GastÓn R. Gordillo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is coauthor of El rÍo y la frontera: movilizaciones aborÍgenes, obras pÚblicas y mercosur en el Pilcomayo.

Landscapes of Devils

Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean ChacoBy Gaston R. Gordillo

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2005 Gaston R. Gordillo
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822333807

Chapter One

Landmarks of Memory

No space ever vanishes utterly, leaving no trace. -Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

When I lived among the Toba, people conjured in their narratives, first, the tangible places they experienced on a regular basis: their hamlets, the bush, the marshes, and the nearby village of Pozo deMaza. They also referred to places located farther away but regularly intertwined with their practices: the lands across the marshes, the town of Ingeniero Juarez (60 kilometers to the southwest), and the farms in Salta where many men and women migrate for work (over 300 kilometers away). Yet this mapping was permanently enmeshed in the memory of sites that have disappeared from their direct experience: to the west, the sugar plantations and in particular San Martin del Tabacal, and within their local geography the places that have been physically erased by history: the grasslands, the Pilcomayo River, and the Anglican mission. All these places, past and present, are tightly interwoven in local practices through memory. When Henri Lefebvre (1991:164) wrote that no space vanishes without leaving traces, he was thinking more about physical marks than about traces left in memory. In this chapter, I explore how both dimensions intersect: that is, first, how the current layout of places such as the bush, the marshlands, or the farms are marked by the spatial sediment left on them by past geographies and, second, how these marks foster memories of landscape transformations. I examine these processes with the aim of showing the deep historicity of these places, exposing the history behind their current configuration, and undermining their deceptive appearance of fixity, sharing Hugh Raffles’s point: “It is the impression of stasis that beguiles. They may look secure, but landscapes are always in motion, always in process” (2002:34). I map these landscapes in motion by focusing on how their current layout has been transformed by labor and social relations, for, as Lefebvre argues, “social relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself ” (1991:129).

This chapter is structured as a journey that begins in the Chaco interior and ends at the foot of the first Andean ranges in San Martin del Tabacal. Since I concentrate on the major changes that affected each place in the twentieth century, I temporarily leave aside the relations that produced these places in tension with each other. Those relationships are the object of the rest of the book, where I examine these locales in detail, dismember them, and then rearticulate them in their multiple interconnections. The villages are our starting point.

The Hamlets

When entering a Toba village, usually arriving by bicycle from another village, I often felt it was hard to tell where the bush ended and the village outskirts began. I would first see a rancho (adobe dwelling) partially hidden by vegetation, then another one equally obscured by trees and bushes, and the trail would gradually lead me to a clearing occupied by more visible and irregularly distributed clusters of adobes. In the late 1990s the Toba lived in twelve hamlets that congregated one, two, or more exogamous webs of extended families distributed in matrilocal households. Most villages comprised less than 100 people but one held about 600. In the largest villages, households are scattered around an adobe church, a dispensary, a primary school, and a building (usually used for storage) of the Instituto de Comunidades Aborigenes (ICA), the provincial agency of indigenous affairs. Reflecting the incipient class differentiation recently created by public-sector employment, brick houses with corrugated iron roofs, where leaders and state employees live, usually occupy the village core and the straw and adobe ranchos of those who lack a stable income are scattered around them.

In casual conversations, many people point out that a few decades earlier those villages did not exist. Even though in the past people roamed those lands through hunting and gathering expeditions, they had their hamlets ten to twenty kilometers farther north, along the banks of the Pilcomayo River. Large floods produced this displacement early in 1975 by destroying those villages and forcing people to move to their current location. Many remember that the old villages by the river bore no marks of government agencies: state schools, dispensaries, or ICA buildings did not exist and people lived in relatively egalitarian places where everybody, even leaders, dwelled in ranchos. This configuration was tightly connected with other places washed away by the floods: the Anglican mission station and Sombrero Negro, a Criollo village two kilometers upstream.

Sombrero Negro was the main site of state presence in the area. Yet as part of the legacy of the violence I examine in chapter 3, the Anglican station immersed most Toba within a sphere of missionary influence that partially excluded state intervention. In 1996 Omar, a man in his late fifties, remembered the differences between Sombrero Negro and the old mission: “In Sombrero Negro there was a store, a gendarmeria post [military border police], a police post. There was also a school, a government school. But Toba kids didn’t go there. They didn’t go. They always went to the mission school. They didn’t know the state school. They didn’t know it. But now it seems no kid knows the mission school.” Omar shed light on the spatial differentiation marked in those days by missionary presence. Memories like this also define current villages, immersed within the sphere of influence of state agencies, by their contrast with the patterns that shaped local practices until the mid-1970s.

The recent salience of trabajo (work) is another factor marking differences between current and past villages. Under the category “work,” people include agriculture, herding, craftsmanship, seasonal wage labor, and most prominently public-sector employment. People define trabajo in opposition to marisca, which refers to hunting, fishing, and gathering of wild fruits and honey, to the point that most see “foraging” and “work” as mutually exclusive practices. Highly valued as a source of commodities, trabajo implies for most Toba a responsibility, regularity, and discipline relatively absent in marisca. This distinction is grounded in their experience of labor migration and has spatial dimensions equally informed by memory. People remember that in their old hamlets on the river everybody lived off marisca and that “work”-especially jobs in state agencies- emerged as a defining feature of their villages only in the late 1980s.

The consolidation of villages as places of trabajo involves, first, domestic practices conducted by women. Handicraft production-wool tapestry and handbags made of chaguar fiber (Bromelia hieronymi)-is the most visible female “work” within the household. Even though crafts have become meager and irregular sources of income, this practice is an important marker of female identity, to the point that women and men alike refer to it as “women’s work.” Women are also in charge of herding sheep and goats in the hamlets and their immediate surroundings. The soil erosion caused by goats, which leave a barren soil devoid of grass and shrubs, is one of the villages’ distinctive spatial marks.

For men, jobs granted by state agencies are the most highly valued type of trabajo. These jobs have turned the largest villages into places increasingly fractured by social hierarchies, which are spearheaded by elected representatives in the Pozo de Maza municipality and delegates to the ICA and (less prominently) skilled public-sector employees such as teaching assistants, nurses, and midwives. These jobs are turning these households into an indigenous petite-bourgeoisie with distinctive interests and, in a few cases, entrepreneurial spirit. Some leaders have invested in hundreds of goats and sheep and, most important, cattle, a particularly controversial commodity because it is the symbol of settler identity. As a recent expression of this differentiation, some leaders have begun hiring relatives or settlers to look after their animals. This means that these leaders are creating a class cleavage not only through their jobs but also through the investment of their salaries in petty commodity production.

Most Toba read the strains created by this differentiation through the language of reciprocity, for they see wealth accumulation as an infringement of the sharing values that define them as Aborigenes, a marker of identity that merges (as we shall see) ethnicity with conditions of poverty. Criticism of well-off leaders for their “stinginess” is often accompanied by memories of an egalitarian past near the river, when it was unthinkable that a leader owned cattle. Ordinary people often challenge this differentiation by putting pressure on their leaders to redistribute part of their resources through patterns of generalized reciprocity (Gordillo 1994; see also Lee 1979, 1988, 2003). Thus, many submit their leaders’ behavior to permanent scrutiny and pay regular “visits” to their households to demand foodstuffs. This social pressure affects the spatial configuration of villages, turning better-off households into public places in which ordinary people partially contain the tendency to produce a more individualized and self-enclosed space. These forms of contention have spatial implications of a different sort. Even though they are contested places, villages are the site of the leaders’ and public-sector employees’ power and resources. People living in poverty base their livelihood elsewhere, at a place they actively defend as a collectively owned space.

The Bush

I left the village on a borrowed bicycle early in the morning, heading to a hamlet located ten kilometers away, where several men were waiting for me to begin a several-day hunting expedition. The bicycle first took me to the narrow trail that starts winding down through the relatively open bush of the village surroundings. The ground was relatively free of vegetation, except for the cacti and algarrobo trees that were all around me. After a few minutes, the bush became thicker and the trail carved a path through a mass of vegetation. A cow, roaming freely in the bush as cattle do in the region, saw me coming and moved languidly to one side of the path. The trail was now full of bumps, many of them the product of footprints left by cattle on hardened mud. After navigating for twenty minutes through that extension of thick bush, I reached la picada, a perfectly straight trail opened for oil exploration in the 1980s by the then state-owned, now privatized, oil company YPF (Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales). Five to six meters wide and able to accommodate a pickup truck, la picada looks like a giant cut made in the heart of the bush, extending with exasperating precision toward its dissolution on the horizon. As I entered la picada and headed north toward the marshes, I felt immersed in a world primarily defined by three colors: the whitish dust of the trail, the blue of the morning sky, and that presence in dark tones of green that engulfed everything on the sides: the bush.

The trails that cut through the region and the encounters with cattle are permanent reminders that the Toba are not the only actors making use of the bush and that this place is deeply marked by the presence of Criollo settlers and state agencies. Toba memories often contrast this spatial configuration with the times when those lands were grasslands, nonaGa or campo, where only Aborigenes lived. Those were the open landscapes roamed by the yagaikipi, the ancient ones (los antiguos), as most Toba call their non-Christian ancestors in contrast to themselves, the new ones (dalaGaikpi). In 1996, Enrique, a man in his fifties, was remembering the times of the ancient ones and told me, pointing to the vegetation that began a few meters from his household: “This isn’t like it was before. All this is dense bush now. But they say that before, there was no bush…. Before, there were no cows, there were no Criollos, there were no roads. And all this was open country. There was thick bush only at the edge of the grasslands. If you wanted to eat ostrich [Rhea americana], you chased them galloping on horseback with boleadoras [throwing balls].” Like many other Toba, Enrique was defining the savannas of yesteryear by the absence of some of the markers that characterize the bush today: cattle, Criollos, and roads. And he remembered the nonaGa by evoking a practice defined by movement and velocity, ostrich hunting on horseback, which is currently impossible to re-create in the bush.

In the early twentieth century, grasslands covered both banks of the Pilcomayo River and stretched, intertwined with patches of bush, fifteen to twenty kilometers into the hinterland. The bush dominated the landscape only in the Chaco interior. According to old people, those grasslands had been created by a dole alo (big fire), a mythical fire forced the first ancient ones to hide underground. At the turn of the century, the grasslands were indeed the product of fires set by the Toba and other indigenous groups to send messages, hunt, and as a weapon in warfare. Those fires reproduced wide areas of open country, halted the growth of trees, and pushed forests into the hinterland (Morello and Saravia Toledo 1959:18; Morello 1970:37).

The first Bolivian and Argentinean explorers in the area marveled at the sight of those grasslands, which they saw as full of potential for cattle herding. Looking for pastures for their cattle, the first Criollo settlers arrived on the Pilcomayo in 1902 and founded Colonia Buenaventura, 150 kilometers upstream from Toba territory. The Criollo colonization brought decisive landscape transformations. Suffering land encroachment and military reprisals, indigenous groups stopped making fires. Cattle depleted the grass and began eating wild fruits and spreading tree seeds (through their feces) over wide territories. As a result, in a few years trees were growing in areas formerly covered with prairies (Morello and Saravia Toledo 1959:20, 76-77; Morello 1970:34, 39). By the 1920s, the social changes brought by the settlers and by the military defeat of indigenous groups were having profound spatial implications; they were creating a radically different landscape of monte and overgrazed strips of sandy soil. As the Criollos moved with their cattle downstream, this landscape transformation reached Toba territory. By 1939, grasslands had mostly disappeared from their lands and had become part of a collective memory. That year the wife of an Anglican missionary living among the Toba wrote: “The old Indians remember when all this area was subtropical grassland without trees-they could see for miles across the flat land” (D. Tebboth 1989:68).

In the 1990s, memories of the grasslands regularly informed Toba experiences of the bush, yet in contradictory ways. During my first fieldwork in 1987, I was surprised to hear many people refer to the landscape that surrounded us as nonaGa, “open country,” when all I could see around us was a pretty convincing bush. I soon learned why people used that term. The bush surrounding that particular village was not as thick as in other areas and this relative openness (hard to decipher for urban eyes) indicated that decades earlier those areas had indeed been open country. I also noticed that people often reserved the term “bush” (viaq, monte) to refer to the thickest and oldest sections of forest, which form a dense ensemble of trees and weeds and are also called “large bush,” viaq adaik (see figures 5 and 6). It took me a while to train my gaze and be able to distinguish the viaq adaik from the more open sections of bush and to understand how the distinction between the two is soaked in memory. Because of the burden of old geographies in their memory, many Toba use the term “bush” and “open country” as echoes that, reverberating from the past, project themselves onto the present as if unaware that the present is a different place. And this particular fusion of language, space, and memory stresses the continuity of past landscapes into the present.

Continues…
Excerpted from Landscapes of Devilsby Gaston R. Gordillo Copyright © 2005 by Gaston R. Gordillo. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.