The "Conquest of the Desert" as a trope and enactment of Argentina's Manifest Destiny

Abstract

The neutralization of "Barbarism" was the key-concept that moved the military campaigns for the annexation of Patagonia. From the very inception of this military enterprise, the moral elites attempted to transform the so-called "Conquest of the Desert" into a threshold for the consolidation of Argentina`s national project. For the Official History, "the conquest" would and could materialize the motto "Order and Progress", seen as solution to the national dilemma --"Civilization or Barbarism"-- as much as the precondition of a viable, enlightened and modern, nation-state.These campaigns also represent a threshold for contemporary Indian memories that refer to them as "the White raid". By doing so, subaltern memories turn upside down the hegemonic mechanisms that transformed "raids" into icons of indigenous savagism. From both points of view, "the conquest" performs as an epitomizing event that collapses into simple lines of reasoning the very complex array of relations, practices and significations that such a venture put into motion. However, It also shows the force it has had and still has to cement together a national formation of alterity based upon the negation of indigenous roots in the conformation of argentine-ness. Our paper aims at identifying some of the material and symbolic implications of the military annexation of Pampa and Patagonia for the configuration of Argentina's formation of alterity in two broad areas. On the one hand, we examine hegemonic memories, common sense understandings and public policies to ponder the role of "the Conquest" in the territorialization of the nation-state over time. On the other, we identify heterogeneous indigenous trajectories opened up by such a process of territorialization. We do so by bringing into focus subaltern memories and sources that expose less known aspects of practices of disposal of indigenous groups. Argentina's Indigenous Policy has not been merely based upon "limited responses to concrete cases" nor operated in spasmodic or random terms, as it has been commonly contended. Rather, it has promoted a systematic exercise of de-indianization and de-tribalizacion that exceeded the militarized period to meet the self-fulfilling prophecy of a "desert" in need of European pioneers.