Confinamiento, deportación y bautismos: misiones salesianas y grupos originarios en la costa del Río Negro (1883-1890)

Abstract

By the mid 1880s. once the so-called “Conquest of the Desert" was formally concluded, several native groups of Norpatagonia were confined to the coasts of the Negro river. Temporary as it was, this confinement has to be seen as a critical phase in a process of structural subordination that involved both the appropriation of indigenous land and labor force, and the symbolic incorporation of indigenes into the "national community" as internal others. While the various agencies that worked out the indigenous incorporation into the nation-state defined "the national community" in different ways, evangelic campaigns by missionaries of the San Francisco de Sales Company were crucial to direct new communalization processes that were taking place among confined groups. In this case, the indigenous incorporation at the new social order was defined by the concept of "parish”, which overlapped only partially with the "argentine-indigenous-citizen" model proposed by state agencies. This paper thus analyzes missionary and indigenous strategies of (un)marking that took place during this period of confinement, for both are seen as crucial practices to understand the broader process of indigenous subordination.