MORENO” AND ERIC BOMAN

A ONE HUNDRED YEARS´ HISTORY

Abstract

The settlement known as “El Moreno” has gone a long way throughout the 20th Century. Moreno is included in the Argentine territory consolidation during the Argentine National government. I was determined to explore and know all the possible resources for export, with to intention of incorporating this vast region into the national society, sponsoring a number of different specialities (agronomists, geologists, naturalists, archeologists, etc.) that in the last decades of the 19th Century, travelled in the Puna, such as Philipp (1860), Brakebush (1883), Holmeberg (1900), Boman (1901 y 1908) Von Rosen and others that were joined by government officials to see the situation in the ´Puna´. 
Cerri and Sanchez de Bustamante. Because of their contribution we can say that, some of them with greater descriptive than others, some of them true chroniclers due to the comprehensiveness and wealth of their stories, but all of them wrote reports that were about detailed observations that have come to us like a picture that shows us the landscape and societies they visited.
We have read the description carried out by Boman about this community at the turn of the Century. (1900) Boman says “There are many traces of a prehispanic population and documents which demonstrate that this place was permanentely inhabited from the begining of the Spanish conquest”. Because of all these it´s a very agreeable situation next to a fresh water stream, I cannot
doubt “El Moreno is “Tambo El Moreno de Matienzo” Boman also mentions in his work a number of details he was able to see while he was at “El Moreno”, there he saw the way Mrs Ana Sorich the owner of “El Moreno´s wife, treated the indians. That is to say that considering this report and investigating the so called ´evolution´? From their primitive state of bondage Boman found them to
becoming Argentine citizens, though marginal ones, to their current situation.
Nowadays “El Moreno” population is constituted by an urban settlement together with its rural surroundings that includes about eighty families. Nonetheless in this process of “growing urbanization of rural dwellers”, we have found there has also been a social phenomenon of citizens trying to recover their history. This has been produced because people have a new identity status, they want to reconstruct their aboriginal identity, expressed in the creation of an aborigenal organization “Sol de Mayo”, they get in contact with other communities as well as with the State through this organization. 
This research work is about the process developed in this period, experiences expressed by present actors and their present reflection on their recent past and their implications of the community’s present and future.