The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History

For more than one hundred years, the Conquest of the Desert (1878–1885) has marked Argentina’s historical passage between eras, standing at the gateway to the nation’s “Golden Age” of progress, modernity, and—most contentiously—national whiteness and the “invisibilization” of Indigenous peoples. This traditional narrative has deeply influenced the ways in which many Argentines understand their nation’s history, its laws and policies, and its cultural heritage. As such, the Conquest has shaped debates about the role of Indigenous peoples within Argentina in the past and present. The Conquest of the Desert brings together scholars from across disciplines to offer an interdisciplinary examination of the Conquest and its legacies. This collection explores issues of settler colonialism, Indigenous-state relations, genocide, borderlands, and Indigenous cultures and land rights through essays that reexamine one of Argentina’s most important historical periods.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Nov 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780826362087

Book preview

THE CONQUEST OF THE DESERT

DIÁLOGOS SERIES · Kris Lane, Series Editor

Understanding Latin America demands dialogue, deep exploration, and frank discussion of key topics. Founded by Lyman L. Johnson in 1992 and edited since 2013 by Kris Lane, the Diálogos Series focuses on innovative scholarship in Latin American history and related fields. The series, the most successful of its type, includes specialist works accessible to a wide readership and a variety of thematic titles, all ideally suited for classroom adoption by university and college teachers.

ALSO AVAILABLE IN THE DIÁLOGOS SERIES:

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A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous Elites of the Colonial Americas by Sean F. McEnroe

Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay by William Garrett Acree Jr.

A Woman, a Man, a Nation: Mariquita Sánchez, Juan Manuel de Rosas, and the Beginnings of Argentina by Jeffrey M. Shumway

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Mexico in the Time of Cholera by Donald Fithian Stevens

Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela by Cristina Soriano

Mexico City, 1808: Power, Sovereignty, and Silver in an Age of War and Revolution by John Tutino

Murder in Mérida, 1792 by Mark W. Lentz

Nuns Navigating the Spanish Empire by Sarah E. Owens

FOR ADDITIONAL TITLES IN THE DIÁLOGOS SERIES, PLEASE VISIT UNMPRESS.COM.

EDITED BY CAROLYNE R. LARSON

THE CONQUEST OF THE DESERT

ARGENTINA’S INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND THE BATTLE FOR HISTORY

University of New Mexico Press · Albuquerque

© 2020 by University of New Mexico Press

All rights reserved. Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-8263-6206-3 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8263-6207-0 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-8263-6208-7 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945493

COVER PHOTOGRAPH: Courtesy of the Museo Etnográfico Juan B. Ambrosetti, Universidad de Buenos Aires, photographic archives. Used with permission.

DESIGNED BY Mindy Basinger Hill

COMPOSED IN Adobe Jenson Pro.

FOR SAM

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Tracing the Battle for History

CAROLYNE R. LARSON

ONE

The Conquest of the Desert: The Official Story

CAROLYNE R. LARSON

TWO

Occupy Every Road and Prepare for Combat: Mapuche and Tehuelche Leaders Face the War in Patagonia

JULIO VEZUB AND MARK HEALEY

THREE

Environment and the Conquest of the Desert, 1876–1885

ROB CHRISTENSEN

FOUR

Live Indians in the Museum: Connecting Evolutionary Anthropology with the Conquest of the Desert

RICARDO D. SALVATORE

FIVE

Beyond the Desert: Indigenous Genocide as a Structuring Event in Northern Patagonia

WALTER DELRIO AND PILAR PÉREZ

SIX

Redefining Borders: The Desert in Argentine Literature

JENNIE I. DANIELS

SEVEN

The Long Conquista del Desierto and the Making of Military Government Indigenous Policy, 1976–1983

DAVID M. K. SHEININ

EIGHT

Senses of Painful Experience: Memory of the Mapuche People in Violent Times

ANA RAMOS

NINE

Mapping Mapuche Territory: Reimagining the Conquest of the Desert

SARAH D. WARREN

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1

Statue of Julio Roca in Centro Cívico Plaza, San Carlos de Bariloche

FIGURE 2

The pampas and Patagonia

FIGURE 3

Conquest of the Desert, 1879 campaigns

FIGURE 4

Argentine campaigns of conquest in Patagonia: the war below the Río Negro (1881–1884)

FIGURE 5

Tame Indians of Linares, Chichinales

FIGURE 6

Longko Millaman and his family, Ñorquín

FIGURE 7

Pulmarí Valley, Neuquén, 2014

FIGURE 8

Monthly average precipitation in millimeters, smoothed to yearly increments

FIGURE 9

Masthead of Azkintuwe

FIGURE 10

Territorio Mapuche Ocupado

FIGURE 11

Map of Wallmapu

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Creating this book has been deeply gratifying, thanks to the terrific scholars who have contributed to it. My thanks to them for collegial relationships old and new, for tolerating my editorial herding with good humor, and for sending me fascinating work to read. It has been a profound privilege to work with these outstanding scholars, who have given so generously of their time and expertise to create what we hope will be a truly useful book on a vital subject. I am deeply grateful to Kris Lane, Clark Whitehorn, Sonia Dickey, Norman Ware, and the entire editorial team at the University of New Mexico Press, who saw value in our project and gave it a home. Kris, Clark, and Sonia championed the book throughout the publication process and gave invaluable feedback that made it a stronger book.

I am also indebted to two extraordinary classes of undergraduate students, at the University of Wyoming and St. Norbert College, who read chapter drafts and offered written feedback to the authors. My sincerest thanks to Shelby Alcorn, Colin Bursik, Stuart Cameron, Michael Cannon, Will Couture, Ian Crouse, Jackson Deterding, Makayla Garnica, Harrison Grunert, Lexi Hageman, Alex Havener, Thomas Heywood, Ben Hickman, Bianca Infante de la Cruz, Kim Ippolito, Alia Jackson, Dante Jadin, Ross Johnson, Jackson Kochevar, Kendal Mager, Kevin Pedersen, Trey Powers, Christal Rohan, Jeremy Rosnow, Erica Sall, Lily Salzer, Andrew Schuster, Kevin Steuck, Stephanie Stull, Stephanie Tuttle, and Steve Yeager.

Finally, a profound thanks to all the colleagues, friends, and family who have supported everyone involved in this project by reading drafts, talking through ideas, or offering a caring ear. For my part, I am especially grateful for the support and friendship of colleagues at the University of Wyoming and St. Norbert College. Few people could claim to be so lucky in their colleagues, not once but twice.

THE CONQUEST OF THE DESERT

INTRODUCTION

Tracing the Battle for History

CAROLYNE R. LARSON

In Centro Cívico Plaza of San Carlos de Bariloche stands an equestrian monument celebrating Julio A. Roca’s role as the commander of the Conquest of the Desert (La Conquista del Desierto, 1878–1885), a series of military campaigns launched by Argentine forces to drive indigenous peoples from the pampas and Patagonia.¹ Many in Argentina today see the conquest as bringing civilization to a barbaric landscape and remember Roca as a national hero. But this monument also tells a different story, one that belies the smooth triumphalism of Roca’s heroics. Bariloche is located in historically Mapuche territory on the Andean slopes of the present-day province of Río Negro, and Mapuche people still inhabit the region, in rural and urban communities. Roca’s monument is regularly spray-painted with slogans such as Roca = genocide, The Mapuche People Live, Assassin, Oppressor, and Marichi Wew, a Mapuche phrase meaning ten times the victors (fig. 1). The monument is also frequently splashed in red paint, symbolizing the blood of indigenous peoples spilled during the conquest, and Mapuche activists stage regular protests around the monument.²

The monument, rather than an unproblematized celebration of Roca’s military campaigns, has instead become a palimpsest of fiercely disputed claims to history and identity. Although the official story of the conquest describes a bold and triumphant campaign for the Argentine nation-state, indigenous and other voices tenaciously reject that story, often through unofficial means. For example, on October 12, 2012, protestors from a workers’ cooperative in Bariloche demanded the statue’s removal, attaching two tethers to the statue and sawing at its legs before the police intervened. Protestors argued that many of our members in the Cooperative are of Mapuche origin and the statue’s presence is offensive because this man killed their ancestors.³

FIGURE 1 Statue of Julio Roca in Centro Cívico Plaza, San Carlos de Bariloche. Robert Cutts, December 2006, Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/panr/4412106930, accessed August 28, 2018. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode.

Mapuche activists’ and anonymous graffitists’ insistence that the Mapuche People Live, alongside their forceful denunciations of the Argentine military’s violence against indigenous peoples, all suggest the Conquest of the Desert’s powerful historical legacies and ongoing relevance in Argentina today.⁴ This book delves into the contentious events of the conquest and their many meanings in Argentina’s past and present, seeking to unpack the issues of nation, violence, memory, colonialism, and indigeneity entangled within them. In particular, this book highlights indigenous and other counternarratives that challenge the official stories about the conquest. These official narratives have underpinned long-standing practices of violence, exclusion, and dispossession against indigenous peoples as well as shaping mainstream national identities. This book examines the historical trajectory of these narratives from the nineteenth century through to the twenty-first, ultimately demonstrating the conquest’s ongoing legacies in present-day struggles for indigenous rights throughout Argentina and beyond. While the official military campaigns of the conquest may have ended in the nineteenth century, their consequences have persisted and adapted to new historical moments or cultural contexts. The battle for history continues today.

The Pampas Borderlands: Historical Context

The Conquest of the Desert marked a violent breaking point in long-standing tensions along a flexible borderland that existed between indigenous communities and Spanish, and later Argentine, settlements (fig. 2). The longer history of human inhabitation in this region shaped the moment in which the conquest campaigns took place and helps to explain why events unfolded the way they did. The conquest was not an aberrant event but rather a legible piece of larger historical arcs that preceded and followed the campaigns themselves. This section offers this context, especially for readers new to this subject, in order to frame the chapters in this book.

Indigenous peoples settled in the pampas and Patagonia around twelve thousand years ago.⁵ By the time of first contact with European peoples in the sixteenth century, the region was home to a diverse array of largely seminomadic indigenous societies. While scholars still differ somewhat in their identification of the indigenous groups living in the pampas and Patagonia before the nineteenth century, it is nonetheless possible to provide a list of names by which indigenous groups called themselves or were known by European travelers. These names include (but are not limited to) Tehuelche, Rankulche (often westernized as Ranquel), Pampas, Puelches, Pehuenches, and Mapuche (sometimes also called Araucano). Many indigenous groups in this region moved seasonally, relocating between winter and summer hunting grounds, pasturelands, foraging sites, and water sources. These indigenous cultures developed social and economic systems around hunting native species like the guanaco (related to llamas and alpacas), the ñandu (a rhea), and the capybara (a mara). The arrival of Europeans introduced cattle and horses to the region; these livestock species thrived in the pampas, growing into enormous herds that late colonial travelers to the region described as stretching to the horizon like moving forests or tumultuous oceans. Indigenous peoples of the pampas and Patagonia embraced horses and cattle during the colonial period as abundant sources of food, hides, and transportation. Groups like the Tehuelche, in particular, became expert equestrians and formidable cavalry fighters, both feared and admired by Western observers.

FIGURE 2 The pampas and Patagonia. Map by the author.

As Raúl José Mandrini has written, it was not until the Spanish arrived in the region in the sixteenth century and carved out their own territorial holdings that the lands remaining in the hands of the aboriginal societies or indigenous peoples were envisioned as a frontier.⁶ In other words, Spanish imperial logics created the frontier, in order to separate a Spanish us from an indigenous them. Moreover, Spanish chroniclers and later Argentine writers had notorious difficulty in distinguishing between different indigenous cultural groups to the south, disagreeing with one another over whether different groups existed and what to call them.⁷ As a result, a powerful picture emerged by the nineteenth century and persevered at least into the later twentieth century, as Mónica Quijada astutely noted, of the indigenous [peoples] of the Pampa and Patagonia as ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages,’ closely associated with the oversimplifying image of ‘nomads’ and a general vision that traditionally has homogenized the differences within the indigenous population.⁸ This historically constructed imprecision of externally applied identity has had important consequences for indigenous peoples in Argentina, both leading up to the Conquest of the Desert as well as in its aftermath, undermining indigenous communities’ claims to cultural recognition and respect, land rights, and community autonomy.⁹

Widely varying estimates suggest that anywhere between twenty thousand and more than forty thousand indigenous people occupied the territory south of the Argentine settlement frontier in 1870.¹⁰ Indigenous politics were most typically organized by decentralized community groups (cacicazgos) led by caciques, leaders chosen by their communities according to a combination of leadership qualities and hereditary connection with former caciques. Cacicazgos varied tremendously in size, from a handful to tens of thousands of men, women, and children. The Argentine state often considered only the largest of these units cacicazgos, calling the smaller units tolderías in reference to the hide and pole tent–like toldos so often described by European and creole (people who identify as being of European descent born in the Americas) travelers to indigenous communities before the conquest. During the nineteenth century, ties between many cacicazgos in the pampas and Patagonia strengthened through trade, political alliance, military support, and family connections, resulting in the emergence of powerful yet flexible confederations (see Julio Vezub and Mark Healey’s chapter in this volume).

Colonial Spanish officials maintained relatively stable and even amicable relations with many cacicazgos of the pampas, and after independence in the 1810s, the new Argentine government sought to follow suit. So long as southward territorial expansion remained a low priority in comparison with issues such as internal political instability, international conflict, and economic stagnation, Argentine state makers favored relatively stable coexistence with indigenous peoples to the south. Bonaerense caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas played an important part in shaping this dynamic in the 1830s, as he shifted Buenos Aires’s provincial economy away from the urban, mercantile systems that connected Buenos Aires back to its colonial roots, and toward the countryside and especially cattle herding, as well as the production of hides, salted beef, and tallow. Exports of these commodities doubled under Rosas’s administration.¹¹ But this land-based economic growth also spurred intensifying violence over territory. Rosas launched a military campaign into the southern borderlands in 1833, opening a corridor along the coast to the Río Negro. As Argentine military officer and writer Álvaro Barros described the campaign decades later, the pampas were overrun. The campaign was bloody. According to the letters of Antonio Reyes 7,000 Indians died. [Adolfo] Saldías raised the figure to 10,000.¹²

Seeking to protect the growing ranching industry, Rosas established a network of treaties with indigenous groups in Buenos Aires province that obliged the government to pay annual tributes in exchange for military allegiance. As Tulio Halperín Donghi has argued, this system theoretically transformed groups of indios amigos (treaty-bound or friendly indigenous peoples) into a barrier against the incursions of the only nominally pacified semisedentary populations of the rest of the Pampas.¹³ Rosas granted plots of newly conquered lands to his military officers, many of whom in turn sold their holdings to wealthy cattle-ranching families, helping to solidify elite power in the province and weakening the foothold of middle-class homesteaders. By the 1850s, this small but powerful elite had consolidated enormous land wealth in the pampas; Rosas himself owned eight hundred thousand acres, on which grazed half a million head of cattle.¹⁴

Nineteenth-century Argentine state representatives continued this pattern after Rosas’s fall from power in 1852, forging treaties with individual caciques that arranged for mutual promises of peace and tribute goods, as well as trade agreements. These treaties often proved increasingly fragile as the century progressed, largely due to increasing Argentine demands on pampas lands and cattle herds, as well as indigenous responses in defense of their lands and resources.¹⁵ In the decades immediately preceding the conquest, prominent caciques throughout the pampas and Patagonia—such as Namuncurá, Pincén, Mariano Rosas, Calfucurá, Valentín Saygüeque, Feliciano Purrán, Reuquecurá, Epumer, Baigorrita, and Juan Ñancucheo—banded their fighting forces together in times of crisis, commanding thousands of warriors for their communities’ mutual protection and military agendas. Well into the nineteenth century, the pampas borderlands were typified by indigenous-creole interactions and exchanges that did not suggest unquestioned creole expansion into indigenous territory. In fact, indigenous forces pushed the Argentine state’s military frontier line north toward Buenos Aires more than once during the nineteenth century. Throughout this long period, the borderland lay relatively close to Buenos Aires, often situated near the Río Salado, which flowed into the Río de la Plata estuary just over one hundred miles south of the city.

Over the course of three centuries, a complex and flexible borderland society emerged between Spanish or Argentine settlements to the north and various indigenous communities to the south, forging shifting networks of trade, social exchange, and peace agreements punctuated by outbursts of violence. Despite the Argentine state’s repeated construction of various lines of forts in order to delineate and defend their southern frontier, this borderland was not a clean line between homogeneous populations of indigenous peoples to the south and Argentines to the north. The pampas’s and Patagonia’s wide array of heterogeneous indigenous communities, operating independently and in shifting relationship to one another, engaged with equally heterogeneous and divided groups to the north that changed in shape and size as the nineteenth century progressed. For example, in addition to the emerging cattle elite of the nineteenth century, the pampas also supported scattered populations of ranch workers, tenant farmers, peones, and peasants who worked landowners’ estates without much realistic hope of acquiring their own lands, especially as the century progressed. Small-scale merchants, artisans, and operators of pulperías (general stores and social gathering places) also gathered in the small urban centers dotted across the pampas, typically appearing along larger wagon trails and the growing railroad lines. European immigrants also entered pampas society; immigrant groups gained popular reputations among their new Argentine neighbors in specific trades—Irishmen as excellent shepherds, Italians as rivermen, Englishmen as perspicacious merchants—and also established agricultural colonias in the open pampas.¹⁶ Gauchos (largely mestizo frontiersmen perhaps most easily, if imperfectly, compared with North American cowboys) dominated contemporary lore and popular imaginings about the pampas, variously revered and reviled by urban Argentines as rugged individualists or as lawless barbarians (see Jennie Daniels’s chapter in this volume).¹⁷

During the second half of the nineteenth century, innovations in meat processing and shipping, as well as improvements in wool production, sent export rates soaring for the agricultural and ranching sectors that most coveted pampas lands. During the 1850s, for instance, wool exports averaged 6,000 tons per year; by the 1860s, Argentina exported 50,000 tons of wool each year; and before 1890, annual exports averaged 120,000 tons, or twenty times the amount shipped forty years earlier.¹⁸ Argentine cattle ranchers strove during the 1860s and 1870s to cultivate a breed of unique Argentine stock that would be acceptable to European palates, and to find ways to deliver their product successfully to European markets. Meanwhile, the Argentine Congress drafted legislation in response to livestock and agricultural producers’ demands for more land. Law 215, passed in 1867, provided federal funding to support Argentine occupation of all territory south to the Río Negro. Such an advance, however, was unrealistic at the time, as Argentina was already committed to the War of the Triple Alliance in the north; although the law was passed, it was not enforced. Three years later, Law 385 earmarked 2 million pesos for the execution of Law 215; this, too, was shelved after its passage.¹⁹ Law 752 of 1875 reiterated the content of Laws 215 and 385, and more specifically provided for the reservation of lands on which to place those tribes that surrendered themselves and fought against those that resisted, until they should be driven back beyond the Río Negro.²⁰ As the 1860s and 1870s progressed, then, economic pressures to expand Argentine territory southward joined with congressional efforts to create a legal foundation for such expansion. Close ties between Argentina’s ranching and agricultural elites and the state smoothed the path for such strategies, as did nineteenth-century liberal beliefs that political stability and economic growth went hand in hand.

The Argentine military also attempted to respond to growing economic and political pressures in the south by fortifying the frontier, but state makers and military leaders perennially disagreed over how best to do this, and where the necessary resources should come from. The Argentine state attempted to garrison its frontier-line forts with regular soldiers but struggled to sufficiently pay and supply its troops; tales of hardship and low morale in these frontier battalions appeared frequently in the popular press and in Argentine literature, thwarting efforts to recruit soldiers throughout the mid-nineteenth century. Such tales would later bolster traditional narratives of the conquest, painting Argentine military conscripts as heroic martyrs to the nation.

During the 1870s, the imperative strands of economic expansion, technological advance, political unification, and military pride that had been slowly developing throughout the nineteenth century wound with growing swiftness around the perceived problem of the southern frontier. Nicolás Avellaneda, president of the republic (1874–1880), strongly believed that foreign investment was crucial to national economic progress, and his interest in creating an Argentina conducive to European investment made him a natural advocate of settlement expansion along the southern frontier. As Avellaneda’s administration took shape, creole ranches and settlements pushed insistently southward, and the Argentine military escalated its attacks against indigenous peoples who (allegedly or actually) violated signed treaties or raided Argentine frontier settlements. Indigenous communities of the pampas often experienced the 1860s–1870s (and understand these decades today) as years of increasing Argentine military incursion, seemingly random acts of violence against indigenous peoples, wanton destruction of livestock, and community disruption. Indigenous memories of these years are often marked by ill omens and warnings from ancestors and natural forces, all foretelling the coming disaster often described as the sad times.²¹ Many indigenous communities responded to intensifying Argentine military pressure by mounting more frequent and larger raids or malones against Argentine settlements. One raid in 1876 penetrated within 60 leagues of Buenos Aires, departing afterward with a reported 300,000 cattle and 500 white captives.²² In this context, the first successful shipment of chilled beef from Buenos Aires to Europe in 1877 opened entirely new and dazzlingly lucrative possibilities in transatlantic demand for Argentine beef, and the collective gaze of Argentine elites, especially in Buenos Aires Province, swiveled southward. To Argentine state makers, landed elites, investors, and liberal intellectuals, it seemed clear that something had to be done. The official campaigns of the conquest began the following year.

Official, if dubious, figures for the conquest claimed that the Argentine army and navy captured or killed over 2,500 warriors. State figures also indicated that more than 10,000 women and children were placed under state supervision, which often meant relocation to Buenos Aires or other cities, where families were separated and both adults and children distributed among the city’s elite as domestic servants. State records also showed that over 1,000 men, women, and children were taken as captives to Choele Choel, and unrecorded numbers were incarcerated in other prisons or camps (often compellingly described as concentration camps) including Valcheta, Martín García, and Retiro.²³ Adult men were often forcibly conscripted into military service in the same Argentine army and navy that had expelled them from their own territories. Still others were compulsorily relocated to other parts of Argentina, forced to work in quasi-slavery conditions as agricultural laborers.²⁴ These figures are by no means complete or reliable, not least because, as Argentine scholars have amply demonstrated, the Argentine state did not fully record the physical and symbolic violence enacted against indigenous peoples during and after the conquest campaigns.²⁵ Nor do these figures encapsulate the myriad fates faced by displaced indigenous peoples after the conquest. Some found temporary refuge to the south and west, in Patagonia and the Andean cordillera. Still others were compulsorily relocated to state-created colonias, where it was hoped they would become westernized agriculturalists and shed their indigenous identities. Some were able to return to the pampas and Patagonia, where they established new communities on public or state-granted lands. These communities were often composed of the survivors of several different indigenous groups, posing further challenges to cultural persistence.

For nearly one and a half centuries, the Conquest of the Desert (1878–1885) has marked Argentina’s historical passage between eras. National history has often appeared to be naturally divided along the pivotal axis of 1880, the year in which Julio A. Roca was elected to the Argentine presidency. Argentine national histories covering the period before the conquest are most often written in terms of social divisions, economic stagnation, and political conflict and violence. Afterward, by contrast, Argentina is said to have entered a golden age of social progress, economic growth, and national unity. The Conquest of the Desert facilitated this abrupt national turnaround, according to contemporaries, by eradicating the indigenous peoples of the southern pampas and northern Patagonia, thereby solving Argentina’s long-standing Indian Problem and facilitating the rise of a white Argentina.²⁶ After the conquest, the Argentine state built a narrative in which indigenous peoples had disappeared, and any who endured were remnants of a doomed race, destined to vanish in the face of civilization’s advance. This narrative of inevitable indigenous disappearance, portrayed as a natural and even universal phenomenon, relegated indigenous peoples and their cultures to the national past. Such ideas translated into state policies that undermined indigenous claims to land and other economic resources, political status, and cultural rights, and also invisibilized indigenous peoples, marginalizing them from the national mainstream politically, economically, and culturally.²⁷ Traditional indigenous lifeways were fractured, broken by military conquest or slowly weakened through contact with, and often coercion by, creole Argentine economic systems, political exclusion, and social controls.²⁸

Despite the lasting legacy of such practices, the conquest did not eliminate indigenous peoples from the pampas or Patagonia. Indigenous communities exist throughout Argentina and campaign continuously for the recovery of their identities and legal rights as First Peoples.²⁹ Indigenous communities in the pampas and Patagonia have struggled for land rights, cultural recognition, political autonomy and inclusion, and peace in the nearly century and a half since the Conquest of the Desert, but have often found such goals to be elusive, obstructed by the profound legacies that the conquest left in its wake.³⁰ These legacies have included discrimination, erasure, dispossession, and state-sponsored violence (see especially the chapters by Warren, Ramos, and Delrio and Pérez in this volume). The Conquest of the Desert continues to shape how many Argentines understand their nation’s past and present, and, although the official campaigns ended generations ago, contemporary events in Argentina, like the ongoing protests surrounding Roca’s monument in Bariloche, make clear that the conquest is anything but a neutral, distant, or closed issue.³¹

The Battle for History

The chapters in this book offer a kaleidoscopic array of approaches to the Conquest of the Desert, from climatological science to literary analysis, in an effort to highlight multiple and often conflicting ideas about the conquest and its meanings. Within that diversity, however, three unifying focuses draw these chapters back together: indigenous peoples and nation-state formation, borderlands and settler colonialism, and interdisciplinary dialogue. First, each chapter engages with scholarship across disciplinary boundaries that troubles the nature of nation-state formation through the lenses of indigenous perspectives and indigenous-state relations. Several chapters in this book explore nation-states’ efforts to control and understand racial difference and indigeneity in particular,³² while other chapters challenge the limits of such analysis by asking how indigenous peoples have operated outside the bounds of Western-conceived notions including territory, state, identity, and memory to change the nature of discussions about national inclusion, sovereignty, jurisprudence, and indigenous rights.³³ In the first vein, Carolyne Larson analyzes the creation of the traditional narratives that imagined the Conquest of the Desert as a pivotal event in nation-state building and justified the erasure of indigenous voices from that national community after the 1880s. Julio Vezub and Mark Healey examine indigenous leadership and political-military strategies during the campaigns of the conquest, with an emphasis on bringing greater attention to the agency of indigenous leaders in the conflict. Chapters by Ana Ramos, and by Walter Delrio and Pilar Pérez, interrogate the conceptual limits of the nation-state, or the state-nation-territory matrix, as well as the various forms of long-term violence experienced by indigenous peoples of the pampas and Patagonia as a result of national incorporation. Several chapters (notably those by Jennie Daniels, Ricardo Salvatore, and David Sheinin) also highlight the often problematic power of national feelings and narratives about the conquest that have cast indigenous peoples as outside of the nation-state and that have used the conquest as a historical rationale for eradicating perceived threats to the nation, indigenous and otherwise. Daniels explores representations of the pampas and Patagonia in Argentine literature, arguing that the desert emerged as a liminal space in the national imagination and can reveal the central logics of Argentine nation-state formation and identity. Sheinin’s chapter examines the centennial celebration of the conquest in 1979, during the military dictatorship that controlled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, highlighting the eerie parallels drawn by pro-junta authors between the Conquest of the Desert and the military dictatorship and noting the long-term consequences of the conquest in late twentieth-century state policy. Contributors to this book also foreground voices and historical variables of the conquest that have been marginalized by homogenizing nation-state building processes and institutions. Ramos focuses on Mapuche nütram—spoken memories of loss, violence, and survival—that defy the silencing of indigenous voices and suffering that has typified traditional narratives of the conquest. Rob Christensen and Sarah Warren offer thought-provokingly complementary analyses of physical landscapes in their chapters; Christensen presents climate and the environment as an often ignored variable in the events of the conquest, while Warren analyzes Mapuche nation-building projects in the twenty-first century with an emphasis on education, cartography, and memories of the past that have been written onto the land. Taken together, the chapters in this book prompt a reconsideration of nation-state formation in Argentina, understandings of which have been implicitly founded upon the timeline of indigenous erasure resulting from the Conquest of the Desert.³⁴

Second, this book adds meaningfully to scholarship on frontiers, borderlands, and settler colonialism that examines imperialism and its attending violences globally.³⁵ The nature of the boundaries between indigenous and creole spaces—physical, visual, social, or symbolic—figures prominently in all of the chapters in this book, and contributors offer new insight into this important question for Argentina, the Americas, and elsewhere. Recent Argentine scholars have fruitfully identified the southern frontier as a living and internal frontier. These studies draw attention to the changing and adaptive nature of borders between indigenous and nonindigenous spaces, and to the often interwoven nature of these frontier spaces, not simply as a contiguous line in the desert but as spaces and ideas that become associated with indigeneity, and therefore with alterity.³⁶ In this volume, Christensen calls attention to environmental and climatic factors that changed markedly during the 1870s and 1880s, shaping the events of the conquest in ways that much existing scholarship has overlooked. Salvatore examines what might be called an internal frontier space in the Museo de La Plata, and the alternate blurring and hardening of boundaries between indigenous and nonindigenous spaces. Warren analyzes Mapuche representations of territory and homeland in the present, underscoring the meaningful fluidity of boundaries, place-names, and belonging for indigenous peoples in the twenty-first century. Delrio and Pérez make an important contribution to the ongoing debate among Argentine scholars over how to