a trip and the space in between

I am not very productive in terms of posts, so here goes a whole section from a paper i am deleting. I still believe in the argument but was rightly criticized I do not present enough evidence. I believe I will be able to make the case when I finish and organize new fieldwork "data". Meanwhile I keep on writing and wishing to get something decent.


The trip of the urban Toba school teachers to the rural area described in the initial vignette, resulted from an invitation by rural intercultural schoolteachers to attend a meeting in their village. The village was undergoing a conflict with the local school because Toba kids going to the school were having serious learning problems and they had expressed bad treatment from the “white” teachers. The community had demanded the removal of the head of the school, and requested the incorporation of the Toba intercultural teachers to the school. An NGO was supporting this claim with a project to develop materials and methodologies in intercultural education. This NGO had helped organizing the meeting and was the one organizing the transportation of people.
The trip was a positive statement of the connection of urban schoolteachers with their colleagues in the rural village. As a response to a community conflict, it presented a collectivity that had specific claims to make to the state functionaries. Making the encounter in the village was a statement of the possibility of meeting in a rural area, in contrast to the general tendency to hold these types of meetings in cities. In this section I analyze the way this trip highlighted a difference between rural and urban Tobas, the way the places become redefine , and the frictions emerging as people traverse the limits of their “home” location.
From my first arrival in the neighborhood I was impressed to see how much urban Toba travelled, against my idea that as urban poor they would have limited options to do so. The reasons for travelling vary from attending a meeting or pressing demands on a government agency, to visiting relatives, and selling handicrafts. Usually people combine these reasons; for example, they extend a stay after a meeting to visit relatives. They take advantage of the organized trips to spread and reinforce their relations with relatives or to get to know new acquaintances.
People traveling on the bus were mostly young, in their twenties and thirties, most of whom had been born in the city or migrated as children and lived most of their lives there. In the present urban youth share the notion of progress linked to the city but they also have very articulated claims about the forms of exclusion they are subjected to as indigenous. They recognize themselves as from a neighborhood but they highlight that they have specific indigenous knowledge and habits, they know how to build handicrafts and how to find materials for them in the bush. The older people on the bus were some of the ones I had interviewed about their migratory experience; they call themselves first “settlers” distinguishing from migrants of a latter period and the youth.
During the meeting I was surprised to see how both groups were suddenly identifying themselves as urban and contrasted their experience with the experience of people in the village. This trip in contrast with the movements back and forth before the moment of settling in the city, was one in which people living in the neighborhood arranged their schedules to go to a meeting and then return at an established moment to go back to work and to their other occupations. My surprise was that even when people in the neighborhood tended to present themselves as indigenous coming from the countryside, while they were in the city they were speaking as urban dwellers. So, while urban Toba in the city center stressed their marginality from the city and presented themselves as indigenous artisans, in the rural area they expressed detachment from the rural way of life, that they lack of natural environments like those close to the village and that they hardly ever eat bush food. The contrast with the village makes the people from the city neighborhood define themselves as urban.
In addition, while we were on the muddy roads trying to get back to the paved road people talked about how hard it is to live in the country, where you cannot move if there is bad weather. The expressions of concern contributed to shape a sharp contrast between the place of the bus accident, the villages and the neighborhood. For instance, when the bus stopped a young teacher, who is fond of going to the nearby bushes to collect handicraft material, she expressed that she couldn’t get wet because she gets sick easily and wouldn’t make it to work. With this concern she showed that her urban job is not compatible with the uncertainty of travel to a village. The anxiety about not getting back home and being stuck in the middle of the countryside grew with the technical difficulties to fix the bus, the impossibility to buy food. We perceived the place we were stuck with the bus as a “nowhere” place that shaped the discontinuity between the village and the city.

In a way this site as a “nowhere” seems to fit the description of travel of Victor Turner (1974) that has been reconsidered for many analyses of contemporary tourism. He analyzes religious pilgrimages and finds them as “liminal” process in which community ties are reinforced, forms of solidarity with strangers (and fellow-travelers) take place. However it is still an interesting question of how the spaces traversed become and are regarded as unspecific locations by travelers. Michel de Certeau (1984) describes a trip on a train, as an experience that gives the illusion of a connection to a place while it in fact abstracts it. He argues that looking through a window on a mobile train turns what is outside into a visual landscape. The window separates inside and outside, and the acceleration of the speed of travel prevents a relation between traveler and what is being passed.
This estrangement acquires a particular density in the case of the Tobas who have the historical experience of having been violently detached from those lands. Even when they were not the people to confront the Argentinean army, they remember their grandparents talking about the war and from that and combine them with their own experiences of displacement making this past their own, they would recognize features of the road and be oriented most of the time. What we were looking out of the bus window as a rural landscape some minutes before was after the bus stopped, somewhere out of which everyone was trying to escape.
But the disconnection from the landscape is not just some generic form of detachment from rural environment. The lack of connection with the landscape is part of the expropriation of these lands from the indigenous groups. A century ago, the Tobas had access to the fastest means of transportation, the horse, and could move around the territory with ease while squads of the Argentinean Army got lost, stuck in the mud and feared the bush (see Luna Olmos 1905). The decisive military campaign of General Victorica subjected indigenous groups not just by occupying their territory, but also as it expropriated all indigenous horses and prevented movement (Fuscaldo 1988). Thus when the older men on the bus, fond of being hunters, improvised a camp under nearby trees and started telling stories about hunting experiences, they transformed that place into “monte” (bush). In a way the action of making a camp reclaimed that “nowhere” space as indigenous. It was an active assertion of what some of those men would say to me in other contexts that “before the fencings everything was a free bush where we moved around”. This unexpected stop was a moment in which older people conveyed a collective historical experience to younger Tobas.
In sum, the trip reconstituted the places and the subjects belonging to them. The Tobas living in the city become “urban” as they contrast their habits with those of relatives in the village. The accident in the road emphasizes the contrast between country and city, as it marks the uneasy connections of one to the other. The unpredictable nature of the trip sets a big obstacle for teachers who now have to comply the demands of a strict labor regime and receive sanctions when they are absent from work. The difficulties materialized in the accident generate a sense of distance between the places. The frictions of this trip remind us that movement is never, as a non space ( Auge 1995). Travelers do enter a network of specific relations during a trip, and relate even if only visually, thus contributing to shaping space.
Moreover, the incident reminds us that movement is directed and coordinated from positions of power. The fact that the bus was stopped by its incapacity to advance on a muddy road may be regarded as a natural accident: bad weather caused a muddy road. However the fact that this particular village remains disconnected from a paved network of roads, that there is no public or private transport connecting the village, and even the anxiety of the bus driver, are the dimensions of a spatialization of power. Power resides not only in policing the limits of a territory but in controlling the movement of people in it. This reminds us of Virilio’s claim that power is “less a matter of occupying a given building than on holding the streets” (1986, 4). He argues that the key element in the development of state power is to control movement and their speed. Out of Virilio’s ideas we can consider that the remoteness and bad routes that connect the indigenous village is in fact a restriction in the access to speedy means of transportation and communication.
The difficulty of the trip is also a reminder that the acceleration of time and the compression of space for some imply the slowing down and isolation of others (Massey 1994). The state of the roads to the village creates spatial marginalization because they restrict the capacity to move. Urban Tobas have consciously attempted to avoid this form of marginality by moving to the city. The fact that difference is shaped not just in chains of meanings (Hall 1996), but shaped in the embodied experience of people and contested through struggles over place is an idea suggested by Laurence Grossberg (1992). It allows us to think how subjectivities are shaped by their capacity to access to forms of moving in space and reshape them.
In the next section I turn to a last form of mobility, a form in which Tobas also make an active occupation of space.