to gain visibility, accelerating the construction of a different self-portrait that became more noticeable than ever. These subaltern groups are currently articulating their claims in front of the state, and are facing the internationalization of their struggles as a consequence of their relationships with different NGOs, multilateral agencies and other Latin American identitarian groups. We are within a scenario where discourses on local identities are rearticulated according to the construction of new negotiating blocks in a global world, a context in which social subjects are fighting to appropriate, re-construct and re-accentuate their narratives of the past and present according to their goals in the public arena. In this essay we will explore this process focusing on how in Argentina, today, a new relationship with Latin America is being re-founded.