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My research analyzes how indigenous mobility in between urban neighbourhoods rural areas in the Argentine Chaco, a lowland area to the north of the country, are a response to state-imposed spatial reconfigurations that are part of an ongoing process of colonization. This process has involved violent state appropriation of indigenous’ lands, and their confinement to mission stations and reservation within economically marginal lands, and the creation of extensive land properties owned by a small national elite. If the indigenous were first incorporated as cheep (and even “free”) labour force, they are now mostly unemployed and, in the rural areas, facing the constraints to growing population, the lack of paid jobs, the crisis of the state as provider of social services and paid jobs, as well as the advancement of neoliberal forms of exploitations over previous Toba hunting and gathering fields.
In this context my project explores how the Toba respond to these contradictions, by constantly moving between and re-making a variety of different places: their own urban neighbourhoods; other parts of the city including the city centre; rural communities; and the surrounding bush.
My central hypothesis is that Toba spatial mobility is part of a strategy to cope with a socioeconomic exclusion that results form the inscription of difference in place. I ask how their movement changes the production of ethnic differences in relation to other systems of inequality. What transformations do these trips imply for their production of and experience in places? I suggest that their repeated geographical displacements destabilize the fixed categories of the dominant spatialization of difference which assumes that indigenous people belong in rural areas. To develop this hypothesis, I examine the particular recreation of Toba embodied identities within differential contexts and in the face of: 1) local, regional and national state formations; 2) other lines of differentiation that interpelate them in class, gender, and racial terms; and 3) in what types of located practices and in which social contexts is indigenous alterity produced and what type of space results from their subordination.
The Toba live throughout the Chaco region, in both urban neighbourhoods and rural villages. Many have also migrated to some of the country’s larger metropolises, resulting in the formation of urban Toba neighbourhoods elsewhere in the country, because of thanks to successful land claims well outside of the group’s “traditional” territory. If contemporary indigenous policies, fostered by an international context of multiculturalist recognition, have facilitated processes of ethnic identification, the existence of Toba urban neighbourhoods is not a simple consequence of this context (Carrasco 2000, Briones 2005). Rather the politics of indigenous recognition developed at the international level, and influencing the Argentinean mainly by the generation of development programs particularly dedicated for indigenous people, and made effective through the transference of important funds to the national, provincial and private sectors (Lorenzetti 2007, Lorenzetti y Lenton 2005). However indigenous politics had been opened in Argentina before the constitution of this international arena, it was Formosa, a province in the Chaco Region that contains half of the Toba population, the first province to have indigenous constitutional recognition and legislation on the area. If the multilateral and international agencies have contribute to shape the possibilities available for people who recognize themselves as indigenous, one cannot state that they were a central motor of this type of articulation as it has happened in other contexts (se for example Li 2003, Tsing 2005), nor can we claim that the identifications made available for the Toba are a type of globalized identities that find its local subjects. Contrarily it is necessary to locate these identities as resulting form long processes of colonization and which have effected particular social trajectories that have generated diverging and converging situations of subordination, from which people have positioned and produced a particular political arena.
Movements between these diverse communities are very common (Tamagno 2001, Vasquez 1991), yet little has been said about how they contribute to shaping Toba production of localized identities, and how this mobility reconfigures the spacialization of power relations. These trips are not necessarily permanent migrations, but are more usually “visits” undertaken for instance to meet up with relatives or to avoid political conflicts at "home." It cannot either be claimed that this movements result from the recreation of a hunter-gatherer “ethos” as some authors have claimed (Miller, Von ), as it has been extensively demonstrated the way the hunter gatherer system was forever transformed as a result of colonization (see Gordillo 2005). If there are traditional forms of knowledge associated to particular locations in the Chaco, it would be misleading to consider that movement is motivated by a nomadic tendency to travel remained unaffected by the multiple transformations of their colonization. The Tobas themselves recognize other motivations as the cause of their will to live in the city (as consumption, the possibility to progress, paid jobs, among others)
Although there is a strong sense among the Toba that the city is the site of “progress” (Vivaldi 2007), this is not the only directionality of their movements rather, they weave a complex net of interconnected spatial trajectories between city and country but also between different urban barrios and different location in the rural areas including Toba villages but also, for example, cotton plantations.
My project’s major fieldwork will consist of twelve months of research. I will use a multisided ethnography in one neighbourhood in Buenos Aires (the capital city of Argentina around 1000 kms far form the Chaco region) and the places people travel to from that location: mainly rural communities and areas in the eastern Chaco and Formosa Provinces. I will base my work in this neighbourhood and I will travel with the people back to the Chaco. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews, I will reconstruct the trajectories of the people that have migrated to these places and their experiences of travel (Pratt 1992, Creswell 2006, Tsing 2005). I will also document the place-making that results from their daily movements between neighbourhoods, regular trips between city, village, and bush, or more occasional movements between cities. While staying in the Chaco with urban tobas in their visits to the rural areas, I will search to explore how people who have not travelled out of the village relate to the travel experience and evocation of distant places of the visitors and how this reshape the place of the villages as the constellation of stories so far.
I search to do this by way of the analysis of the experiences of the people who are shaped by these forces and who also subvert them. In a context of widespread social mobilization against entrenched neoliberal policies in Argentina, the Toba’s subtle political practices both show ways in which subordinate groups might escape state domination and social stigmatization, and also offer a strong case for further analyzing the effects of colonial and neo-colonial violence on the formation of social subjectivities.