The Dispute over Territory During National and Provincial State Formation: The Battle of Quera and the Demonization of Indigenous Peoples

Abstract

The categorizations used by elites and the government regarding Indigenous claims in the Jujuy highlands during the latter half of the nineteenth century, which triggered the Battles of Abra de la Cruz and Quera, gave rise to a series of arguments and justificatory discourses concerning the actions that the provincial and national states deployed against the insurgent Indigenous populations. This contributed to their subjugation and compulsory incorporation into the project of nationalization and territorial and cultural homogenization, accompanying the process of configuration of Argentine “national” identity.

As part of an interdisciplinary research project entitled “Social Memory, Identity, and Resistance: The Indigenous Question in the Puna of Jujuy in the Process of Nation-State Formation (Puna Campaign, 1874–1875),” we set out to analyze the process by which Indigenous territorial claims were demonized in that context. On the basis of primary and secondary sources, we recorded the use of the category communists to refer to those who collectively claimed ancestral lands. This process of resignification, carried out by the landowning elite with regard to the territorial claim, associated traits attributed to the Indigenous, the exotic, and the dangerous with communal ideology and the European political context.

The interviews conducted show, among other results, the persistence and resignification in memory of the circumstances surrounding the defeat of the rebels, as well as tensions among different interpretations of the events, sustained by the mantle of silence that lasted for a century. At present, different Indigenous activist organizations seek to revitalize memory in relation to projects of territorial strengthening.