Chamosa Hahr

Indigenous or Criollo: The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley
Oscar Chamosa
In 1937, after spending almost ten years collecting ballads, tales, and riddles in
northwestern Argentina, folklorist Juan Alfonso Carrizo wrote about the rural residents of Tucumn province in these terms: The race of almost the entire population is white of the Spanish type. [Although] there are a small number of mestizos in the Calchaqu valley, I did not see any of the autochthonous type; neither do any statistics report the existence of such.1 In other words, Carrizo defined the population of the valley as criollo, a flexible ethnic term that Argentines used to describe both the descendents of colonial Spanish settlers, and people of mixed indigenous and European background, or mestizos. Carrizos assertion seems to suggest that at some point in history, Spanish settlers had entirely displaced the Andean agriculturists who had occupied the valley since the precolonial period. That, however, never happened. Colonial documents show that most residents of the valley were indigenous individuals who, similarly to the neighboring Kollas in northern Jujuy, were subjected to Spanish administration and forced to pay tribute and provide forced labor (mita).2 Throughout the nineteenth century, few immigrants made the valley their home, and visitors referred to the local population as indios. Moreover, villagers kept the same indigenous family names recorded in colonial censuses. Yet, despite demographic continuities, the Calchaqu communities did experience a transition from being indigenous to being criollo in legal and cultural terms. In this article, I explore the creolization of the Calchaqu valley, arguing that the categorization of the Calchaqu people as criollos was the product of legal,
Thanks to Patricia Richards as well as to the editors of HAHR and anonymous reviewers for their valuable commentaries and suggestions. 1. Juan Alfonso Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Tucumn, 3 vols. (Tucumn: Univ. Nacional de Tucumn), 1:37. 2. The region also includes the valley of Quebrada of Humahuaca, in Jujuy, which together with adjacent Puna is populated by both criollos and Kollas, an Andean indigenous group; see Gustavo Paz, Resistencia y rebelin campesina en la Puna de Jujuy, 1850 1875, Boletn del Instituto Ravignani, 3rd ser., 4 (1993): 68 89.
Hispanic American Historical Review 88:1 doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-079 Copyright 2008 by Duke University Press
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HAHR / February / Chamosa
linguistic, and economic changes as well as part of an elite effort to represent Argentina as a white country.3 Furthermore, in analyzing how the myth of white Argentina related to the other prevailing assimilationist theories in the region, I also explore the meaning of creolization as a critical constituent of the myth of white Argentina. At the turn of the nineteenth century, while other Latin American national elites took pains to represent their countries as homogeneously mestizo, Argentine elites preferred to represent their nation as uniformly white. Ethnicity and national identity are now understood as the result of historical processes rather than as essential entities.4 In the case of Latin America, historical literatures growing emphasis on nation formation and ethnic relations sheds light on state policies of assimilation that consistently favored homogeneity over diversity. These policies coalesced in the nation formation myth of mestizaje in most of Latin America, and the myth of the white nation in Argentina.5 The existing literature on ethnicity and race in Argentina at the turn of the century tends to focus on the promotion of European immigration and the decimation of the indigenous populations of Chaco and Patagonia as the main policies implemented by the Argentine state to whiten its population.6 In contrast to current Latin American historiography, Argentine historians have tended to focus on the assimilation of European immigrants rather than on the assimilation of the non-European population into the national mainstream.7 Against that current,
3. Mnica Quijada, Indgenas: Violencia, tierras y ciudadana, in Homogeneidad y nacin: Con un estudio de caso: Argentina, siglos XIX y XX, ed. Mnica Quijada, Carmen Bernard, and Arnd Schneider (Madrid: CSIC, 2000), 28. 4. Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), 14; John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 69. 5. Marisol de la Cadena, Are Mestizos Hybrids? The Conceptual Politics of Andean Identities, Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (2005): 219 84; Jeffrey Gould, Gender, Politics, and the Triumph of Mestizaje in Early 20th Century Nicaragua, Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2 (1996): 2 30; Charles R. Hale, Mestizaje, Hybridity, and the Cultural Politics of Difference in Post-Revolutionary Central America, Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2 (1996): 36 46; Peter Wade, Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience, Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (2005): 239 57. 6. Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 139; Carol A. Smith, The Symbolics of Blood: Mestizaje in the Americas, Identities 3 (1997): 503. 7. See for example Fernando Devoto, La inmigracin italiana en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 1985); Alejandro E. Fernndez et al., La inmigracin espaola en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 1999); Alberto Sarramone, Los abuelos inmigrantes: Historia y sociologa de la inmigracin argentina (Azul, Argentina: Biblos Azul, 1999).
The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley
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Northwestern Argentina. Map by the author.
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authors such as Mnica Quijada and Carmen Bernard recognize the necessity to review the myth of white Argentina and place the country in the broader discussion of nation formation in Latin America.8 Others, mostly anthropologists, have focused on how the state tried to impose a unifying view of nationality on indigenous groups in Chaco and Patagonia.9 However, less attention has been paid to the policies that attempted to assimilate the different pockets of population that had not been significantly affected by immigration. These populations included people of African descent in the cities, especially Buenos Aires, criollos in the pampas and lowlands of the northwest, and a few pockets of indigenous people who had been subjected to the Spanish crown: Guaranis in the northeast, Kollas in the province of Jujuy and part of Salta, and the Calchaqu people in Salta, Tucumn, and Catamarca. The case of the Argentine northwest, and especially the Calchaqu valley, is especially significant in exploring how the myth of white Argentina operated in a local context. First, the population of the region remained mostly criollo after the large wave of immigration settled down in the country. Second, the folklore of Salta and Tucumn and of the Calchaqu valley in particular played a prominent role in the cultural policies of Argentine nationalism in the mid-twentieth century, presenting the apparent contradiction of a country that defined itself as white but celebrated a local non-European culture as its national folklore. I analyze that contradiction and propose that educational officials, folklorists, and Tucumns sugar industrialists made a concerted effort to represent the Calchaqu communities as criollo folk societies. The same cultural policies that downplayed the indigenous origin of the Calchaqu culture emphasized its Spanish elements. The scholarly representation of the Calchaqu people has shifted over time, as can be seen in three chronologically consecutive sets of sources. The first are the writings of pioneering Argentine anthropologists and folklorists who visited the valley in the 1890s and saw the local societies still operating within indigenous cultural parameters. In 1921, elementary teachers assigned to the valley by the national government produced a series of reports that show a cul-
8. Mnica Quijada and Carmen Bernard, Introduccin, in Homogeneidad y nacin, 9. 9. Hctor Vzquez, Procesos identitarios y exclusin sociocultural: La cuestin indgena en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2002); Gastn Gordillo and Silvia Hirsch, Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities in Argentina: Histories of Invisibilization and Reemergence, Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8 (2003): 4 30, Gastn Gordillo, Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2004).
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ture in transition, in which local societies retained aspects of their traditional beliefs and rituals but moved toward assimilation with the rest of the nation. The work of professional folklorists who performed fieldwork in the region in the 1930s and 1940s provides additional description. Among them, Juan Alfonso Carrizo is credited with creating an enormous folkloric archive and building a folkloric canon that established the criollos of the northwest as quintessentially Argentine. Carrizo notoriously downplayed the indigenous background of the valley and made an effort to cast it as a reservoir of ancient Spanish traditions, allegedly the original core of the Argentine nationality. By combining historical narrative with the analysis of intellectual discussions, I demonstrate that the creolization of the Calchaqu culture resulted from a juxtaposition of lived experiences and academic discourse.
Assimilation Ideologies and the White Country Myth
During the nation formation period, 1880 1910, Latin American modernizing elites, anxious to appear as European as possible, attempted the forced creolization of indigenous peoples by introducing education reforms and land and labor legislation that undermined the existing communities and turned them into mestizos, ladinos, or criollos, according to the local terminology.10 At the same time, most Latin American countries adopted a foundational myth of mestizaje, which asserted that Latin American nations were the result of a harmonious mixture of European, indigenous, and African races. Argentina followed policies of creolization comparable in almost every aspect to other Latin American countries, but it differed critically in that the nation was regarded as white rather than mestizo. The myth of mestizaje avows that twentieth-century Latin American nations were not composed of individual, segregated races. On the contrary, they were the product of a four-century-long process of amalgamation among indigenous Americans, Europeans, and Africans (el indio, el espaol, and el negro, in the masculine, third-person parlance of the time). In light of the rampant scientific racism then prevalent, the myth of mestizaje sounded like a sooth-
10. Marisol de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, 1919 1991 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000); Jeffrey Gould, To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880 1965 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998), 40 50; Jean Muteba Rahier, Introduction: Mestizaje, Muletaje, Mestiagem in Latin American Ideologies of National Identities, Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8 (2003): 40 51.
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ing invitation to racial democracy. That, however, is a misleading perception. As anthropologist Carol A. Smith states, A nation-building myth such as that concerning mestizaje creates inequality at the same time it presumes to create homogeneity.11 To understand this apparent paradox, Smith points to the different levels at which the myth of mestizaje operated. In the first place, mestizaje referred to the reproduction of individuals whose parents belonged to different groups of ancestry. Second, mestizaje occurred when indigenous individuals or communities, as well as people of African descent, adopted an identity as mestizo and were widely recognized as such. Finally, according to Smith, mestizaje became a political discourse that created the mestizo national subject and assigned specific value to this identity. Although the three aspects of mestizaje were interrelated, the imperative of political and cultural homogenization superseded the actual process of biological mixture or cultural subscription to mestizo identity, leaving behind a myriad of indigenous and African-descended communities whose identities differed from the national common denominator. The resilience of these groups in maintaining their ethnicity demonstrates that the process of unification was highly incomplete, Smith argues. However, as authors Jeffrey Gould and Charles Hale showed, the deepening gap between official mestizo ideology and local ethnic heterogeneity prompted agents of the state to resort to repressive policies.12 Smith concludes that what weakened the myth of mestizaje was the persistence of a racial and social hierarchy, the legacy of Iberian domination, which continued to value fairer skin and European ancestry over the indigenous and African components of the alleged mixture. By preserving this hierarchy, the actual implementation of mestizaje ideologies meant little more than assimilating the part of the population with indigenous and African ancestry into the cultural traits of the European elite. In a way, the process of mestizaje or creolization implied a whitening of groups and individuals of indigenous and African descent, who held the burden of leaving behind elements of their ancestral cultures and adopting the mores of the European settlers and their descendents. In contrast to their Latin American peers, early twentieth-century Argentine intellectuals declined to embrace the assimilationist principle of mestizaje as the foundational myth of the nation. Instead, as Mnica Quijada points
11. Carol Smith, Myths, Intellectuals, and Race/Class/Gender Distinctions in the Formation of Latin American Nations, Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2 (1996): 149. 12. Gould, Gender, Politics, and the Triumph of Mestizaje, 4 33; Charles R. Hale, Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894 1987 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 26.
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out, Argentines preferred to think of themselves as an entirely white nation.13 Although assimilationist principles were popular among Argentine intellectuals, they understood assimilation as a unilateral process of whitening. The myth of Argentina as a white country pervaded the state-sponsored discourse on race and effectively precluded Argentines from adopting even a self-serving and romanticized view of subordinated ethnic groups. The turn-of-the-century elite not only created this myth but also succeeded in exporting it abroad. Even today, some English language reference works, such as the Columbia Encyclopedia and CIA World Factbook, describe the Argentine population as 98 percent white.14 This myth, although vaguely supported by the existence of a relatively large and sustained European immigration, was even more deceptive than the myth of mestizaje. In fact, the part of the Argentine population that was either European-born or of European descent could not have reached more than 60 percent at its peak in the 1920s. The myth did not account for the racial identity of the remaining 40 percent of the Argentine population. Furthermore, a sizable indigenous population existed in several parts of the country at the same time that Buenos Aires was exporting the white country myth to foreign investors. In their creation of the white Argentina myth, the founding fathers were conscious of this discrepancy, but they filled the gap with a good dose of wishful thinking.15 The easiest way to deal with this problem, as George Reid Andrews notices, was to refuse to acknowledge the existence of the nonwhite population, for instance by excluding racial categories from the national censuses and from public discourse.16 In the preliminary study of the 1895 national census, the census officers explained that they decided not to account for race because the majority of the interviewees would identify themselves as white. And yet, the same census officers estimated the total nonwhite population at a flimsy 5 percent. As for mestizos in particular, the census officers said: There is in the whole country a very small quantity of mixed-race individuals, the result of the
13. Quijada, Indgenas: Violencia, tierras y ciudadana, 28. 14. Argentina, The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001 4); Argentina, Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook (Washington, DC: CIA, 2005). 15. By founding fathers of the myth of white Argentina I refer to the group of positivist thinkers that initiated the study of social sciences in Argentina, including Jos Ingenieros, Jos Ramos Meja, and Alejandro Bunge, among others; see Nicola Miller, In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish America (London: Verso, 1999). 16. George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800 1900 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1980).
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commerce between whites and Indians . . . who constitute the remains of a race in the process of extinction. To emphasize this statement the census officers add: The racial question, so noticeable in the United States, does not exist in Argentina, where it will not take much time for the population to become completely unified, creating a new and beautiful white race produced by the contact among all the European nations, made fruitful in the South American soil.17 Statements like these, common among turn-of-the-century Argentine social scientists, cast serious doubts on the accuracy of their methods, to say the least. Although the 1895 and 1914 censuses did not specify race or ethnicity, it is possible to estimate the geographical distribution of the European and criollo populations to demonstrate the non-European character of the northwest. The provinces of the Andean northwest received only a marginal number of the several million Italian and Spanish immigrants who settled in Argentina in the period between 1870 and World War I. The majority of the Europeans predominantly Italian settled in the coastal cities and in the extensive farmlands of Buenos Aires, Entre Ros, Santa Fe, and Crdoba provinces, the area known as the pampas. The most European of all districts in Argentina was the city of Buenos Aires, which contained a third of the national population. There, immigrants constituted two-thirds of the adult male population. The provinces in the pampas followed the city in percentage of immigrants. In these provinces small towns, the newcomers, familiarly called gringos, enjoyed privileged access to land and credit and thus displaced criollos from the most profitable activities.18 The census of 1914 shows that of three million people living in the provinces of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, not counting the city of Buenos Aires, one million were European immigrants and one and a half million were children of European mothers, which made the pampas a white country of sorts the pampa gringa.19 However, even if immigrants and their children outnumbered criollos, the latter still constituted at least the remaining quarter of the pampas rural population. A completely different situation was found in the five prov17. Repblica Argentina, Segundo Censo Nacional, levantado el 10 de Mayo de 1895, 5 vols. (Buenos Aires: Comisin Nacional del Censo, 1898), 2:xlvi viii. 18. Jeremy Adelman, Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890 1914 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994); Ezequiel Gallo, La Pampa gringa: La colonizacin agrcola en Santa Fe (1870 1895) (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1983); Gastn Gori, La pampa sin gaucho: Influencia del inmigrante en la transformacin de los usos y costumbres en el campo argentino en el siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: Raigal, 1952). 19. These figures are derived from Argentina Comisin Nacional de Censos, Tercer Censo Nacional, levantado el 1 de Julio de 1914, 10 vols. (Buenos Aires: L. J. Roso, 1916 19), 2:178 248, 4:76 102.
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inces of the northwest, where criollos were an overwhelming majority. While some immigrants settled in the cities of Tucumn and Salta, immigrants, many of them of Syrian-Lebanese origin, constituted only 2.6 percent of a total rural population of six hundred thousand; the rest were criollos.20 Therefore, there were at least one million criollos in the rural areas, divided evenly between the pampas and the northwest. In the latter region, criollos were not only the majority but they also lived in close-knit communities that favored the continuation of their culture. A simple solution that elite intellectuals found to accommodate the preimmigration population in the myth of white Argentina was to regard criollos not as a mestizo group but instead to emphasize their European ancestry. The lack of definition in the census regarding race contributed to making the racial connotation of the term criollo even more ambiguous. In the colonial period, the criollo category referred to only the American-born white elite, just as it did in the rest of the Spanish colonies. After the beginning of the massive European immigration, the use of criollo expanded to include any native Argentine regardless of race. White descendents of colonial Spanish, as well as people of African descent, mestizos (also called gauchos, and sometimes even chinos), or descendents of previously tributary indigenous peoples could equally be called criollos. Furthermore, Argentine writers who participated in the literary movement called criollismo defined their characters by culture, not race. Black gauchos, for instance, were common in criollista works, especially those for the theater, as were European immigrants who adopted gaucho customs and language.21 Criollismo succeeded under the assumption that autochthonous gauchos were rapidly disappearing, swept aside by the rise of the white rural middle class. What remained was a cultural type, whose adoption by the children of European immigrants represented the ultimate triumph of the myth of white Argentina.22 The myth of white Argentina reflected the general trend toward assimilation that reigned in the political discussion on nation and ethnicity across Latin America. Elsewhere, state officials and intellectuals pressured the former
20. The total rural population in the provinces of Jujuy, Salta, Tucumn, and Santiago del Estero and Catamarca was 600,000. Argentina, Tercer Censo Nacional, 2:294 347. 21. Ana Cara-Walker, The Art of Assimilation and Dissimulation among Italians and Argentines, Latin American Research Review 22 (1987): 37 67; Micol Seigel, Cocoliches Romp: Fun with Nationalism at Argentinas Carnival, Drama Review 44 (2000): 56 83; Alberto Gerchunoff and Ricardo Feierstein, Alberto Gerchunoff, Judo y Argentino: Viaje temtico desde Los gauchos judos (1910) hasta sus ltimos textos (1950) y visin crtica (Buenos Aires: Mla, 2000). 22. Miller, In the Shadow of the State, 172 73.
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colonial indigenous communities to rapidly assimilate into the nation. While in most Latin American countries assimilation implied that indigenous people could pass as mestizo, in Argentina to assimilate meant to adopt an intermediate category of criollo, which as a result of the cultural politics of the time was ultimately equivalent to Europeanness. The whitening of the nonimmigrant Argentine population occurred primarily on the desktops of government officials and in academic journals and other printed media. But in the villages and districts where the non-European Argentines lived, whitening was a remote and abstract concept, which sometimes had not even been heard of. However, the assimilation engineered by the state was not just a matter of shifting labels in a census form; it also fostered changes in practices and norms in local communities. In the next section, I will revisit the long-term history of the Calchaqu valley, highlighting the key moments and factors that signaled its integration into the national community.
Indigenous Roots and Creolization in the Calchaqu Valley
The history of the Calchaqu valley can be summarized as a progressive loss of political and economic autonomy and assimilation into broader political entities. Before the fifteenth century, the valley was populated by agriculturalists who apparently spoke a common language, identified as Cacan, but lacked centralized organization. In the mid-fifteenth century, these polities became gradually incorporated into the Inca empire, which brought to the area both settlers and the Quechua language.23 In the mid-sixteenth century, rulership of the Calchaqu valley passed from the Incas to the Spanish and the population became indigenous subjects of the Spanish crown. Finally, in the nineteenth century, the Calchaqu people became citizens of the Argentine Republic. At that time, they also lost the ethnic definition as indios that the Spanish had assigned and were officially designated as criollos. Claims of an overall indigenous heritage are based on the history of the valley, as abandoned terraces, ruins of walled towns, rich burial sites, and splendid pieces of ceramic and carved rocks give evidence of the valleys pre-Columbian splendor. The cultural uniqueness of the valley seems to be facilitated by its geographic location. The steeply winding road that connects the Tucumn lowland
23. Vernica Williams and Mara B. Cremonte, Mitmaqkuna o circulacin de bienes? Indicadores de la produccin cermica como identificadores tnicos, un caso de estudio en el Noroeste argentino, in El Tucumn colonial y Charcas, ed. Ana Mara Lorandi (Buenos Aires: Univ. Nacional de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, 1997), 75 83.
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town of Acheral and the village of El Mollar up in the valleys was built in 1946. Before that time, travelers had followed switchbacks up and down on the backs of mules. Looking at the sharp ravines and the thickly vegetated damp cliffs that threaten to engulf the modern road after each rain, it is difficult to imagine the weary muleteers and their animals treading this unlikely path. The valleys sense of geographic isolation and cultural individuality may be misleading, however; interconnection among the different oases that punctuate the central and southern Andes was and is more the norm than the exception. Geographic isolation did help the valley communities to shield themselves against what they perceived as endangering exogenous forces, although many of those attempts ended with a greater loss of independence. The first of these defining moments in the history of the valley was the forceful incorporation of the Cacan-speaking independent polities into the Inca empire, a process completed no later than 1470. The Cuzco rulers not only unified the different polities of the valley but also imposed a characteristic architectural and artistic style linked with the Inca state cult.24 The Inca may have also transplanted settlers from Peru (mitmaqkuna), who brought to the region the Quechua language, extensive maize cultivation, and Inca rituals.25 The result was a thorough political inclusion of the Calchaqu valley into the southern provinces of the empire of the Inca, and the orientation of its economy around the central Andes magnet of the Cuzco region. After the fall of Cuzco in 1536, the Calchaqu people regained their independence and defended it heroically against the Spanish. Led by the chief Juan Calchaqu and other leaders, protected by high and narrow passes, and with their battle practices strengthened by the adoption of horses, the Calchaqu warriors kept the Spanish invaders at bay for several decades.26 In the meantime, the Spanish had stabilized several settlements in the eastern lowlands, including the present-day provincial capitals of La Rioja, Catamarca, Tucumn, Salta, and Jujuy, which specialized in supplying cattle for the rising market of Potos. The official name of this province was Tucumn. In 1588, the governor of Tucumn climbed up to the valley with a small Spanish army and, taking advantage of
24. Terence N. DAltroy et al., Inka Rule in the Northern Calchaqu Valley, Argentina, Journal of Field Archaeology 27 (2000): 5. 25. Estela Noli and Mara M. Arana, Los Pichao: Aportes desde la ethnohistoria, in Investigations at Pichao: Introduction to Studies in the Santa Mara Valley, North-Western Argentina, ed. Lisbet Bengtsson et al., British Archaeological Reports International Series, 978 (Oxford: J. and E. Hedges, 2001). 26. Manuel Lizondo Borda, Descubrimiento del Tucumn: El pasaje de Almagro, la entrada de Rojas, el itinerario de Matienzo (Tucumn: Univ. Nacional de Tucumn, 1943).
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a fratricidal war, forced Juan Calchaqu and his sons to acknowledge Spanish sovereignty over the valley.27 The surrender of Juan Calchaqu did not end the actual autonomy of the valleys. For another century the Calchaqu people intermittently refused to pay tributes, snubbed their encomenderos, eschewed the mita (labor draft) shifts, only selectively adopted the faith preached by a handful of Jesuit missionaries, and on several dramatic occasions raised up arms against the Spanish.28 As the bishop of Salta complained in a letter to the Consejo de Indias in 1657: [The Calchaqu people] are idolatrous in a high degree, they have continuous communication with Satan, for the light of Gospel has never worked among them. . . . they have ruined our towns, valleys, livestock, men, and weapons, and produced heavy losses to Your Majesty.29 The solution the Spanish found, the bishop goes on to explain, was to sign a treaty that exempted the Calchaques from regular tributes, allowing them to conduct long-distance cattle drives to Potos in exchange for a voluntary mita to the lowland towns. This arrangement satisfied neither the Calchaques, who were disgruntled with the mita, nor the Spanish, who coveted the valleys rich mineral ores and labor pool. In 1657, Captain Don Francisco Bohorquez, a Spanish adventurer who fancied himself a grandchild of the last Inca, challenged the status quo by having the Calchaqu people recognize him as their Inca.30 There ensued a two-year war with the Spanish, in the middle of which Bohorquez capitulated, obtaining a royal pardon. The Calchaques ignored Bohorquezs defection and continued fighting until the outraged Spanish soldiers massacred several thousand Calchaqu villagers in 1659 and 1660.31 The devastating defeat in 1660 also signaled the beginning of Spanish
27. Juan Ramrez de Velazco to Consejo de Indias, Salta, 20 Apr. 1588, Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla, Audiencia de Charcas (hereafter cited as AGI, Charcas), leg. 26, doc. 1. 28. Expediente de la visita que hizo el Obispo de Tucumn, Dr. Don Julian de Cortazar, en el valle Calchaqu, in Papeles Eclesiasticos del Tucumn, Documentos del Archivo de Indias, ed. Roberto Levillier (Madrid: J. Pueyo, 1926), 95 98. 29. Bishop of Tucumn to Consejo de Indias, Salta, 13 Sept. 1658, AGI, Charcas, leg. 122, doc. 6. 30. Captain Pedro Bohorquez to governor of Tucumn, Santa Mara, 7 May 1657, AGI, Charcas, leg. 122; Conference on actions to be taken in the Calchaqu Valley (Junta en que se trat las consecuencias y ejecuciones que haban de tener en Valle Calchaqu), San Juan de la Rivera, 4 Aug. 1657, AGI, Charcas, leg. 122. 31. Report on Pedro Bohorquezs insurrection, Salta, 3 Feb. 1658, AGI, Charcas, leg. 58.
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landholding over Calchaqu communities. Even though the Spanish governor granted communal lands to the resettled pueblos, no stipulations were made on the exact limits of those properties. This allowed Spanish hacendados, or large landowners, from Salta and Tucumn to obtain land grants over lands that the communities of Amaicha and Colalao possessed in the eastern slope of the Calchaqu range in present-day Tucumn.32 This process of dispossession continued well into the nineteenth century.33 The Calchaqu communities preserved the lands in the valley itself, however. In 1716, the communities of Amaicha, Quilmes, and Colalao obtained a royal ordinance arranging the boundaries of their communal property.34 But the pueblo of Tolombn, which had not obtained such a document, lost part of its lands to its own encomendero in the second half of the eighteenth century.35 Such land grabs by encomenderos or richer members of the communities were probably a common occurrence across the valley. The legal disputes between Calchaques and encomenderos and among encomenderos themselves for the possession of the land grants allow historians to look into the process of ethnic redefinition during the colonial period. The court proceedings define the peoples in the valley variously as Calchaques, Diaguitas, Yocaviles, Amaichas, Tafes, and Tolombones, among other designations. The persons who brought these cases to court treated the different communities as distinct ethnicities and discussed their place of origin as well as the different languages they spoke. For instance, the Tafes appear in some documents as a group completely separate from the Calchaques and in others as part of them. Historian Rodolfo Cruz argues that practices such as these reflect
32. Report on the state of the province of Tucumn by Governor Alonzo de Mercado y Villacorta, Salta, 6 June 1659, AGI, Charcas, leg. 58; land grant in favor of Pedro de Avila y Zrate, Talavera, 1697, Archivo Histrico de Tucumn (hereafter cited as AHT), Protocolos, ser. A, box 3; contract between Francisco de Aragon and Sebastian Rosel, Tucumn 1692, AHT, Protocolos, ser. A, box 3; property title of Juan Romn, Tucumn, 1697, AHT, Protocolos, ser. A, box 3. 33. Proceedings on the dispossession of lands belonging to the indians of Colalao and Tolombn, Salta, 1808, AHT, Judicial, box 52, exp. 52. 34. The real cdula or royal ordinance is entirely reproduced in Miguel Figueroa Romn and Andrs Mulet, Planificacin integral del valle de Amaicha (Tucumn: Univ. Nacional de Tucumn, 1949). 35. Proceedings of census of Trancas Parish, Indian towns of Colalao y Tolombn, San Miguel de Tucumn (Autos de revisita, curato de Trancas, pueblos de Colalao y Tolombn, San Miguel de Tucumn), 16 May 1786, Archivo General de la Nacin, Argentina (hereafter cited as AGN), leg. 13.17.2.1, Padrones de Indios de Salta, 33.
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the power of Spanish settlers to redefine the ethnicity of the valleys dwellers according to their economic interest.36 As the Spanish authority became firmly established in the valley during the eighteenth century, the settlers tended to homogenize the Calchaqu communities under a common denomination as indios de padrn individuals labeled by Spanish census takers as liable to pay the indigenous tribute. The revisita, or census, of 1791 listed 948 indios de padrn in Catamarca, 795 in Tucumn, and 780 in Salta, the majority of whom lived in the Calchaqu valleys.37 The colonial officers who visited the indigenous villages in the 1780s and 1790s needed a Quechua translator to communicate with the locals but do not mention the Cacan language. However, perhaps as a result of the presence of missionaries and Spanish landowners, important cultural changes could already be perceived at the end of the colonial period. For instance, in the community of Cafayate, an officer recorded that a translator was not needed because most Indians understood Spanish perfectly.38 Yet what defined an indigenous person in the colonial legislation was not language but ascription to an officially recognized pueblo de indios. The legal definition as indios forced the Calchaques to pay tributes and labor services but also allowed communities to retain part of their lands under collective ownership, and with it, their identity as indigenous. This colonial pact was rendered null after the outbreak of hostilities between the rebel patriots and the Spanish in 1810. During the first six years of the War of Independence, the entire northwest became a critical battlefield where patriot armies managed to keep at bay the royal armies sent from Lima. An immediate effect of the war in the Calchaqu valley was that patriot officers stopped collecting the Indian tribute, the main incentive to the colonial administrators to retain the indigenous category.39 The onset of the independent republic
36. Manuel Lizondo Borda, Historia de Tucumn, Siglos XVII XVIII (Tucumn: Univ. Nacional de Tucumn, 1941), 48; Rodolfo Cruz, La construccin de identidades tnicas en el Tucumn colonial: Los amaichas y los tafes en el debate sobre su verdadera estructura tnica, in Lorandi, El Tucumn colonial, 65 92. 37. These figures show a slight population increase since the early part of the eighteenth century. There is also a noticeable natural increase in the population between the censuses of 1786 and 1791, although the time frame is too small to consider it a trend. Census of tributary Indians (Autos de revisita), Salta, 27 Nov. 1791, AGN, leg. 13.17.2.1, exp. 275. 38. Ibid. 39. The accounting books simply declare void the collection of indigenous tributes but do not explain the reason for this change. Estado del corte y tanteo de la Caja Provincial, 1811 13, San Miguel de Tucumn, 8 Aug. 1814, AGN, leg. 10.5.10.2. However, the situation was consistent with the difficulties faced by the bureaucracy of the independent republic
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also inspired a new language of citizenship and equality, which undermined the caste system that both exploited and sustained the indigenous communities. The republican rhetoric had immediate impacts in the courts of Tucumn, where individual indigenous men and women used it as means to demand equal treatment as citizens of the fledging nation. In 1812, three separate indigenous women who, as they alleged, were subjected to personal servitude in the houses of two Tucumn landowners and one rural justice of the peace requested to be exonerated from this personal service by virtue of the Decree of Individual Guarantees of 1811.40 In 1813, the Constitutional Assembly debated the place of indigenous subjects in the new republic and finally abolished both tribute and mita. After the formal declaration of independence in 1816, the Calchaques, as well as all people registered as indigenous in the Spanish censuses, became Argentine citizens and, in theory, enjoyed whatever limited rights this status entitled them to. Reciprocally, the new government drafted Calchaqu men of all ages into the armies of independence. The War of Independence and ensuing civil wars that ravaged Argentina between 1810 and 1862 were a major causeway for the creolization of the Calchaqu people. Particularly during independence, the valleys and lowlands of the northwest became the critical battleground where the United Provinces of the Ro de la Plata managed to sustain its sovereign claim against the loyalist troops dispatched from Peru. Although exact registry of the militias that fought against the Spanish is difficult to find, there is evidence that patriot officials demanded contributions of men and horses from the communities in the valley.41 The recruits from the valleys were stationed in the cities of Salta and Tucumn, where the patriot commander General Manuel Belgrano not only took care of training them as soldiers but also of imposing on them a sense of nationality through carefully choreographed martial rituals.42 Without a doubt, the intense experi-
to collect taxes elsewhere, see Tulio Halpern Donghi, Guerra y finanzas en los orgenes del estado argentino (Buenos Aires: Univ. de Belgrano, 1982). 40. Provincial Junta of Tucumn to Supreme Junta, San Miguel de Tucumn, 28 Jan. 1812, AGN, leg. 10.5.10.1; Freedom of Mara Santos, servant of Ignacio Bazn, San Miguel de Tucumn, 11 Mar. 1812, AGN, leg. 10.5.10.1; Freedom of Mara Magdalena, indian servant of Jos Tern, San Miguel de Tucumn, 20 Jan. 1812, AGN, leg. 10.5.10.1; Cabildo de Tucumn to Provincial Junta of Tucumn, San Miguel de Tucumn, 3 Feb. 1812, AGN, leg. 10.5.10.1. 41. Neighbors of Fuerte de Andalgal to provincial government of Tucumn, San Miguel de Tucumn, 22 Aug. 1814, AGN, leg.10.5.10.2. 42. Libro de rdenes del da del Ejrcito Auxiliador del Per, 1816, in Museo Mitre, Documentos del Archivo de Belgrano (Buenos Aires: Impr. Coni Hermanos, 1916).
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ence of warfare and camaraderie with criollos from different parts of the country furthered the assimilation of the Calchaqu men. Similarly, the countrys long civil war between Federales and Unitarios, which divided the population of the valley between the two opposing sides, forced the Calchaqu people to assume nationwide political identities.43 The wars of independence and the civil wars were powerful forces in erasing the isolation of the valley and incorporating the former indigenous villages into the fledgling national community. Some Calchaqu communities found that independence opened the possibility of reclaiming lands from the descendants of Spanish hacendados. After a long civil trial, the communities of Amaicha, Quilmes, and Calimonte managed to regain their legal holdings. The nationwide liberal reforms that began in 1862 constituted a powerful ideological backlash against the preservation of communal lands. Elsewhere in the northwest, the expansion of Buenos Aires liberalism prompted the explosion of criollo rebellions. Criollo culture, historian Ariel de la Fuente demonstrates, was critical in defining the sides in this conflict.44 The caudillos representing criollo small herders and peasants of the lowlands reacted against the centralizing modernity of Buenos Aires. The valleys did not side with the caudillos, though. Instead, the Calchaqu villagers aligned themselves with the government loyalists troops.45 This alliance with the central government reveals another step taken in assimilating themselves into the larger national community. In the long battle to retain their lands, the Calchaqu communities tinkered with their ethnic identity as they deemed fit to better defend their interests. In an 1823 lawsuit against a neighboring landowner, Amaicha comuneros, village members with full rights to the common lands, identified themselves as originally native from this American country.46 The petitioners understood that this condition granted them more rights than the majority of the people who inhabit it and therefore entitled them to preserve the communal lands
43. On one occasion in the middle of the war, the militias in the valley shifted sides from the Federales to the Unitarios, or liberals. See Manuel Lizondo Borda, Documentos argentinos: Crisstomo Alvarez y su campaa libertadora del norte, 1852 (Tucumn: Univ. Nacional de Tucumn, 1957), 18 19. 44. Ariel de la Fuente, Children of Facundo: Caudillo and Gaucho Insurgency during the Argentine State-Formation Process (La Rioja, 1853 1870) (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000). 45. In 1921, people in the valley still remembered the caudillo rebellions of 1865 and 1870 as dramatic disruptions of their normal life. Ramn Cano and Miguel Cano Velez, Amaicha, 1921 Encuesta Nacional del Magisterio, Instituto Nacional de Antropologa (hereafter cited as ENM), leg. Tucumn 58, pp. 23 24. 46. Esteban Figueroa, representing the village of Amaicha, to governor of Tucumn, Amaicha, 26 Apr. 1823, AHT, Judicial, box 125, exp. 25, p. 6.
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that even the most usurping of all conquistadors ceded to us. This language reflects a strategy that appropriated the language of rights of the independence elite without challenging the colonial juridical order, which acknowledged indigenous communal landholdings. But as the liberal juridical order advanced, the Calchaqu comuneros, probably advised by city lawyers, downgraded their indigenous affiliation to descendents of the original inhabitants and emphasized their rights as Argentine citizens.47 In 1892, avoiding the use of any specific ethnic label, the provincial government granted the land to the rural communes of Amaicha, Quilmes, and Calimonte, their members officially designated as comuneros.48 By obtaining that recognition, the Calchaqu communities effectively challenged a liberal conception of landholding that rejected communal solidarity and glorified private ownership. The victory also entailed acceptance of full membership in the national community. Despite the success of those communities in retaining their communal lands, the majority of other communities were not so fortunate. Still, many Calchaqu people lived outside the communal villages and either held private property or had no access to property at all. The archives of the 1867 and 1895 national censuses present a bleak reality in which the majority of the adult males are listed as day laborers ( jornaleros) while womens professions were limited to laundress and seamstress. In contrast, in Amaicha and Quilmes, where property was communal, the majority of male and female adults are listed as farmers (labradores).49 The common name for individuals who were not members of the collectively owned communities was lugareos, or people from the place, which apparently did not connote a separate culture from those who were full members of the communities. The censuses of 1869 and 1895 show many indigenous surnames, some belonging to the same families that lived in those communities in the time of the 1791 census, like the Sasos of Amaicha. Others were internal
47. On the reform of indigenous landholding in Jujuy and Salta, see David Bushnell, Reform and Reaction in the Platine Provinces, 1810 1852 (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1983), 91 92; and Bushnell, The Indian Policy of Jujuy Province, Americas 55 (1999): 584. 48. Figueroa Romn and Mulet, Planificacin integral del valle de Amaicha, 31 33; Carlos Reyes Gajardo, Motivos culturales del valle de Amaicha (Tucumn: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 1966), 50 52; Alejandro Isla, Los usos polticos de la identidad: Indigenismo y estado (Buenos Aires: Editorial de las Ciencias, 2002), 74. 49. Tucumn Leales-Encalilla, Buenos Aires, 18 Sept. 1867, AGN, Primer Censo Argentino, Libreto Nro 459; Colalao del Valle, Poblacin Urbana, 15 May 1895, AGN, Libretos del Segundo Censo Nacional, leg. 1359; Colalao del Valle, Poblacin Rural, 15 May 1895, AGN, Libretos del Segundo Censo Nacional, leg. 1359; Amaicha, Poblacin Rural, 15 May 1895, AGN, Libretos del Segundo Censo Nacional, leg. 1359.
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immigrants who moved across the artificial provincial borders that sliced the valley into three parts. Still, many indigenous people had Spanish surnames in 1791, and many people over 56 years old with names such as Cruz, Ayala, Gonzalez, Balderrama, and Benarez in the 1869 census may have been legally born as Indians.50 The disappearance of indigenous languages in the Calchaqu valley presents something of a mystery. If in 1791 Spaniards needed Quechua translators to talk to residents of most communities in the valley, at the end of the nineteenth century no visitor reported the use of any language other than Spanish. However, it remains unclear when and how the indigenous languages faded from the linguistic landscape. Samuel Lafone Quevedo, an archaeologist who ran a copper mine in the Calchaqu town of Santa Maria before starting his academic career, claimed to have heard a few old people talking in Quechua in 1860 and that its usage was common during the first half of the nineteenth century. He asserts that priests took confessions in Quechua and that merchants traveling to and from Bolivia communicated with each other in Quechua.51 Lafone Quevedo speculates that the transition from Quechua to Spanish was the result of public schooling. But before the federal government founded elementary schools in the valley in 1907, education was nonexistent in any language. The most likely explanation is that as communication with the lowlands became more common over the course of the nineteenth century, Spanish displaced Quechua as the spoken language. It was not only language that was lost in the nineteenth century. Longdistance cattle commerce had been the center of the valley economy in the colonial period. Local farms produced fodder for the passing herds that used the valley as a highway between Northern Chile and Bolivia. Some cattle were also raised for export in the valley itself. But economic changes affecting the entire northwest, especially the decline of mining in Bolivia, civil and international wars, and the development of railroads, slowly eroded this source of income. For those without land, the economy of the valley offered reduced means of subsistence. Commercial farms in Taf and Cafayate controlled by lowland patrician families were better irrigated and connected with the lowland markets, and they specialized in the production of grains and cattle for Salta and Tucumn. The
50. Eusebia Martin, Apellidos indgenas documentados en los archivos provinciales del norte argentino (Buenos Aires: Univ. de Buenos Aires, 1963). 51. Samuel A. Lafone Quevedo, Tesoro de catamarqueismos: Nombres de lugares y apellidos indios con etimologas y eslabones aislados de la lengua cacana, 3rd ed. (Tucumn: Univ. Nacional de Tucumn, 1927), xxv.
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Michel Torino family from Salta even managed to develop profitable vineyards and a winery in Cafayate; their wine eventually became an established national brand. Most lugareos worked the lands of absentee large-scale landowners. The rest of the local producers, either comuneros or lugareos, struggled to find a replacement for the cattle commerce.52 Faraway economic developments also influenced the economic reorientation of the valley. The demographic and economic growth of the pampas and Buenos Aires prompted the reorientation of the lethargic northwestern economy from ranching to sugar production. The political alliance between the patrician families of Tucumn, Salta, and Jujuy and the national elites in Buenos Aires guaranteed full protection for the regional sugar industry. As a result, between 1880 and 1900, more than thirty top-of-the-line sugar mills rose up in the northwestern lowlands, generating more than a hundred thousand jobs and providing for 60 percent of the regional economic output.53 Such economic dynamism rapidly transformed the rural economy in the lowlands from ranching and subsistence agriculture into a brazen form of agrarian capitalism. The development of the sugar industry dramatically disrupted the course of life in the valley, where the sugarcane planters found an ideal seasonal labor pool. Each year, by mid-May, many of the 20,000 Calchaques boarded their doors and windows and migrated en masse toward the lowlands of Tucumn and Salta for la zafra, the cane harvest, only to return at the end of August. The harvesters working conditions were universally described as highly exploitative.54 Entire families, including children and the elderly, toiled during
52. Hugo Ferrullo and Gustavo Mendez, El desarrollo rural en la comunidad de Quilmes (Valle Calchaqu), Desarrollo Rural 1 (1990); Estela B. de Santamarina, Notas a la antropogeografa del Valle de Taf (Tucumn: Univ. Nacional de Tucumn, 1945). Archeologist Juan B. Ambrosetti attributes the stagnation of the Calchaqu valley to the decline of cattle exports to Bolivia. This downturn may have motivated the abandonment of fodder fields. Juan B. Ambrosetti, La hacienda de Molinos, Valles Calchaques, provincia de Salta, Estudios Historia, Ciencias, Letras 3, no. 4 (1903): 158 80. 53. Donna J. Guy, Argentine Sugar Politics: Tucumn and the Generation of Eighty (Tempe: Arizona State Univ. Press, 1980), xi, 34 35; Patricia Jurez Dappe, The Sugar Boom in Tucumn: Economy and Society in Northwestern Argentina, 1876 1916 (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California at Los Angeles, 2001); Roberto Pucci, Azcar y proteccionismo en la Argentina, in Estudios sobre la historia de la industria azucarera argentina, ed. Daniel Campi (Tucumn: Univ. Nacional de Tucumn, 1991), 61 96. 54. La Vanguardia (Buenos Aires), 20 Sept. 1902, p. 2; La Vanguardia, 11 Dec. 1897, p. 1; La Vanguardia, 2 Oct. 1897, p. 4; see also Juan Bialet Mass, El estado de las clases obreras argentinas a comienzos del siglo (Crdoba, Argentina: Univ. Nacional de Crdoba, 1968), 105; Donna J. Guy, The Rural Working Class in Nineteenth Century Argentina: Forced Plantation Labor in Tucumn, Latin American Research Review 13, no. 1 (1978): 135 45.
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extended workdays under the whip of the overseers, having no place to spend the night but in makeshift huts thatched with cane leaves. The minuscule wages were often encumbered with debt to either the company store or the grocers in the valley, who acted as hiring agents for the planters. In truth, it was those debts that coerced peasants into the harvest every year. The decline of cattle traffic to Bolivia and Chile seriously thwarted the valleys already limited cash flow and put the families at the mercy of richer landowners and grocers, who advanced credit in exchange for labor. This system of debt peonage exacerbated social stratification in the valley. The arrival of capitalism in the northwest brought other changes. In the 1920s, Juan Alfonso Carrizo somberly commented on the bad habits that seasonal workers brought back to the valley on their return from the lowlands. Among those bad habits, Carrizo included drinking, gambling, swearing, fancy shoes, and, worst of all, tango. Apparently, the workers bought gramophones and tango records from the merchants that surrounded the sugar mills, which according to Carrizo, introduced the pernicious vocabulary and attitudes of Buenos Aires into the local society.55 Other, less moralistic sources partially confirm some of Carrizos observations. Not just tango but characteristically lowland criollo musical styles and dances such as chacarera, gato, and zamba became prevalent in the valleys.56 This horizontal cultural exchange between Calchaques and criollos from the lowlands is a good example of what Peter Wade calls mestizaje as lived experience.57 Carrizo may have exaggerated the pace of change, but he was right to assess the cultural implications of capitalist penetration in this remote corner of Argentina. The changes he points out were the last in a series of transitions the valley experienced at the end of the colonial period. The political discourse of citizenship, recruitment into the national army, erosion of economic independence, and loss of indigenous language all contributed to the elimination of the colonial construction of race based on categorical distinctions among Spanish, mestizos, and Indians. The ambiguous label of criollo, already used to refer to Argentines in many other parts of the country, became the term that was considered to best fit the Calchaqu people at the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition to the different historical factors enumerated here, this transition was reinforced by the views of the external actors, such as anthropologists,
55. Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Tucumn, 1:248. 56. Tunes collected by Isabel Aretz in Tucumn, 27 Jul. to 1 Dec 1941, Archivo del Instituto Nacional de Musicologa Carlos Vega, Libro de Viajes, 91. 57. Wade, Rethinking Mestizaje, 44.
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teachers, and folklorists, who exerted an important influence in defining the ethnicity of the Calchaqu people.
Indians or Criollos? The Anthropologists View
As the Calchaqu valley became more integrated into the Argentine economy and the people assimilated with the broader criollo culture, specialists of all sorts used their power to define the ethnic constitution of the country in terms that better suited elite interests. The early archaeologists and anthropologists who visited the valley, indoctrinated in biological definitions of race, tended to define the Calchaqu people not just as indigenous but as the living remains of ancient civilizations, themselves on their way to extinction. Echoing an agenda common to the development of folkloric and archaeological fields elsewhere, the collection and classification of local cultural artifacts went hand in hand with the desire for extinction of that local culture. This attitude is clearly discernible in the writings of Juan Bautista Ambrosetti, an archaeologist and folklorist from the University of Buenos Aires who performed intensive fieldwork in the valley between 1895 and 1906. Ambrosetti was born in Entre Ros to an immigrant Italian family and moved to Buenos Aires to study natural sciences. Appointed a professor of natural history at the University of Buenos Aires, Ambrosetti performed a series of groundbreaking research trips to the most distant parts of the country with the support of the Institute of Geographic Studies.58 Early in his career, the Calchaqu valley caught his attention. His field trips were archaeological expeditions and folkloric surveys rolled into one. He was primarily interested in pre-Columbian ceramics and secondarily in contemporary folk culture.59 His descriptions of the valley, however, did not benefit its inhabitants. For Ambrosetti, the indigenous condition of the valley culture helped him shed light on his archaeological findings. As Ambrosetti explained: The ceremonies of present-day Calchaques show such an indigenous character that I do not hesitate to see them as similar to the ones performed in pre-Columbian times.60 For instance, he described small sculptures found in graves as fetishes
58. Juan B. Ambrosetti, Viaje de un maturrango y otros relatos folklricos (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Centurin, 1963). 59. Juan B. Ambrosetti, Por el valle Calchaqu, Anales de la Sociedad Cientfica Argentina 44 (1897): 87 120. 60. Juan B. Ambrosetti, Notas de arqueologa calchaqu (Buenos Aires: Imp. la Buenos Aires, 1899), 72.
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because he observed that the modern population of the valley using figurines during special rituals. Although Ambrosetti did not practice any anthropometric measurement of the valley dwellers, for him culture and race were associated terms; therefore, if contemporary Calchaqu people performed the same practices as pre-Columbian valley dwellers, then they must be the same people. Adn Quiroga, another folklorist who toured the valley, shared the view that the valley dwellers were indigenous. As in the case of Charles Nisard, studied by Michel de Certeau, Adn Quiroga was both a law enforcement officer and a folklorist.61 Trained as a lawyer, Quiroga moved from Catamarca to Tucumn in 1886 with a job as legal advisor to the police department. Eventually he obtained an appointment as a judge of the criminal court. Quiroga moved back to Catamarca to be elected mayor of that provincial capital. In 1904, he reached the top security office in the country as subsecretary of the interior during the tenure of Minister Joaqun V. Gonzlez, also a vocational folklorist and admirer of Calchaqu antiquities. During breaks from work as a government official, Quiroga toured the Calchaqu valley performing archaeological and folkloric research. Although Quiroga never taught at a university, his vocational work was highly regarded in academic circles and eventually published by scholarly editorial houses.62 Adn Quiroga did not hesitate to use the adjective indigenous when referring to anything related to the valley. His informants were el indio Peralta, or la india Mara de Machigasta; similarly, the towns of Amaicha and Colalao were pueblos indgenas. The entire organization of his main work, Folklore Calchaqu, reinforces the idea that the valleys people were totally and unmistakably indigenous.63 Like Ambrosetti, Quiroga seemed to be interested in local folklore as a way of shedding light on the motifs of pre-Columbian artifacts. He assumed that the valley peoples myths and deities of 1895 were the same as those represented in vases and carved figures from the pre-Columbian period. Ambrosetti and Quiroga did not problematize the issue of whether the valley people were indigenous or not they took it for granted that they were. With the evidence they gathered on rituals, myths, and language, it was impossible for them to think otherwise. For them, indigenous meant ancient and atavistic, a culture that, like the surrounding archaeological sites, had remained
61. Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, The Beauty of the Dead: Nisard, in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, ed. Michel de Certeau (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), 119 36. 62. Calchaqu del Dr. Adn Quiroga, El Orden (Tucumn), 28 May 1896, p. 1. 63. Adn Quiroga, Folklore calchaqu (Buenos Aires: Univ. de Buenos Aires, 1929).
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untouched for centuries. Their interest in these local cultures was colored by a clear dislike of modernity combined with a fatalistic vision of the extinction of whoever dared resist its force. The description of the Calchaques as indigenous people in the process of extinction resonated with the discourse of the Buenos Aires based social science establishment led by sociologist Jos Ingenieros.64 The rapid extinction to which the Calchaqu people were doomed would come as a result of the several deficiencies that the very design of the census of 1914 tried to put in evidence. This design attempted to show the degree of civilization the country had reached during the previous thirty years. For instance, in addition to the standard demographic data, the census includes detailed information of economic activity and lists civic associations, theaters, and museums as tokens of cultural progress. The census also presents housing and health data, which clearly reveal that the people of the northwest were more poorly educated, fed, and housed and suffered a higher incidence of chronic diseases and physical and psychological disabilities than people in other regions. This evidence may have led the social scientists to conclude and hope that the healthier European population would eventually displace the illness-ridden Calchaques and other nonwhite northwesterners. But reality proved the Argentine positivists wrong. The impoverished populations of the northwest were not decreasing but growing, and it was clear that they were going to be around for much longer than the Buenos Aires social scientists would have liked. Therefore, other national authorities whose duty it was to deal with the deficiencies pointed out by the census, namely the lamentable state of public education in the valleys, resolved to intervene and force the cultural creolization of this population. The public education authorities approved curricular programs aimed to unite the national culture around the white Argentina paradigm and assigned to rural teachers the task of producing this transformation in their school districts. A group of rural teachers was charged with putting these plans into effect in the Calchaqu valley and, paradoxically, with recording the local folk traditions before their education plans managed to eliminate them.
The Calchaqu Valley in the National Folkloric Survey of 1921
The National Folkloric Survey ordered by the National Board of Education in 1921 provides an important written source through which historians can explore how rural teachers interacted with the local society in the Calchaqu valley.
64. Jos Ingenieros, Sociologa argentina (Madrid: D. Jorro, 1913), 457.
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The survey created a new opportunity for the accumulation of knowledge on rural lore and it represented another step toward the definition of the criollo. As in the case of the first folklorists, the board pursued several goals, such as appealing to nationalist feelings, creating an archive of popular culture, and hastening the penetration of modernity into the surviving local cultures.65 The National Board of Education assigned each rural teacher in the country the task of collecting folklore materials in their districts.66 The survey offers an unusual window into the Calchaqu people from the point of view of the local teachers and, indirectly, into what local communities thought about their culture and ethnicity. From their reports, it is evident that the rural teachers did not define the Calchaqu people as indigenous but as criollos of indigenous ancestry. This definition, I argue, was the direct result of the process of de-Indianization, in which the teachers were not neutral observers but central actors, if not the most critical ones. Although the quality of the teachers reports is uneven and they are generally influenced by the questionnaire designed by board member Juan P. Ramos, the unpublished survey offers a wealth of information on specific localities and descriptions of local life. Foremost, it gives us a complex picture of how rural teachers interacted with their host societies. To regulate the data collection process, the board distributed printed sheets with a model survey accompanied by a brochure that gave instructions on specific procedures. The brochure instructed teachers to pay attention to superstitious ceremonies, fables, myths, sayings, and ballads of Indians and gauchos.67 After receiving the instructions in May of 1921, rural teachers across the country worked on the assignment for four months. The results were collected by local school districts and sent to the National Board in October of that year. Despite their lack of training as folklorists, the teachers in the Calchaqu valley were able to report a vast array of aspects of local daily life and culture. Their personal knowledge of the communities gave them an advantage over urban researchers. Both Ambrosetti and Quiroga complained that it was very
65. Angel Gallardo, Proyecto de renovacin de votos profesionales, El Monitor de la Educacin Comn, no. 580 (1921): 55 56; Consejo Nacional de Educacin Argentina, Folklore Argentino (Buenos Aires: Consejo Nacional de Educacin, 1921); Concurso de folklore argentino, El Monitor de la Educacin Comn, no. 581 (1921): 111 12. 66. Juan P. Ramos, Instrucciones a los maestros para el mejor cumplimiento de la resolucin adoptada por el Honorable Consejo sobre folklore argentino, El Monitor de la Educacin Comn, no. 580 (1921): 3 26; Julio Picarel, Orientacin cultural nacionalista, El Monitor de la Educacin Comn, no. 581 (1921): 221 22. 67. Ramos, Instrucciones a los maestros, 3 26.
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hard to obtain information from the Calchaqu people and that the rustic herders looked at them with mistrust. Teachers enjoyed the advantage of residing permanently in the area, and they shared the same rough living conditions as their neighbors. Yet they were also outsiders and could observe the rural communities from the vantage point of modern educated citizens and local representatives of the national government. Adrin Canelada and Ramn and Miguel Cano were among those teachers. Born and educated in Spain, Canelada immigrated to Argentina after returning from the War of 1898 in Cuba. After living a few months in Tucumn city, Canelada obtained a job as a teacher at one of the newly formed national schools in the Calchaqu valley. His destination was Calimonte, a lonely rural school halfway between Amaicha and Colalao. He served the school for forty years and moved to Amaicha after retirement.68 The Board of Education ranked his among the six best individual reports in the national folklore survey.69 Brothers Ramn and Miguel Cano, two other teachers who contributed extensively to the folkloric survey, were born in the valley, although they were also outsiders of a sort. Their family had arrived from Salta city after their father bought a forage farm in Colalao in the early 1890s. Both brothers studied in the normal school of Tucumn and returned to the valley to teach at the national school of Amaicha. They studied music and became interested in the local musical culture. They were among the few teachers who could supply musical notations of folk songs for the survey archive. Twenty years later, they were still living in Amaicha and had become local officials, and they served as both informants and guides to the ethnomusicologists who toured the area.70 As a result of their intimate knowledge of their localities, teachers such as Canelada and the Cano brothers were able to identify many aspects of local culture that the first folklorists failed to perceive and report. The survey, for instance, revealed how ingrained were beliefs in sorcery, witchcraft, and faith healing among the Calchaqu people. The teachers in the Calchaqu valley named different local individuals who were reputed to be witches and sorcerers, reported incidents of sorcery and faith healing to which they were direct
68. Adrin Canelada, Mis nostalgias en el Valle Calchaqu (Tucumn: Univ. Nacional de Tucumn, 1994). 69. Distribucin de Premios entre maestros que colaboraron en la recopilacin de materials folklricos, El Monitor de Educacin Comn 64, no. 873 (1945): 77 88. 70. Isabel Aretz, Msica tradicional argentina: Tucumn, historia y folklore (Tucumn: Univ. Nacional de Tucumn, 1946); Colalao del Valle, Poblacin Urbana, 15 May 1895, AGN, Libretos del Segundo Censo Nacional, leg. 1359; Gua comercial de Tucumn (Tucumn: Mercurio, 1931).
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witnesses, and provided extended lists of herbal medicines and folk medical procedures, revealing the scant penetration of modern medical services. The teachers detailed accounts suggested that they were well informed about local folk medicine, probably because they may have used those services themselves on occasion. On a different level, the teachers reports were candid and many times expressed the internal differences in their communities, often referring to class divisions or personal feuds, dynamics that professional folklorists were not able to see during their short stays in the valley. Knowing that they had been sent as envoys of progress and aware that they had to live up to the standards they purportedly represented, teachers distanced themselves from the culture they described in their reports. All of them referred to the locals with a distant estas gentes (these people) and then went on to enumerate their odd and primitive ways. Canelada described the Calchaqu people as of a permanently serious countenance, as ones who may be concealing a mystery, and also as possessors of an atavistic indolence that prevented them from making any effort to do anything that was not prescribed by custom.71 Rather than using the label indigenous, the teachers preferred to use ethnically neutral terms such as gente del lugar (local people), vallistos (people of the valley), or habitantes de la zona (inhabitants of the area), or, more generally, criollos. At the same time, the teachers recognized that the Calchaqu people were descendents of indigenous people, even though they did not use that term to identify them.72 Defining local religion in the valleys was an important part of defining the peoples ethnicity. For the early folklorists such as Ambrosetti and Quiroga, the peculiar religion of the Calchaqu people revealed the indigenous ascription of the valley dwellers. Ambrosetti defined the valleys religion as a promiscuity of beliefs in which Catholic saints were subordinated to the fetishist ancient Calchaqu religion.73 Adn Quiroga attempted to organize those mythologies coherently around a series of myths that he identified as Incaic, minimizing the Catholic intervention. From the reports of the National Folkloric Survey of 1921, it appears that the people of the valley shared some of the basic tenets of the colonial Andean religion, but their religion was still, in the eyes of the teachers, no more than a local variation of popular Catholicism.
71. Report of teacher Adrin Canelada, School no. 217, Calimonte, 1921 Encuesta Nacional del Magisterio (hereafter cited as ENM), box Tucumn, leg. 54, pp. 115 18. The archive of this folkloric survey is hosted by the Instituto Nacional de Antropologa in Buenos Aires. 72. Report of teacher Adran Canelada, 124. 73. Ambrosetti, Notas de arqueologa calchaqu, 69 n. 1.
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Calchaqu people practiced a few rituals of clear Andean lineage during the early part of the twentieth century. In Amaicha, Colalao, and Quilmes, shepherds conducted the annual ceremony of sealadas or cattle branding, a ritual that early folklorists have used as an example of the exceptional character of the local culture.74 The sealada was simply the annual branding of the animals, a procedure required and regulated by law across the country. In the valley, however, it acquired special local characteristics. After the branding of cattle was finished, the master of ceremonies ordered that a hole be dug in one of the corners of the corral. There the party offered pieces of the animals ears to the Pachamama, Mother Earth in the pan-Andean cosmology. The master of ceremonies bundled the offering in the herd owners sons poncho together with coca leaves; the blood of one or more animals sacrificed at that moment; a generous provision of chicha (maize beer), aloja (a fermented beverage from a local fruit), or cane liquor; and the smoked cigarettes of those present. After that, people walked around the corral driving the flock while singing prayers to Llastay, protector of livestock, and to Pachamama, pleading for the growth of the flock and for the good fortune of the herd owner.75 Although the teachers recognized these rituals as peculiar to the region and at odds with the prevailing criteria of rationality and modernity, they did not see them as indigenous rituals. Rather, they understood them as local superstitions, and even though teachers saw the rituals as atavistic, they also perceived the existence of processes of change.76 Teacher Lola Nieto reproduced a conversation with one of the village elders, who complained that the local Catholic priests were making people lose their faith by battling against popular rituals.77 Similarly, while describing the devotion to Santa Brbara, Canelada contended that many such local traditions had became the subject of derision by youth because of the advancement they believe they possess, and that people who still believed tended to conceal it, afraid of the scorn of the youth.78
74. Ambrosetti, Notas de arqueologa calchaqu, 71. 75. Report of teacher Adran Canelada, 72 74; report of teacher Rosario R. de Nieto, School no. 5, Amaicha del Valle, 1921, ENM, box Tucumn, leg. 230, pp. 6 7; report of teacher Damin Pereyra, School no. 62, El Molle, 1921, ENM, box Tucumn, leg. 250, pp. 9 11; report of teacher Francisca de Garmendia, School no. 10, Amaicha del Valle, 1921, ENM, box Tucumn, leg. 134, p. 7. 76. Report of teacher Ramn Cano, School no. 10, Amaicha del Valle, 1921, ENM, box Tucumn, leg. 57, p. 3. 77. Report of teacher Lola Nieto, School no. 5, Quilmes, 1921, ENM, box Tucumn, leg. 229, p. 1. 78. Report of teacher Canelada, 13.
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The teachers also reported a series of cultural practices, which perhaps because of their pervasiveness they failed to see as products of cultural assimilation. Canelada includes among tales of enchanted mountains and ghostly apparitions that he heard from local storytellers a story about a famous boxer who was the center of attention of the specialized press and obtained the prize of Muscular Force World Champion.79 The story, filled with references to urban life and European countries, gives evidence of the oral transmission of novelties learned through contact with the outside world. Teachers also describe a series of folk dances and musical genres that are characteristic of the lowlands. These dances were so well established as a form of popular entertainment that the teachers could not perceive their foreignness. In addition to folk dances, teacher Ramn Cano transcribes lyrics of milongas, criollo songs from Buenos Aires that had become popular in the early 1900s; one of those milongas was authored by legendary tango singer Carlos Gardel.80 Overall, the several hundred pages of teachers reports on the Calchaqu rural culture convey the impression that they were describing a non-Western local culture in the process of change; however, they restrained themselves from calling this culture indigenous. Their task, as spelled out in scores of National Board of Education bulletins and publications, was to instill a homogenous sense of nationality and to uplift the children of rural dwellers to the minimum standards of instruction demanded by the central government. It might have been in the best professional interest of the teachers to portray the Calchaqu people as backward in order to highlight the efforts of the newly founded public schools to reverse that condition. Teacher Rosario R. de Nieto, of Amaicha, asserted that the people in her school district preserve primitive traditions and beliefs, although she never called the people themselves indigenous.81 The complete absence of the term indigenous among the hundreds of pages of teacher folkloric reports is a clear suggestion that the term was no longer in use among the local communities. The teachers presented a very complex portrait of the rural communities where they lived, but at the same time they proved that the Calchaqu people were effectively becoming criollos and therefore creolizing a number of practices and beliefs that in the past were part of their indigenous heritage.
79. Ibid., 181 84. 80. Report of teacher Ramn Cano, 16 24. 81. Report of teacher Rosario Nieto, 3.
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The White Industry of the Northwest and the Folklorization of the Calchaqu People
More than a hundred years after independence, the Calchaqu people seemed to be immersed in the process of assimilation into the Argentine mainstream. This assimilation resulted from actual practices of the Calchaques, but also from external pressure of state agents. In the 1930s, the pressure came from folklorists who reached the Calchaqu valley in search of the Argentine folk. What followed was a process of folklorization that reinforced the ongoing creolization. Here, folklorization refers to state and/or elite policies devised to stylize a range of lower-class cultural practices into a canon of artifacts able to be performed, reproduced, or exhibited. The ultimate goal of folklorization policies is to bolster cultural nationalism by emphasizing local, regional, or national differences in a context of transnational cultural exchanges.82 A common effect of folklorization is the isolation of cultural artifacts from the meaning that the practitioners originally assigned to them and the social context in which they were produced.83 Folklorists collected elements of Calchaqu culture, such as music and songs, as well as carnival traditions, and put them in a singular place of expectation within the Argentine folkloric canon. The folklorization of the Calchaques is intrinsically associated with the politics and culture of the sugar industry of the northwest. Due to a combination of economic factors aggravated by the depression of the 1930s, this industry depended heavily on national government subsidies and tariff protection to stay afloat.84 Not surprisingly, sugar industrialists found that their economic goals could be better achieved by taking part in electoral politics. Even more relevant to this study is that a powerful group of sugar industrialists took their politics to the cultural arena and became directly involved in a massive project of folklore research and education. In the middle of this project, the ethnicity of the Calchaqu people again became an issue of speculation, this time by defining them as whites. Ernesto E. Padilla, sugar mill owner, industry leader, and Conservative governor of Tucumn between 1912 and 1916, was the first politician to understand the political usages of the rural culture of his province. During his tenure at the provincial executive branch, he developed several projects to preserve the
82. David Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1983); Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1997). 83. Whisnant, All That Is Native, 6. 84. Guy, Argentine Sugar Politics, 91 97, 113 17.
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archaeological sites in the valleys as well as current practices such as the production of local handmade textiles. Later he moved to Buenos Aires, where he represented the province of Tucumn in the National Congress, which did not seem to present an obstacle to his continued advocacy of the sugar industry. He was also very much involved in the public education system and cultural institutions, being appointed minister of education in 1930 and later chair of the Board of Education of Buenos Aires. Between 1920 and 1940, Padilla led a powerful clan of sugar industrialists and conservative politicians from the northwest, which had direct control over the Ministry of Education, the National Board of Education, and the University of Tucumn. This structure facilitated Padillas plan to create a corpus of national folklore that emphasized the northwest, the Calchaqu valley in particular, as the center of authentic Argentine culture. The story of the cultural intervention of the sugar industry in the Calchaqu valley plays out as a perfect metaphor of the white Argentina myth. In Congress, Deputy Padilla and fellow Tucumn representative Juan Simn Padrs fought to obtain a legal recognition of the sugar industry as a white industry. This unusual label had nothing to do with the color of the product but with the ethnicity of the workers who toiled in fields and mills. Padilla and Padrs invoked the example of Australia, which in 1914 included the sugar industry under the White Australia Act, banning Aboriginal and Melanesian workers and receiving in compensation protective tariffs against cheap Javanese sugar.85 Argentines wanted similar protection against Cuban and Brazilian sugar, which, according to the industrialists twisted explanation, competed favorably with Tucumn sugar because of the exploitation of inferior races.86 Tucumn industrialists claimed to be forced to hire only white criollo workers, whose higher living standards could not be compared to the colored workers of Java, Hawaii, etc.87 The industrialists took pride in providing jobs for the large criollo population of the northwest but demanded a protective tariff in recognition of their patriotic commitment. The industrialists obtained the legal protection
85. Emilio Schleh, La industria azucarera (Buenos Aires: Ferrari Hermanos, 1935), 58; La cuestin azucarera, La Industria Azucarera 169 (1917): 20; Kay Saunders, Workers in Bondage: The Origins and Bases of Unfree Labour in Queensland, 1824 1916 (St. Luca: Univ. of Queensland Press, 1982). 86. Repblica Argentina, Cmara de Diputados, Investigacin parlamentaria sobre la actuacin del diputado nacional ingeniero Juan Simn Padrs, in Compilacin legal sobre el azcar, ed. Emilio Schleh (Buenos Aires: Centro Azucarero Nacional, 1943). 87. Los salarios de los trabajadores rurales en Luisiana y en Tucumn, La Industria Azucarera 235 (1922): 183.
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they desired in 1928, when the federal government created a special regime for the industry based on the principles of white industry.88 Industrialists had to brace against mounting criticism from the Left, which mocked the argument of the businessmen, noting that Tucumn workers received very few of the purported benefits created by the special protection. Furthermore, the metropolitan leftist press consistently defined the sugar workers as either indigenous or dark-skinned criollos.89 To counter those attacks, the industrialists supplied the sympathetic press with articles showing off the supposed benefits workers enjoyed in the sugar mills and claiming that workers were white criollos (perhaps counting on the deficient early twentieth-century graphic technology).90 To reinforce their argument from a cultural point of view, the sugar industrialists recruited a group of sympathetic folklorists who, for their own academic motives, were interested in demonstrating that the rural culture of the northwest was purely Spanish and Catholic rather than indigenous and pagan. Prominent in this group were ballad collector Juan Alfonso Carrizo, his assistant Bruno Jacovella, and ethnomusicologist Isabel Aretz. This group toured the entire northwest between 1928 and 1943, amassing an enormous quantity of ethnographic data, which they published in several volumes lavishly financed by the Sugar Industry Association.91 Carrizos and Aretzs contribution to Argentine folklore was too vast and complex to call it simply a prop for the sugar industrys obscure designs. But it calls attention to the researchers insistence, most evident in Carrizos case, on denying any non-Western influence in the makeup of the northwestern rural culture. Carrizo, himself a northwesterner of mixed ancestry, goes as far as to assert that the vast majority of the criollo population in Tucumn was purely descended from colonial Spanish settlers.92 He even specifies that in the Calchaqu valley a few people were mestizos, but otherwise Carrizo tends to identify Calchaques as criollos, defined as
88. Laudo dictado por el presidente de la Nacin en el conflicto caero-industrial de Tucumn (Buenos Aires: Centro Azucarero Argentino, 1928), 6. 89. La Vanguardia, 25 June 1904; Tierra Libre, July 1928, p. 3; Tierra Libre, Feb. 1928, p. 4. 90. El Orden, 29 Jan. 1927, p. 4. 91. Aretz, Msica tradicional argentina; Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Tucumn; Juan Alfonso Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Salta (Buenos Aires: A. Baiocco y ca., 1933); Juan Alfonso Carrizo, Trovas de la independencia recogidas en Salta y Jujuy, La Prensa, 25 May 1933; Juan Alfonso Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Jujuy (Tucumn: M. Violetto, 1934); Juan Alfonso Carrizo, Cancionero popular de La Rioja (Buenos Aires: A. Baiocco y ca., 1942). 92. Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Tucumn, 1:11.
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descendents of colonial Spanish settlers. Carrizo, who had studied the colonial documents of the Spanish conquest of the valley in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, claimed that the indigenous population had been annihilated or dispersed and replaced by pure-blooded Spaniards, an interpretation that neither the documents nor common sense allows. Indeed, Carrizo sufficiently proves that a large number of Calchaqu ballads, sayings, and riddles were nothing but local versions of European Spanish folklore. Different versions of such Spanish lore existed across the Spanish Americas, from Texas to Chile, as Carrizos erudite footnotes inform us, but that did not make all the Spanish speakers of the western hemisphere white. Carrizo preferred to ignore this contradiction in his argument and, building on then-current diffusionism, concluded that if Calchaqu people sang seventeenthcentury Spanish ballads it was because they were descendents of Spanish conquistadors. His protectors in the sugar industry were elated with Carrizos theory and findings. One of them, Alberto Rouges, owner of the Santa Rosa sugar mill, wrote a flattering preface for Carrizos folklore collection, praising it as the discovery of the Spanish roots of Argentine culture buried under the avalanche of cosmopolitanism that had swept the country since 1880. In fact, as the private letters exchanged among Rouges, Carrizo, and Padilla suggest, it was Rouges himself who suggested this hypothesis to Carrizo and directed him for the greater part of his fieldwork. This way of representing Calchaqu culture directly affected the works of Augusto Ral Cortazar, the most respected Argentine folklorist at that time. In 1944, Cortazar obtained a folklore grant from the Culture Commission, a federal agency, to study the folklore of the Calchaqu valley with the help of Carrizo, who was a member of the committee that awarded the grant.93 Cortazar had earlier published a book on the cultural influences in Argentine folklore. In this volume, Cortazar seemed to agree with the Latin American ideology of mestizaje, which defines Latin American culture as a mixture of indigenous and Iberian elements (he does not mention the African part). However, when he narrows down this definition to the Argentine case, he finds that looking at the cases of indigenous survival in our time, if we confronted them with the totality of our present civilization, we will realize their minuscule contribution and exceptional character. . . . Considering only the popular sector . . . I believe that
93. Argentine Republic, Comisin Nacional de Cultura: Su labor en 1944 (Buenos Aires: Comisin Nacional de Cultura, 1945), 25 26.
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evidence shows that the physiognomy, the lifestyle [tono de vida], the political, economic, and legal organization is generally European.94 When Cortazar published the results of his fieldwork in the Calchaqu valley in a monograph on the Calchaqu carnival, he introduced the book with a long (and rather interesting) analysis of the Mediterranean origins of the preLent carnival to which, later in the book, he attributed carnival rituals in the valleys.95 Thus, Cortazar followed Carrizos emphasis on the European roots of Calchaqu culture. Carrizos characterization of northwestern folklore as Spanish, and therefore white, became an axiom for the two following decades, mostly because Carrizo and his assistant Jacovella controlled the Institute of Tradition, later called the Institute of Folklore, which was the source of federal funding for folklore research. But the wishful denial of the indigenous roots of the Calchaqu valley thrived in a soil fertilized with the myth of white Argentina the same myth that sugar industrialists cleverly used to obtain protection for their industry. It was not only academic folklorists who discovered this region. Popular folk musicians, who gained access to commercial radio after a decree by the military government in 1943, adopted musical styles from the northwestern valleys, especially the guitar and drum based zamba, and adapted them to the tastes of wider audiences. Among a series of musicians and poets from Salta and Tucumn stands Hector Chavero, better known by his stage name Atahualpa Yupanqui, who reached wide recognition with his highly stylized folk rhythms and socially minded lyrics that celebrated the life of the rural criollos and evoked the arid but astonishing landscape of the Andean valleys. Many of his songs, especially El arriero (The Cattle Driver) and Lunita tucumana (Tucumns Little Moon) became staples in public school music lessons, introducing generations of Argentines to the northwestern folklore and inscribing in the collective identity not just the name of the remote valley but respect and admiration for its people. In a way, the creolized and folklorized Calchaqu people traded the loss (however undesired) of an autonomous ethnic identity for a place in the symbolic core of the nation.
94. Augusto Ral Cortazar, Confluencias culturales en el folklore argentino (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1944), 61 63. 95. Augusto Ral Cortazar, El carnaval en el folklore calchaqu, con una breve exposicin sobre la teora y la prctica del mtodo folklrico integral (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1949).
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Conclusion
In his 2002 ethnography of the Calchaqu town of Amaicha, Alejandro Isla enumerates eight alternative ways residents describe themselves and their neighbors, including the terms comuneros, lugareos, aborgenes, gauchos, criollos, Calchaques, Tucumanos, and Argentinos.96 These overlapping categories reflect not just the flexibility of self-identification but also the historical process of creolization in the Calchaqu valley. From being a stronghold of indigenous resistance against the Spanish, the valley was slowly but effectively integrated into the colonial economy and, later, into the nation-state. Integration into the nation-state, initiated at the time of the War of Independence and buttressed by the intervention of the public schools, brought about important changes in the way the state classified the Calchaqu people. In this article I have analyzed the process of creolization of the Calchaqu communities, taking into account the political, legal, and economic changes that framed the transition from indigenous to criollo as well as the academic discourses that assimilated the valleys peoples and cultures into the national imaginary. Following the examples of work on Colombia, Nicaragua, and Peru by authors such as Peter Wade, Charles Hale, Jeffrey Gould, Nancy Appelbaum, and Marisol de la Cadena, I have sought to demonstrate that Argentina also participated in the same general trend of simplifying the ethnic diversity in the country by assimilating smaller groups into a national totality. The main difference is that while in other Latin American countries the mainstream was defined as mestizo, in Argentina it was defined as white. These policies of assimilation are most clearly seen in the Calchaqu valley. In this region of the country, the political and legal processes of creolization started immediately after the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1810. Lawsuits brought to the civil courts of Tucumn show how indigenous people used the language of equal citizenship introduced by the patriots to lighten their burden of personal services traditionally due to the white settlers and to secure their lands against the encroachment of large estates. During the War of Independence, the incorporation of the Calchaqu people into the patriots army represented another step in the assimilation of the valley into the fledgling national community. Nevertheless, what may have made a greater impact in this process of creolization was the transformation of the Calchaqu peasants into a semiproletarian labor pool for the sugar industry. The annual migrations to the sugar plantations located in the lowlands of Tucumn, and to a lesser extent, of Salta, had the consequence of immersing the Calchaqu people in the cash
96. Isla, Los usos polticos de la identidad, 74.
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economy. In the lowlands, entire Calchaqu families became exposed not just to the criollo culture of the lowlands but also to the nascent commercial popular culture imported from Buenos Aires. Equally determinant in the process of creolization was the creation of national schools in 1907, which imposed the national language as well as the official ideology of Argentine nationality. At the turn of the century, as economic and cultural changes were distancing the Calchaqu people from their indigenous past, a series of experts offered their views on Calchaqu ethnicity. A first group of anthropologists, based on their observations of cultural practices, defined the Calchaques as indigenous. Later, the teachers who reported to the National Board of Education described many of the same indigenous rituals noted by the anthropologists but defined the Calchaques as criollos. And finally, in the 1930s and 1940s, folklorists led by Carrizo not only defined the Calchaques as criollos but, emphasizing the Spanish ancestry of their culture, catapulted Calchaqu local culture to the special position of authentic Argentine folklore. In compliance with the myth of white Argentina to which Carrizo adhered, that authentic folk could be defined only as European. This scholarly discourse added force to the sugar industrys efforts to define its workers as white and thus obtain special fiscal treatment from the federal government. The combination of legal, political, and economic pressures, together with an academic discourse that fostered assimilation but at the same time extolled the virtues of traditional culture, explains how the Calchaques lost their indigenous status in a little more than a century. It should be noted that, despite the steps taken to assimilate the Calchaqu people into the Argentine mainstream, the issue of how they identified themselves remained unresolved. Calchaques preserved several of the practices and beliefs that would allow them to identify as Andean indigenous people. For instance, the cult of Pachamama, still practiced today, and some specific forms of magic and faith healing connect them with the larger Andean world. They also acknowledged that the pre-Columbian ruins were built by their ancestors and resisted the desecration of burial sites by archaeologists. Furthermore, the community of Amaicha retained its communal landholding. However, neither the preservation of communal land nor of traditions and beliefs guaranteed the survival of indigenous identity. Isla reported that some Calchaques would be offended if they were called indios. At present, this trend has reversed, and the growing emphasis on multiculturalism is encouraging many Calchaqu people to reassert themselves as indigenous.97
97. I observed this tendency to reclaim indigenous identity among local intellectuals in my interviews with members of Cooperativa Amauta in Los Sazos, Tucumn, in 2002.
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Defining an ethnic group is a matter of power, often of competing powers. The borders and contents of an ethnic group are shaped by the interplay between the members of the group and forces such as the state, academia, and economic elites. Government officials, folklorists, teachers, and missionaries, among others, have usually decided the ethnicity of the countrys minorities without soliciting their opinion. Folklorists, in particular, took the lead in redefining the Calchaqu people. Since the task of constructing a folkloric canon was undertaken when the foundational myth of white Argentina was still hegemonic, there was little chance that the Calchaqu people, identified by the folklorists as one of the most authentic Argentine folk societies, could have been defined as anything but criollo.

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Indigenous or Criollo: The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

Northwestern Argentina. Map by the author.

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumns Calchaqu Valley

HAHR / February / Chamosa

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