Cultural destructuring, diaspora, and concealment: The case of the Vilela language and people

LUCÍA GOLLUSCIO, MARCELO DOMINGUEZ, ANALÍA GUTIÉRREZ

San Francisco

Congreso; Annual Meeting SSILA/Linguistic Society of America; 2005

SSILA/Linguistic Society of America

Abstract Different sources have considered the Vilela people and language extinct or near extinct. Curiously, neither the language nor the people have been considered a relevant issue by most of the linguists, ethnographers and historians in Argentina. The only available contemporaneous linguistic documentation was published by Elena Lozano, an Argentine linguist who collected, transcribed, parsed, and translated Vilela texts in the seventies (Lozano 1970, 1977). It is also worth noting the lack of an official and legal recognition of the Vilela cultural identity. However, rather than an absolute and irreversible extinction of the “Vilela world,” the situation of this people today is related to their “invisibilization”. Our research shows an extremely complex situation as a consequence of historical processes of cultural de-structuring, geographical dispersion, and conflictive interethnic relationships. This would seem to have produced the progressive abandonment of traditional practices and language use, their social-cultural integration with the Toba, Mocovi, and Criollo, the implementation of hiding strategies, and the maintenance of kinship networks whose identity does not appear to be organized around notions of “peoplehood”. On a linguistic level, these processes greatly account for either secrecy in the use of the original tongue or language loss and shift to Spanish, Mocovi, and/or Toba. The primary object of our field research has thus been to locate Vilela people and speakers in Chaco, Argentina. The characteristics of the situation have made work extremely difficult. In the last eight months, we have made significant progress due to a methodological reorientation that has made it possible to trace with greater precision migratory paths and genealogical ties. Based on this, we located the direct descendents of many of the consultants that had collaborated with the linguists and anthropologists who worked in the area over the past fifty years. These peoples constitute a small group of Vilela strongly linked by kinship ties that have rejected integration with other Chaco groups and have maintained many of their cultural patterns as well as a certain degree of linguistic competence. The paper is structured as follows. In the first part we describe the ethno-historical, social-cultural and linguistic processes that contribute to explain the current sociolinguistic situation of the Vilela. In the second part, we discuss both the theoretical and the ethical-methodological challenges that have emerged during fieldwork.