Picone on Larson, 'The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina's Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History'

H-LatAm Picone on Larson, 'The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History'

Review published on Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Carolyne R. Larson, ed. The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History. Diálogos Series. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020. Illustrations. 256 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8263-6207-0.

Reviewed by María de los Ángeles Picone (Boston College)Published on H-LatAm (June, 2021) Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55740

In 1879, the government of Argentina unleashed a military campaign to northern Patagonia, known at the time as the “Conquest of the Desert.” What was the desert? For the Sarmientine generation, it was the vast lands that surrounded economic centers, unproductive, uninhabited, and usually beyond state control. Of course, the desert was far from empty. In fact, the raid of 1879 sought disarticulate indigenous chiefdoms in present-day Río Negro, Neuquén, and La Pampa. Behind the soldiers came authorities surveying, dividing, planning, and selling lands to whomever was willing to move to the “new” territories. This was the official story.

The Conquest of the Desert joins a vast literature that challenges the official narrative of the Argentina military raid of 1879.[1] By shifting the attention to the experiences of Mapuche and Tehuelche living in northern Patagonia, this volume highlights the kaleidoscopic impacts of the violent removal of indigenous peoples from their territories during the raid and its aftermath. The volume brings together scholars from Argentina, the United States, and Canada in different stages of their careers and from different disciplines. It successfully weaves a multifaceted approach to the study of a single moment in a single space, benefiting from a wealth of sources and disciplinary frameworks. Additionally, the editors sagely decided to permit either footnotes or in-text citations, according to the disciplinary practice from each scholar. In an introduction and nine chapters, this ambitious project examines the relationship between the Argentine state and indigenous communities of northern Patagonia during and after a military raid carried out between 1879 and 1884.

The introduction provides a synthesis of the history of indigenous people of northern Patagonia. Additionally, Carolyne R. Larson, the book’s editor, in chapter 1 provides a more detailed account on the motivations of military men and authorities to undertake the military campaign. While it might seem counterintuitive to begin with the official narrative, Larson presents it as the object that all remaining chapters scrutinize.

In chapter 2, Julio Vezub and Mark Healey begin the task of dismantling the simplified version of columns and expeditions present in the publications from the Ministry of War. Using extensive correspondence and reports from the national archives (at a time when archives are closed due to COVID-19, they make us miss archival research!), the authors paint a vivid picture of frontier

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Picone on Larson, 'The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History'. H- LatAm. 06-30-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/23910/reviews/7886729/picone-larson-conquest-desert-argentina%E2%80%99s-indigenous-peoples-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-LatAm relations from the caciques’ perspective, especiallylongkos Valentín Saygüeque and Manuel Namuncurá. Additionally, they incorporate the always-fascinating testimony of Ignacio Cañiumir, a handwritten document that mixes facts and fiction he allegedly sent to a professor in 1899.

Rob Christensen’s chapter pushes against the trope of technological superiority of the military raid by providing evidence that weather and disease (smallpox) favored Argentine forces. The El Niño Oscillation of 1877 caused unprecedented precipitations followed by droughts, disrupting trading circuits. Additionally, the consolidation of confederacies facilitated the spread of disease. As extreme weather undermined Mapuche subsistence, so did their ability to fight disease. Finally, the mobile nature of the war and the imprisonment of indigenous soldiers made the Mapuche susceptible to disease.

In a focal shift from the military trail to the aftermath of the campaign, Ricardo Salvatore studies the lives of Inacayal and Foyel, two Mapuche caciques captured by the Argentine military and taken with their families to the Museum of Natural History in the city of La Plata. Drawing on multiple reports from people working in the museum, the author confronts the experiences of the indigenous families in its halls with the rationale behind exhibits of crania and bones. In doing so, he joins a body of literature that has argued that by filling the museum walls and showcases, scientists symbolically filled the desert, advancing Argentine “civilization” to northern Patagonia.[2]

In the first four chapters, however, we lack the problematization of the “Conquest of the Desert” as a historical construct, which scholars in Argentina have done for decades. In chapter 5, Walter Delrio and Pilar Pérez introduce this literature to the English-speaking audience and reconceptualize the “Conquest of the Desert” as a war that sought to disappear by assimilation, subjugation, or annihilation the indigenous presence in northern Patagonia. The authors aptly highlight the internal disparateness within state forces and policies, resulting in equally diverse response. While the authors have been working on such themes for nearly a decade, the chapter at hand explains how narratives of a victorious, finished, homogenous moment (a “conquest”) still loom large in present- day conversations of indigenous claims to land and reparations.[3]

In chapter 6, Jennie Daniels analyzes literary representations of the desert in Argentine literature. The author effectively synthesizes major works in four chronologies, concluding that the figure of the desert provided writers with a symbolic space to mark difference (civilization/barbarism, urban/rural, white/nonwhite). At heart, the figure of the desert remains a liminal space in literary production that revealed structures central to elites’ ideas of the Argentine nation, a paradox that Ernesto Livon- Grosman has also pointed out in his examination of travel literature, Geografías imaginarias: El relato de viaje y la construcción del espacio patagónico (2003).

In chapter 7, David Sheinin asks how the memory of the conquest underpinned military policy toward indigenous people, especially during the last dictatorship (1976-83). Multiple celebrations commemorated the centennial of the conquest, accompanied by publications that exalted the campaign of 1879. Sheinin purposely brings to the fore the frontier as a space that escaped modernization and where the government sought to advance the civilizing mission it perceived to have begun a hundred years earlier. Fellow Latin Americanists of dictatorship will recognize similar anxieties in other countries as well.

An experienced ethnographer, Ana Ramos, continues the examination of memory of the conquest in chapter 8, but this time through the lens of Mapuche oral tradition and collective texts nütram( ). Nütram are not only their contents but also their performance. Ramos argues that these traditions were disappeared from the national narrative of the conquest, silencing the experiences of captivity, enslavement, torture, and death. However, the nütram have survived for generations and informed present-day Mapuche political philosophies.

In the last chapter, Sarah Warren asks how the memory of the military campaign of 1879 appears in present-day Mapuche spatial epistemologies. To that end, she analyzes three maps of Mapuche territory (Wallmapu) published by Mapuche organizations. In these cartographic materials Warren recognizes toponymic and geographical markers that further revitalize Mapuche culture as a means to strengthen their territorial claims.

The volume has a clear unifying thread. However, its contributions as a whole and in each individual chapter seem more fragmented. While the introduction states that “this book adds meaningfully to scholarship on frontier, borderlands, and settler colonialism,” each chapter engages differently with these analytical lenses, if they do (p. 12). Particularly, I found puzzling the uneven use of “Conquest of the Desert” both as a shorthand periodization and as the title of the book, especially since it represents the narrative these authors sought to dismantle. As these chapters show, the “Conquest of the Desert” was not a conquest, and the desert was not empty.

Overall, this volume provides a good transdisciplinary introduction to the history of the genocide of 1879-85. In bringing this diversity of approaches to the same table of contents, Larson enables a conversation beyond the traditional chronological boundaries that typify Argentine scholarship. Additionally, each chapter provides succinct historical context, which undergraduates or anyone reading about northern Patagonia for the first time will find accessible.

Notes

[1]. Miguel Alberto Bartolomé, “Los pobladores del ‘desierto’: Genocidio, etnocidio y etnogénesis en la Argentina,”Cuadernos de Antropología Social, no. 17 (2003): https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/1809/180913909009.pdf; Pedro Navarro Floria, ed.,Paisajes del Progeso: La resignificación de la Patagonia Norte, 1880-1916 (Neuquén: Educo, 2007); Claudia Briones and Walter Delrio, “La ‘Conquista del Desierto’ desde perspetivas hegemónicas y subalternas,” RUNA, archivo para las ciencias del hombre 27 (2007): 23-48; Diego Escolar, Celia Claudia Salomon Tarquini, and Julio Esteban Vezub, “La ‘Campaña del Desierto’ (1870-1890): Notas para una crítica historiográfica,” in Guerras de la Historia Argentina, ed. Federico Lorenz (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 2015), 223-47; and Pilar María Victoria Pérez, “La Conquista del desierto y los estudios sobre genocidio: Recorridos, preguntas y debates,” La Conquista del desierto y los estudios sobre genocidio: Recorridos, preguntas y debates 27, no. 2 (2019): 24-51.

[2]. Irina Podgorny and Maria Margaret Lopes, El desierto en una vitrina: Museos e historia natural en la Argentina, 1810-1890 (Mexico City: Limusa, 2008); and Álvaro Fernández Bravo,El museo vacío: Acumulación primitiva, patrimonio cultural e identidades colectivas; Argentina y Brasil, 1880-1945 (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 2016).

[3]. Walter Delrio and Pilar Pérez, “Territorializaciones y prácticas estatales: Percepciones del espacio social luego de la Conquista del Desierto,” in Cultura y espacio: Araucanía-Norpatagonia, ed. Pedro Navarro Floria and Walter Delrio (S. C. de Bariloche: Universidad Nacional de Río Negro – Instituto de Investigaciones en Diversidad Cultural y Procesos de Cambio, 2011), 237-52.

Citation: María de los Ángeles Picone. Review of Larson, Carolyne R., ed.,The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. June, 2021. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55740

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.