Silvia María Hirsch. Returning to the land, evoking the past, and sowing the future: Guaraní Indians and the formation of new rural communities in Northern Argentina.

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Returning to the land, evoking the past, and sowing the future: Guaraní Indians and the formation of new rural communities in Northern Argentina

SilviaMaríaHirsch

UNSAM Colloquium Life Configurations April 2-4, 2012 UNSAM Lujan, Buenos Aires

Indigenous peoples in Argentina have undergone a dramatic process of

marginalization, exploitation and invisibilization of their cultures and identities.

However, in the last three decades these groups have experienced a gradual

process of empowerment as a result of democratization, legislative reforms and

the development of indigenous organizations and leadership. This in turn has

allowed them to claim for their legal rights and demand assistance from the State

and its institutions.

Modernization has led to an unyielding process of urbanization whereby

indigenous peoples have lost access to their ancestral territory and to their

former ways of subsistence. Furthermore, urbanization is fraught with

overcrowding, with a loss of vital social space and a dismemberment of

communal forms of life. The process of land claims is deeply influenced by these

urban experiences, and is aimed at regaining control of their territory and building

new communities. In Northwestern Argentina, in the province of Salta, Guaraní

and Tapiete indigenous communities have undergone urbanization and lost

access to their ancestral lands for cultivation. However, many families have

continued to practice agriculture in a context of sustained pressure and

encroachment of their territoty, in a transitional habitat characterized by the

presence of agribusiness, oil and gas companies and private properties. But in

the last two decades settlement in unoccupied lands has intensified and

indigenous families have moved from urban to rural areas to built new

communities. In fact, they have begun a process of land claims in territories that

used to belong to them and in other lands which were not part of their ancestral

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territory, but which are available to settle and cultivate. These movements are

deeply rooted in the narratives and oral history of their ancestors and their own

notions of spatiality and nature.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the ways in which indigenous

processes of re-ruralization and territorialization are rooted in memories of the

past, involve changing the present and envisioning the future of new generations.

Oral histories and experiences of agriculture and nature are present in the

everyday lives of indigenous families. These narratives are intertwined with

native notions of freedom, autonomy, and self-reliance. The tensions inherent in

these processes- the imagined past, the lived present, and the projected future-

form a complex web of symbols, discourses and practices. Furthermore, this

paper addresses some of the following questions: In which ways do Guaraní and

Tapiete cultural configurations weave the past, present and future to foster the

creation of new communities? How is well-being at the individual and collective

level achieved amidst a context of exclusion, intense socio-cultural change and

external pressure?

Settlers of these new communities refer to a state of “tranquility” and

“contact with nature” as being part of their essence and grounding in the world.

Forming and building a new community entails a collective venture which cannot

endure without group consensus; it involves gathering people with a common

objective willing to sustain hardships and obstacles. This process is in dialogue

with the past, in fact it evokes memories and narratives of their ancestors who

almost a century ago migrated from southern Bolivia and from their rural

communities in Argentina to work in sugar-cane plantations of the region and

who also founded new settlements. The process of reterritorialization is

grounded on a notion of territory which includes productive, reproductive, spiritual

and political components which are part of the everyday life of indigenous

peoples (Gordillo 2011, Perico y Ribero 2002).

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Finally, in this paper I incorporate a gender perspective, whereby analysis of

women’s roles and participation in the process of community building exemplifies

the dynamic transformation of indigenous society and how the subaltern- in terms

of ethnicity and gender-reconfigure notions of agency and empowerment.

This paper focuses on indigenous families from urbanized communities that are

settling in rural areas in plots which range between 15 and 300 hectares. These

lands are surrounded by agribusiness, livestock farms, oil and gas refineries,

indigenous communities as well as non-Indian settlements. Northwest Argentina

is undergoing intensive land pressure, ecological changes, demographic growth,

and expansion of agriculture. Land claims and settlement in rural space have an

important political component and involve the struggle for recognition of the

indigenous people’s ethnic identity, citizenship rights, and their sense of

belonging to the nation (Gordillo 2011). The Tapiete and Guaraní Indians who

claim their lands and resettle in rural areas are basing their claims on their self-

recognition as indigenous peoples, and in so doing they are grounding their

claims on legal rights guaranteed by the argentine constitution.

In the first part of this paper I present a brief history of the settlement of

these two indigenous groups in communities of northwest Argentina, and

describe how the Tapiete and Guarani conceptualize notions of space and

territory. In the second part I analyze how oral narratives are reenacted in the

present to help construct discourses and practices linked to metaphors of the

land and nature. Finally, in the third part I address women’s participation in

constructing new communities and the circumstances that have allowed them to

become active and creative agents.

What lies at the core of the indigenous’ peoples distress in their lives in

urban settings is how these experiences clash with their own notions of spatiality

and how their memories unveil images of nature and well-being. The cases of

reterrriotrialization I examine in this paper have polysemic meanings in terms of

how the lands are occupied and signified. In some cases, the lands claimed by

these indigenous groups are rooted in an ancestral history because they were

inhabited and cultivated by them in previous times. In other cases these are new

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lands, there is no particular history connected to that portion of land, but the

connection operates at a symbolic and emotional level. In order words, these

lands and the nature in which they are embedded are a metonymy which

operates at a discoursive and experiential level, because land and nature are

engrained in the ways in which indigenous peoples experience space and well-

being.

In many cases the land that these social actors claim constitute small enclaves

surrounded by a diversity of social actors, enterprises and ventures. Some

authors refer to these contexts as “new rurality”, which involves the coexistence

of small and large producers, agribusiness, tourism, oil and gas companies,

peasants, rural workers, indigenous communities, and land invasions (Giarracca

2004). These rural areas to involve a multifuncionality of the use of space and

forms of livelihood. In other words, people resort to multiple strategies to sustain

their lives in these new environments. Hence, the settlers produce crops for their

subsistence and if they have surplus they sell them, but they also have

permanent and temporal jobs or receive government subsidies that allow them to

support their families.

Guaraníes y Tapietes: formation of communities in northwest Argentina The Guarani of Northern Argentina are also known in the ethnographic literature

as “chiriguanos”, but since the last three decades their self-denomination is

Guaraní. Although there is historical evidence that there were Guarani

settlements in northwest Argentina since the 18th century, the presence of

thousands of Guarani and of the Tapiete Indians as well, is the result of massive

migrations which began in the end of the 19th century and intensified during the

20th century. During the first 4 decades of the 20th century, thousands of Guaraní

and Tapiete Indians, among many other indigenous groups, migrated to the

sugar-cane plantations and farms of the provinces of Salta and Jujuy in search

for work. In addition, the Chaco war which took place between Bolivia and

Paraguay from 1932-1935 affected the lives of many indigenous peoples who

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were living in the zone of conflict and who were forced to leave their ancestral

communities. These migrations were sustained until the 1970’s and resulted in

the permanent settlement of thousands of Guarani and Tapiete in Argentina.

Gordillo (2011) refers to the identity of these Guaraní groups as a “diasporic

indigeneity’. Migration both historical and contemporary is part of the narratives

of these indigenous groups. The massive migrations to northern Argentina

activated an utopian imaginary of this new land which these groups called

“mbaporenda” the land where there is work”. Argentina thus became the land

that provides greater well-being, a sense of future, and that opens the possibility

of constructing new communities, amidst very different social political and

economic conditions (Nordenskiöld 1912, Metraux 1935, Hirsch 1989, 2006).

Hence, the memories of the Guaraní and Tapiete are two-fold and in two

stages, on the one hand memories of the past in Bolivia, in rural areas with

greater extensions of land, “traditional culture and use of native language”, the

place of origin and the place of the ancestors; and on the other hand, northern

Argentina, as a land more modernized, with loss of culture and language, but

with the possibilities of a better livelihood and a promise of a better future.

The idealized past evoked in the memories of both groups projects

essentialist notions of culture, for my interviewees the time they lived of the land,

closer to nature life was better, they were stronger, healthier and did not depend

as much on wage labor. Life in the countryside also provided a strengthening of

family and communal bonds, a space for the performance of communal rituals,

for the free use of their native tongue. These visions lie at the core of their ways

of reading the past and understanding the present.

And these memories are in tension with other memories of the past,

because the ideal past was a time of hardship as well, labor exploitation,

injustices, periods of “Ikaruai” hunger, lack of access to health and education.

The older generation of men and women have transmitted to their

children and grandchildren an oral history based on the importance of the land,

and the sense of rootedness, insisting in their narratives that their livelihood used

to be based on the practice of agriculture. Land involves toiling the soil but also

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living in an ample space. The Guarani and Tapiete, perceive the world as formed

by three concentric spheres the oka (patio) where social interactions take place;

the koo (fields) where the basic staples of the diet are planted and harvested;

and the kaa or bush, the space where animals and supernatural beings lives.

These three spheres are the integral realms of existence, they connect the

sphere of the supernatural, production and reproduction, and cultural and social

life. This is the physical space men and women cherish and yearn for.

“Antes vivíamos de la siembra”: new Tapiete settlements

The Tapietes are a group who has undergone a dramatic process of

sedentarization and urbanization. This group migrated from a large territory in

southern Bolivia where they lived from hunting, gathering and fishing and also

practiced horticulture. In the 1940’s and 50’s Tapiete families decide not to

return to Bolivia but to settle in Argentina, in the city of Tartagal. Initially they

lived in the center of the town, but they were gradually pushed to the periphery of

the city to where they are now located in a very small community composed of 4

blocks. Initially their community had space for their gardens, and they planted

their crops and raised some chickens and ducks, but in the 1980’s the community

was divided into small plots with no space left for their gardens. This abrupt

process of urbanization was a tremendously painful and dramatic experience, in

fact it constituted a turning point that let to greater dependency on wage labor

and contact with nature was beginning to be severed. However, many tapietes

continued interacting with the bush and nature. In fact they visited relatives who

live 350 km away, or walked a couple of kilometers to where they gathered wood,

collected plants for traditional medicine and honey.

During a fieldtrip in 2011 I was told about two new rural Tapiete

settlements. I first visited “Tapiete 4”, a small plot of 28 hectares in which 30

families are beginning to work the land and make their houses. I asked one of its

founders, Juan Vega, what were the motives to settle in this plot and he

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responded “ we can’t live there any longer there is no space, young people don’t

know what it used to be like, but we used to live from our crops, we have lot of

family, some have 8 or 10 children. Before the community was formed we lived

dispersed, and not crowded”.

A week after this visit Federico, another Tapiete told me that a group of his

relatives, mostly women, were cleaning 15 hectares to build houses and plant the

land, and mentioned the following: “its like starting over, its like starting to live

again, this gave me the energy to continue.” We both went to visit his aunt and

nieces while they were cleaning the land to built houses and plant their gardens. I

observed the enthusiasm which the women felt in this new collective project.

They named the plot “Koe piahu,” which means “New Dawn”. I observed a

group of 6 women cleaning the bush of this future new community. Miriam, one

of them, explained to me that her sisters didn’t know how to use a machete, so

she taught them, and remembered that when she was a child she used to

accompany her grandmother to plant and harvest in the garden they had next to

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their community. Miriam and her sisters are enthusiastic about this new project,

they are motivated with the idea of having more space to live, and in their words

“a project for the future.”

Searching for nature and tranquility: the development of new rural

settlements.

In the case of the Guaraní, the urbanized community called Cherenta,

exemplifies the multiple territorial displacements imposed on a group and the

forced process of relocation and urbanization. The inhabitants of Cherenta were

moved to their current community located 3 km from the centre of Tartagal, four

decades ago, and currently demographic growth, closeness to the city and the

lack of jobs have forced many people to search for temporal work outside the

community. This in turn led to a decrease and to certain extent abandonment of

agricultural practices. Some families began to feel the threat of overcrowding,

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the problems it generates in interpersonal and family relations, the constant

sound of blaring music, the presence of new social problems such as drug

consumption and alcoholism. All of these factors motivated a group of

approximately 30 families in 2007 to reoccupy land which used to be cultivated

by the elders located only 1 km away from Cherenta. These families cleared the

land, planted their crops, built precarious dwellings and named the community

“Tenta Ipïau,” or “Pueblo Nuevo” in Spanish. Some of these families decided to

settle permanently in this location, while others spent the day and return to sleep

in their houses in Cherenta.

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I noticed the significant presence of women who have moved with their

younger children and grandchildren. These women worked as domestic servants

for many years, and in their youth they accompanied their parents and husbands

to work in the region’s harvests. Their memories are marked by their low salaries,

extended hours away from their homes and children, and economic instability,

but they remember accompanying their grandparents to work in their fields, and

what this meant to them. These women have lived the larger part of their lives in

the town, and they had been distanced from rural work for many years. However,

their notion of space, of interpersonal relations and their sense of grounding in

the world, is in consonance with Guaraní notions of spatiality. The oka, patio, the

koo fields, are spaces they long for. The oka is the locus of social interaction, it

is where men and women meet to drink mate, prepare food, gossip, exchange

information, or simply share the afternoon with their family. This space is distant

from the overcrowded and noisy patios of their houses, it is distant from the

disagreements with neighbors; and there is no presence of drugs or alcohol.

Hence they feel the new communities restore tranquility and health as well as

Guarani forms of reciprocity.

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Conclusion Tapiete and guaraní men and women are part of the unstable workforce of

the region, they supplement their meager income with social subsidies provided

by the state. Women who decide to settle in these areas and form part of the

project of ruralization have a fundamental role in making this project viable. They

contribute with their social subsidies to the families economic sustenance and

they are providing the logistic support which involves the caretaking tasks of the

domestic sphere.

In conversations conducted the people they all referred to the emotional

well-being they feel in the rural space, the silence, the tranquility.

Juan Palavecino, a Tapiete who works as a butcher in town and is enthusiastically planning the fields in a rural community expressed the following: Being in the community is connecting to nature, because we are natural, this is a dead wall, it doesn’t have life, it protects us from the wind, heat, cold, that’s all. But there in nature, you can smell the flowers, you can hear the birds such as the charata, the parrots, its so natural that we need to connect to nature, and why? Because its our culture and more so because we are Indians. Because that comes from the roots, from the blood, I carry it in my blood.

In the new rural settlements the living conditions are difficult, the houses

are precarious, they lack running water and electricity, but the oka ( patio) is the

axis of indigenous social life, the space shared with family, friends, and neighbors

the space rooted in indigenous forms of family and community sociability. In the

cases analyzed in this paper, memories of the past generate an experience of

well-being and of future projects. The settlement in new communities involves

participation in assemblies, in the request for support to the municipality,

government offices and other institutions. To occupy these lands involves a

vision of the future, a sense of autonomy and the project of community building,

and in these processes women are active agents of collective construction.

Women provide the daily work not only of domestic reproduction, because they

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cook, clean, take care of the children, but they are also involved in taking care of

the domestic animals, in supporting their husbands, in contributing with their

social subsidies to make these projects viable. But women and men feel

profoundly identified with rural spaces, and they are transmitting these feelings

and experiences to their children and grandchildren.

Hence, women and men of diverse ages activate a project of community

building in spaces rooted in family histories, narrative and memories. The

process of reruralization here described is incipient, we are uncertain about its

longevity, whether these fragile spaces will endure the pressure of agribusiness,

oil and gas refineries, private landowners, and whether women will be able to

achieve greater political and economic power. But what I observe is a life

configuration which entails collective, communal and shared practices and

experiences grounded in history and memory, geared to the future.

Bibliography

Giarraca, Norma (2004) (2004). Introducción. América Latina, nuevas ruralidades, viejas y nuevas acciones colectivas. En publicacion: Ruralidades Latinoamericanas. Identidades y luchas sociales. CLACSO, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Gordillo, Gastón (2011) Longing for Elsewhere, Guaraní Reterrritorializations. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53 (4) 855-881. Hirsch, Silvia (2006) El pueblo tapiete de Argentina, historia y cultura. Instituto de Lingüística, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Perico y Ribero (2002) Nueva Ruralidad Visión del territorio en América Latina y el Caribe. Instituto Internamericano de Cooperación para la Agricultura.

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