Narrar la nación

Several works considered classics of Argentine literature were written during a period crucial to understanding the Argentine state’s actions, including its military campaigns against Indigenous societies, from the country’s early years as a republic through the end of the nineteenth century. These works are set in the vast Pampas, a landscape depicted as empty, mysterious, and desert-like. In this context, they served as sociological accounts that described the “realities” of rural life, frontier regions, Indigenous ways of life, and interactions among different social groups in the Pampas of Buenos Aires Province. This article examines how Indigenous populations of the Pampas are represented in several foundational works of Argentine literature and sociology, including Esteban Echeverría’s La cautiva (1837), Domingo F. Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845), and José Hernández’s Martín Fierro (1872–1879). These texts can be regarded as cornerstones of Argentine national identity formation to this day, given their popularity and their longstanding inclusion as required reading in schools. The main objective is to identify the roles assigned to Indigenous peoples in these narratives and consider how these representations have shaped social imaginaries of ethnic and cultural diversity in Argentina. This analysis draws on contemporary anthropological debates concerning the formation of national identity, the construction of aboriginality, and otherness. Although these works have been extensively studied from literary, sociological, gender, and other perspectives, relatively few studies have focused exclusively on Indigenous issues. The analysis shows that the classics examined here played a fundamental role in supporting the ideology of an emerging, culturally homogeneous nation and in constructing the Pampas as a desert and frontier region inhabited by an “internal other” who was viewed through deeply discriminatory and exclusionary perspectives within the nation-building project.

Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · Indigenous Cultures and History · Latin American Literature Analysis

• Política indigenista argentina

  Open Access•Diana Lenton•Anuário Antropológico•2010

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• Prácticas de fronterización, pluralización y diferencia

  Open Access•C Briones, Carlos Del Cairo et al.•Universitas Humanística•2015

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