nuevo intento

aca estoy tratando de ordenar la perspectiva de mi trabajo por enesima vez en este anio [no hay enies aca] y medio. esta vez para un proyecto casi sin teoria, que me obliga a tratar al menos de sintetizar todo al maximo. bueno y va con un enfasis importante en lo urbano como requicito.


This research will be structured around three main themes: spatial mobility, urban marginality (), subaltern alterities ( ). To this terms that define the field of my research there are a series of associated concepts: circular migration and rural cosmopolitanism, urban segregation, urban indigeneity ()


While many initial studies of globalizations emphasised the encrease of mobility as a result of flow of capital, travel, labour migrations, and the growing circulation of goods and communications (Harvey, Appadurai) it has been also pointed to the fact that mobility is not equally accessible to all social groups (Massey, Urry, Creswell). This does not only mean that some locations that may have been highly communicated by the circulation of trains are now isolated, but also has been dramatically manifested in the face of Katrina hurricane and the fact that most refugees where people who did not own a car as all collective transportation fail to provide an escape form the city. This research will thus consider the way the Tobas use the available transportation system in order to make their trips, it will consider the way this travels are made and experienced and the way they reshape their experience of places.


I will follow Gidwani and Sivarakrishnan (year)proposition of studying the role of circular migrations (to the cities and back to the rural areas) as constituting a type of “rural cosmopolitanisms”, a term the authors use to refer to the groups of people who have a “cultural competence” and skills form different rural and urban locations. This is a concept that can be used to think the effects of travelling back to the communities and the tension between the Tobas’ capacity to make themselves a place in the city but also the exclusion that results in the stigmatization of them as rural, backward.

Urban Marginality has been a focus of concern in social sciences since the opening of the century. While initial lines of inquiry looked to marginality as a negative outcome of modernization that has to be corrected and eradicated (ie Simmel?), a contrastive perspectives have celebrated the urban peripheries as sites of resisting communal life in the fase of individualization and alienation of big metropolis (ie W Foote). In response to both perspectives have argued that marginality is a complicated term as it masks the fact that social polarization is no just an unexpected outcome but in fact the existence of a subordinated and impoverished population provide cheap and always available workfoce that allows higher levels of accumulation (ulf). Thus many authors point to the need of understanding the structural relation of exploitation for which the existence of such inequalities is functional. In the last years such perspective was challenged in the face that it is not always possible of talking of a functionality of such sectors, as in many cases cities deindustrialization and the huge retraction of labour market has excluded whole sectors altogether (ie Waquant, Caldeira). If the forms of marginalization vary, ranging from Chicago ghettos to French banlieue, and Brazilian favelas, the localization of sections excluded from dominant forms of politics and sociality is a general pattern of contemporary cities.

To this perspective studies of colonization and decolonization and focusing the making of race and ethnic difference as way of inscribing systems of inequality of exclusion have contributed to show how process of racial and ethnic segregation were constitutive of the creation of cities. These works show how some of colonial settlements where sites of coexistence and exchange between different groups (indigenous, settlers, merchants, among others) that where then made into locations of white supremacy by defining racially and ethnically different groups as inferior “others” (Mawani, Kuppinger, Bashford).

This project will explore the tension between marginality resulting form a process of differentiation and segregation that has defined indigenous as an “other” and “new inhabitants”, from the city’s “normal citizens”, and their participation in the formation, and the ongoing history of coexistence within the city (and of the Argentinean nation at large).

Finally As post colonial studies have largely analyzed the large sector of colonized populations were mostly excluded from the field of dominant politics, and not considered full citizens. This “remaining” subaltern sector constitute a field of partial independence in which politics and sociality have its particular forms as it is excluded form political and symbolic representation (Chakrabarty, Spivak). This difference was constituted not just by distinguishing groups but also by defining different humanities and inscribing it into people’s bodies through racial ideologies as well as by spatially re-localizing those groups. Many researchers have showed that these processes of excluding and dominating non white others was part of the process of constitution of white supremacy, and a “dark side” of the foundational ideas of modernity that restricted “freedom and equality” to the fully human, civilized whites Europeans (Gilroy, Goldberg, Mignolo).

Urban Indigenous situation on Argentina is linked to long trajectory of struggles for political recognition, resulting from a long process of colonization, in which the indigenous people and culture, unlike other Latinamerican countries, were negated as a part of the national identity. This project situates within the frame that consideres that the particularity of contemporary indigenous people is having been colonized, and displaced in their own lands, in contrast to other ethnicities. If the state project of indigenous transformation into workers and citizens was never fully achieved, to the economic and political marginalization experienced in rural communities, the advancement of the agricultural frontier in the 1960-70, and the mechanization of tasks for which Tobas were employed, generated a great pressure that resulted in big migrations to cities in the Chaco and then outside the region (mostly Rosario, Santa Fe, Buenos Aires). If the maintaining of connections to rural areas is a characteristic many urban indigenous around the world share (Kishagami, Peters, Fogel Chance), one particularity of the Tobas is that rather than disperse in the margins of the cities, they have formed urban neighbourhoods in the cities to which they have collectively migrated. The concentration of Toba population on a city (and nation) that imagines itself as totally white – constituted European descendant puts into manifest a the social diversity that rather than being recognized is excluded from the way portenios present themselves (Guano)

I will thus explore the way tobas are constituted as a subaltern other, in a position shared with other subaltern groups (as, for example, migrants form neighbouring countries), but that this position does not erase the particularity of being a group colonized in their own territory. Indigenous then challenges both the dominant imagination of a white city and simplistic formulas of multiculturality that deny the complex mechanisms of exclusion to which indigenous people (and other marginalized groups) have been subjected.