Celina San Martín: Dispositivo archivo misional y política mimética. Una trayectoria mapuche-tehuelche en Santa Cruz, Argentina, a finales del siglo XIX
In this article, I reconstruct the history of two indigenous groups drawing on documents scattered across different archives, as well as on conversations with their descendants living today in the province of Santa Cruz, Argentina. In particular, I analyse the relationship that Pailan, a Mapuche leader, maintained with the Tehuelche chief Calacho in Puerto Santa Cruz from 1885 onwards. The reconstruction of this trajectory is carried out in reference to the “missionary archival apparatus” – a surveillance network that involved Salesian missionaries, state officials, settlers, and indigenous people in hierarchical and supportive positions. As a corollary to the functioning of this apparatus, the previous relations and regulations that the state maintained with the indigenous people were “put under erasure” and replaced by new political projects. However, within the folds of this apparatus, groups such as that of Pailan managed to resist and persist by deploying a kind of mimetic tactics. The general line of my argument aims at illuminating at a micro level the particularities of the so-called Conquest of the Desert that took place in Pampa and Patagonia from 1879 to 1900.
[Argentina, Mapuches, Tehuelches, Santa Cruz, missionary archival apparatus, Salesians]
