Indigenous or Criollo the Myth of White Argentina in Tucumán’s Calchaquí Valley

Thanks to Patricia Richards as well as to the editors of HAHR and anonymous reviewers for their valuable commentaries and suggestions.

1. Juan Alfonso Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Tucumán, 3 vols. (Tucumán: Univ. Nacional de Tucumán), 1:37.

2. The region also includes the valley of Quebrada of Humahuaca, in Jujuy, which together with adjacent Puna is populated by both criollos and Kollas, an Andean indigenous group; see Gustavo Paz, “Resistencia y rebelión campesina en la Puna de Jujuy, 1850 – 1875,” Boletín del Instituto Ravignani, 3rd ser., 4 (1993): 68 – 89.

Hispanic American Historical Review 88:1 doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-079 Copyright 2008 by Duke University Press

Indigenous or Criollo: The Myth of White

Argentina in Tucumán’s Calchaquí Valley

Oscar Chamosa

In 1937, after spending almost ten years collecting ballads, tales, and riddles in northwestern Argentina, folklorist Juan Alfonso Carrizo wrote about the rural residents of Tucumán province in these terms: “The race of almost the entire population is white of the Spanish type. [Although] there are a small number of mestizos in the Calchaquí valley, I did not see any of the autochthonous type; neither do any statistics report the existence of such.”1 In other words, Car-rizo defined the population of the valley as criollo, a flexible ethnic term that Argentines used to describe both the descendents of colonial Spanish settlers, and people of mixed indigenous and European background, or mestizos. Car-rizo’s assertion seems to suggest that at some point in history, Spanish settlers had entirely displaced the Andean agriculturists who had occupied the valley since the precolonial period. That, however, never happened. Colonial docu-ments show that most residents of the valley were indigenous individuals who, similarly to the neighboring Kollas in northern Jujuy, were subjected to Span-ish administration and forced to pay tribute and provide forced labor (mita).2 Throughout the nineteenth century, few immigrants made the valley their home, and visitors referred to the local population as indios. Moreover, villag-ers kept the same indigenous family names recorded in colonial censuses. Yet, despite demographic continuities, the Calchaquí communities did experience a transition from being indigenous to being criollo in legal and cultural terms. In this article, I explore the creolization of the Calchaquí valley, arguing that the categorization of the Calchaquí people as criollos was the product of legal,

Hispanic American Historical Review

Published by Duke University Press

72 HAHR / February / Chamosa

linguistic, and economic changes as well as part of an elite effort to represent Argentina as a white country.3 Furthermore, in analyzing how the myth of white Argentina related to the other prevailing assimilationist theories in the region, I also explore the meaning of creolization as a critical constituent of the myth of white Argentina.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, while other Latin American national elites took pains to represent their countries as homogeneously mestizo, Argen-tine elites preferred to represent their nation as uniformly white. Ethnicity and national identity are now understood as the result of historical processes rather than as essential entities.4 In the case of Latin America, historical literature’s growing emphasis on nation formation and ethnic relations sheds light on state policies of assimilation that consistently favored homogeneity over diversity. These policies coalesced in the nation formation myth of mestizaje in most of Latin America, and the myth of the white nation in Argentina.5 The existing literature on ethnicity and race in Argentina at the turn of the century tends to focus on the promotion of European immigration and the decimation of the indigenous populations of Chaco and Patagonia as the main policies imple-mented by the Argentine state to “whiten” its population.6 In contrast to current Latin American historiography, Argentine historians have tended to focus on the assimilation of European immigrants rather than on the assimilation of the non-European population into the national mainstream.7 Against that current,

3. Mónica Quijada, “Indígenas: Violencia, tierras y ciudadanía,” in Homogeneidad y nación: Con un estudio de caso: Argentina, siglos XIX y XX, ed. Mónica Quijada, Carmen Bernard, and Arnd Schneider (Madrid: CSIC, 2000), 28.

4. Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), 14; John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 69.

5. Marisol de la Cadena, “Are Mestizos Hybrids? The Conceptual Politics of Andean Identities,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (2005): 219 – 84; Jeffrey Gould, “Gender, Politics, and the Triumph of Mestizaje in Early 20th Century Nicaragua,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2 (1996): 2 – 30; Charles R. Hale, “Mestizaje, Hybridity, and the Cultural Politics of Difference in Post-Revolutionary Central America,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2 (1996): 36 – 46; Peter Wade, “Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (2005): 239 – 57.

6. Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 139; Carol A. Smith, “The Symbolics of Blood: Mestizaje in the Americas,” Identities 3 (1997): 503.

7. See for example Fernando Devoto, La inmigración italiana en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 1985); Alejandro E. Fernández et al., La inmigración española en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 1999); Alberto Sarramone, Los abuelos inmigrantes: Historia y sociología de la inmigración argentina (Azul, Argentina: Biblos Azul, 1999).



The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumán’s Calchaquí Valley 73

Northwestern Argentina. Map by the author.




authors such as Mónica Quijada and Carmen Bernard recognize the necessity to review the myth of white Argentina and place the country in the broader dis-cussion of nation formation in Latin America.8 Others, mostly anthropologists, have focused on how the state tried to impose a unifying view of nationality on indigenous groups in Chaco and Patagonia.9 However, less attention has been paid to the policies that attempted to assimilate the different pockets of popula-tion that had not been significantly affected by immigration. These populations included people of African descent in the cities, especially Buenos Aires, criollos in the pampas and lowlands of the northwest, and a few pockets of indigenous people who had been subjected to the Spanish crown: Guaranis in the north-east, Kollas in the province of Jujuy and part of Salta, and the Calchaquí people in Salta, Tucumán, and Catamarca.

The case of the Argentine northwest, and especially the Calchaquí valley, is especially significant in exploring how the myth of white Argentina operated in a local context. First, the population of the region remained mostly criollo after the large wave of immigration settled down in the country. Second, the folklore of Salta and Tucumán and of the Calchaquí valley in particular played a promi-nent role in the cultural policies of Argentine nationalism in the mid-twentieth century, presenting the apparent contradiction of a country that defined itself as white but celebrated a local non-European culture as its national folklore. I analyze that contradiction and propose that educational officials, folklor-ists, and Tucumán’s sugar industrialists made a concerted effort to represent the Calchaquí communities as criollo folk societies. The same cultural policies that downplayed the indigenous origin of the Calchaquí culture emphasized its Spanish elements.

The scholarly representation of the Calchaquí people has shifted over time, as can be seen in three chronologically consecutive sets of sources. The first are the writings of pioneering Argentine anthropologists and folklorists who visited the valley in the 1890s and saw the local societies still operating within indigenous cultural parameters. In 1921, elementary teachers assigned to the valley by the national government produced a series of reports that show a cul-

8. Mónica Quijada and Carmen Bernard, “Introducción,” in Homogeneidad y nación, 9. 9. Héctor Vázquez, Procesos identitarios y exclusión sociocultural: La cuestión indígena en

Argentina (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2002); Gastón Gordillo and Silvia Hirsch, “Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities in Argentina: Histories of Invisibilization and Reemergence,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8 (2003): 4 – 30, Gastón Gordillo, Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2004).




ture in transition, in which local societies retained aspects of their traditional beliefs and rituals but moved toward assimilation with the rest of the nation. The work of professional folklorists who performed fieldwork in the region in the 1930s and 1940s provides additional description. Among them, Juan Alfonso Carrizo is credited with creating an enormous folkloric archive and building a folkloric canon that established the criollos of the northwest as quintessentially Argentine. Carrizo notoriously downplayed the indigenous background of the valley and made an effort to cast it as a reservoir of ancient Spanish traditions, allegedly the original core of the Argentine nationality. By combining histori-cal narrative with the analysis of intellectual discussions, I demonstrate that the creolization of the Calchaquí culture resulted from a juxtaposition of lived experiences and academic discourse.

Assimilation Ideologies and the “White Country” Myth

During the nation formation period, 1880 – 1910, Latin American modernizing elites, anxious to appear as European as possible, attempted the forced creoliza-tion of indigenous peoples by introducing education reforms and land and labor legislation that undermined the existing communities and turned them into mestizos, ladinos, or criollos, according to the local terminology.10 At the same time, most Latin American countries adopted a foundational myth of mestizaje, which asserted that Latin American nations were the result of a harmonious mixture of European, indigenous, and African “races.” Argentina followed poli-cies of creolization comparable in almost every aspect to other Latin American countries, but it differed critically in that the nation was regarded as white rather than mestizo.

The myth of mestizaje avows that twentieth-century Latin American nations were not composed of individual, segregated races. On the contrary, they were the product of a four-century-long process of amalgamation among indigenous Americans, Europeans, and Africans (el indio, el español, and el negro, in the masculine, third-person parlance of the time). In light of the rampant scientific racism then prevalent, the myth of mestizaje sounded like a sooth-

10. Marisol de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, 1919 – 1991 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000); Jeffrey Gould, To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880 – 1965 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998), 40 – 50; Jean Muteba Rahier, “Introduction: Mestizaje, Muletaje, Mestiçagem in Latin American Ideologies of National Identities,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8 (2003): 40 – 51.




ing invitation to racial democracy. That, however, is a misleading perception. As anthropologist Carol A. Smith states, “A nation-building myth such as that concerning mestizaje creates inequality at the same time it presumes to create homogeneity.”11 To understand this apparent paradox, Smith points to the dif-ferent levels at which the myth of mestizaje operated. In the first place, mestizaje referred to the reproduction of individuals whose parents belonged to differ-ent groups of ancestry. Second, mestizaje occurred when indigenous individu-als or communities, as well as people of African descent, adopted an identity as mestizo and were widely recognized as such. Finally, according to Smith, mes-tizaje became a political discourse that created the mestizo national subject and assigned specific value to this identity. Although the three aspects of mestizaje were interrelated, the imperative of political and cultural homogenization super-seded the actual process of biological mixture or cultural subscription to mestizo identity, leaving behind a myriad of indigenous and African-descended commu-nities whose identities differed from the national common denominator.

The resilience of these groups in maintaining their ethnicity demonstrates that the process of unification was highly incomplete, Smith argues. However, as authors Jeffrey Gould and Charles Hale showed, the deepening gap between official mestizo ideology and local ethnic heterogeneity prompted agents of the state to resort to repressive policies.12 Smith concludes that what weakened the myth of mestizaje was the persistence of a racial and social hierarchy, the leg-acy of Iberian domination, which continued to value fairer skin and European ancestry over the indigenous and African components of the alleged mixture. By preserving this hierarchy, the actual implementation of mestizaje ideologies meant little more than assimilating the part of the population with indigenous and African ancestry into the cultural traits of the European elite. In a way, the process of mestizaje or creolization implied a “whitening” of groups and individuals of indigenous and African descent, who held the burden of leaving behind elements of their ancestral cultures and adopting the mores of the Euro-pean settlers and their descendents.

In contrast to their Latin American peers, early twentieth-century Argen-tine intellectuals declined to embrace the assimilationist principle of mestizaje as the foundational myth of the nation. Instead, as Mónica Quijada points

11. Carol Smith, “Myths, Intellectuals, and Race/Class/Gender Distinctions in the Formation of Latin American Nations,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2 (1996): 149.

12. Gould, “Gender, Politics, and the Triumph of Mestizaje,” 4 – 33; Charles R. Hale, Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894 – 1987 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 26.




out, Argentines preferred to think of themselves as an entirely white nation.13 Although assimilationist principles were popular among Argentine intellec-tuals, they understood assimilation as a unilateral process of whitening. The myth of Argentina as a white country pervaded the state-sponsored discourse on race and effectively precluded Argentines from adopting even a self-serving and romanticized view of subordinated ethnic groups. The turn-of-the-century elite not only created this myth but also succeeded in exporting it abroad. Even today, some English language reference works, such as the Columbia Encyclope-dia and CIA World Factbook, describe the Argentine population as 98 percent white.14 This myth, although vaguely supported by the existence of a relatively large and sustained European immigration, was even more deceptive than the myth of mestizaje. In fact, the part of the Argentine population that was either European-born or of European descent could not have reached more than 60 percent at its peak in the 1920s. The myth did not account for the racial identity of the remaining 40 percent of the Argentine population. Furthermore, a sizable indigenous population existed in several parts of the country at the same time that Buenos Aires was exporting the white country myth to foreign investors.

In their creation of the white Argentina myth, the founding fathers were conscious of this discrepancy, but they filled the gap with a good dose of wishful thinking.15 The easiest way to deal with this problem, as George Reid Andrews notices, was to refuse to acknowledge the existence of the nonwhite popula-tion, for instance by excluding racial categories from the national censuses and from public discourse.16 In the preliminary study of the 1895 national census, the census officers explained that they decided not to account for race because “the majority of the interviewees would identify themselves as white.” And yet, the same census officers estimated the total nonwhite population at a flimsy 5 percent. As for mestizos in particular, the census officers said: “There is in the whole country a very small quantity of mixed-race individuals, the result of the

13. Quijada, “Indígenas: Violencia, tierras y ciudadanía,” 28.14. “Argentina,” The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. (New York: Columbia University

Press, 2001 – 4); “Argentina,” Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook (Washington, DC: CIA, 2005).

15. By “founding fathers of the myth of white Argentina” I refer to the group of positivist thinkers that initiated the study of social sciences in Argentina, including José Ingenieros, José Ramos Mejía, and Alejandro Bunge, among others; see Nicola Miller, In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish America (London: Verso, 1999).

16. George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800 – 1900 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1980).




commerce between whites and Indians . . . who constitute the remains of a race in the process of extinction.” To emphasize this statement the census officers add: “The racial question, so noticeable in the United States, does not exist in Argentina, where it will not take much time for the population to become com-pletely unified, creating a new and beautiful white race produced by the contact among all the European nations, made fruitful in the South American soil.”17 Statements like these, common among turn-of-the-century Argentine social scientists, cast serious doubts on the accuracy of their methods, to say the least.

Although the 1895 and 1914 censuses did not specify race or ethnicity, it is possible to estimate the geographical distribution of the European and cri-ollo populations to demonstrate the non-European character of the northwest. The provinces of the Andean northwest received only a marginal number of the several million Italian and Spanish immigrants who settled in Argentina in the period between 1870 and World War I. The majority of the Europeans — predominantly Italian — settled in the coastal cities and in the extensive farm-lands of Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos, Santa Fe, and Córdoba provinces, the area known as the pampas. The most European of all districts in Argentina was the city of Buenos Aires, which contained a third of the national population. There, immigrants constituted two-thirds of the adult male population. The provinces in the pampas followed the city in percentage of immigrants. In these provinces’ small towns, the newcomers, familiarly called gringos, enjoyed privileged access to land and credit and thus displaced criollos from the most profitable activi-ties.18 The census of 1914 shows that of three million people living in the prov-inces of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, not counting the city of Buenos Aires, one million were European immigrants and one and a half million were children of European mothers, which made the pampas a white country of sorts — the pampa gringa.19 However, even if immigrants and their children outnumbered criollos, the latter still constituted at least the remaining quarter of the pampas’ rural population. A completely different situation was found in the five prov-

17. República Argentina, Segundo Censo Nacional, levantado el 10 de Mayo de 1895, 5 vols. (Buenos Aires: Comisión Nacional del Censo, 1898), 2:xlvi – viii.

18. Jeremy Adelman, Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890 – 1914 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994); Ezequiel Gallo, La Pampa gringa: La colonización agrícola en Santa Fe (1870 – 1895) (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1983); Gastón Gori, La pampa sin gaucho: Influencia del inmigrante en la transformación de los usos y costumbres en el campo argentino en el siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: Raigal, 1952).

19. These figures are derived from Argentina Comisión Nacional de Censos, Tercer Censo Nacional, levantado el 1º de Julio de 1914, 10 vols. (Buenos Aires: L. J. Roso, 1916 – 19), 2:178 – 248, 4:76 – 102.




inces of the northwest, where criollos were an overwhelming majority. While some immigrants settled in the cities of Tucumán and Salta, immigrants, many of them of Syrian-Lebanese origin, constituted only 2.6 percent of a total rural population of six hundred thousand; the rest were criollos.20 Therefore, there were at least one million criollos in the rural areas, divided evenly between the pampas and the northwest. In the latter region, criollos were not only the major-ity but they also lived in close-knit communities that favored the continuation of their culture.

A simple solution that elite intellectuals found to accommodate the pre- immigration population in the myth of white Argentina was to regard criollos not as a mestizo group but instead to emphasize their European ancestry. The lack of definition in the census regarding race contributed to making the racial connotation of the term criollo even more ambiguous. In the colonial period, the criollo category referred to only the American-born white elite, just as it did in the rest of the Spanish colonies. After the beginning of the massive European immigration, the use of criollo expanded to include any native Argentine regard-less of race. White descendents of colonial Spanish, as well as people of African descent, mestizos (also called gauchos, and sometimes even chinos), or descendents of previously tributary indigenous peoples could equally be called criollos. Fur-thermore, Argentine writers who participated in the literary movement called cri-ollismo defined their characters by culture, not race. Black gauchos, for instance, were common in criollista works, especially those for the theater, as were Euro-pean immigrants who adopted gaucho customs and language.21 Criollismo suc-ceeded under the assumption that autochthonous gauchos were rapidly disap-pearing, swept aside by the rise of the white rural middle class. What remained was a cultural type, whose adoption by the children of European immigrants represented the ultimate triumph of the myth of white Argentina.22

The myth of white Argentina reflected the general trend toward assimi-lation that reigned in the political discussion on nation and ethnicity across Latin America. Elsewhere, state officials and intellectuals pressured the former

20. The total rural population in the provinces of Jujuy, Salta, Tucumán, and Santiago del Estero and Catamarca was 600,000. Argentina, Tercer Censo Nacional, 2:294 – 347.

21. Ana Cara-Walker, “The Art of Assimilation and Dissimulation among Italians and Argentines,” Latin American Research Review 22 (1987): 37 – 67; Micol Seigel, “Cocoliche’s Romp: Fun with Nationalism at Argentina’s Carnival,” Drama Review 44 (2000): 56 – 83; Alberto Gerchunoff and Ricardo Feierstein, Alberto Gerchunoff, Judío y Argentino: Viaje temático desde “Los gauchos judíos” (1910) hasta sus últimos textos (1950) y visión crítica (Buenos Aires: Míla, 2000).

22. Miller, In the Shadow of the State, 172 – 73.




colonial indigenous communities to rapidly assimilate into the nation. While in most Latin American countries assimilation implied that indigenous people could pass as mestizo, in Argentina to assimilate meant to adopt an intermedi-ate category of criollo, which as a result of the cultural politics of the time was ultimately equivalent to Europeanness. The whitening of the nonimmigrant Argentine population occurred primarily on the desktops of government offi-cials and in academic journals and other printed media. But in the villages and districts where the non-European Argentines lived, whitening was a remote and abstract concept, which sometimes had not even been heard of. However, the assimilation engineered by the state was not just a matter of shifting labels in a census form; it also fostered changes in practices and norms in local communi-ties. In the next section, I will revisit the long-term history of the Calchaquí valley, highlighting the key moments and factors that signaled its integration into the national community.

Indigenous Roots and Creolization in the Calchaquí Valley

The history of the Calchaquí valley can be summarized as a progressive loss of political and economic autonomy and assimilation into broader political entities. Before the fifteenth century, the valley was populated by agriculturalists who apparently spoke a common language, identified as Cacan, but lacked central-ized organization. In the mid-fifteenth century, these polities became gradually incorporated into the Inca empire, which brought to the area both settlers and the Quechua language.23 In the mid-sixteenth century, rulership of the Cal-chaquí valley passed from the Incas to the Spanish and the population became indigenous subjects of the Spanish crown. Finally, in the nineteenth century, the Calchaquí people became citizens of the Argentine Republic. At that time, they also lost the ethnic definition as indios that the Spanish had assigned and were officially designated as criollos.

Claims of an overall indigenous heritage are based on the history of the val-ley, as abandoned terraces, ruins of walled towns, rich burial sites, and splendid pieces of ceramic and carved rocks give evidence of the valley’s pre-Columbian splendor. The cultural uniqueness of the valley seems to be facilitated by its geo-graphic location. The steeply winding road that connects the Tucumán lowland

23. Verónica Williams and María B. Cremonte, “Mitmaqkuna o circulación de bienes? Indicadores de la producción cerámica como identificadores étnicos, un caso de estudio en el Noroeste argentino,” in El Tucumán colonial y Charcas, ed. Ana María Lorandi (Buenos Aires: Univ. Nacional de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, 1997), 75 – 83.




town of Acheral and the village of El Mollar up in the valleys was built in 1946. Before that time, travelers had followed switchbacks up and down on the backs of mules. Looking at the sharp ravines and the thickly vegetated damp cliffs that threaten to engulf the modern road after each rain, it is difficult to imagine the weary muleteers and their animals treading this unlikely path. The val-ley’s sense of geographic isolation and cultural individuality may be misleading, however; interconnection among the different oases that punctuate the central and southern Andes was and is more the norm than the exception. Geographic isolation did help the valley communities to shield themselves against what they perceived as endangering exogenous forces, although many of those attempts ended with a greater loss of independence.

The first of these defining moments in the history of the valley was the forceful incorporation of the Cacan-speaking independent polities into the Inca empire, a process completed no later than 1470. The Cuzco rulers not only uni-fied the different polities of the valley but also imposed a characteristic architec-tural and artistic style linked with the Inca state cult.24 The Inca may have also transplanted settlers from Peru (mitmaqkuna), who brought to the region the Quechua language, extensive maize cultivation, and Inca rituals.25 The result was a thorough political inclusion of the Calchaquí valley into the southern provinces of the empire of the Inca, and the orientation of its economy around the central Andes magnet of the Cuzco region.

After the fall of Cuzco in 1536, the Calchaquí people regained their inde-pendence and defended it heroically against the Spanish. Led by the chief Juan Calchaquí and other leaders, protected by high and narrow passes, and with their battle practices strengthened by the adoption of horses, the Calchaquí warriors kept the Spanish invaders at bay for several decades.26 In the meantime, the Spanish had stabilized several settlements in the eastern lowlands, including the present-day provincial capitals of La Rioja, Catamarca, Tucumán, Salta, and Jujuy, which specialized in supplying cattle for the rising market of Potosí. The official name of this province was Tucumán. In 1588, the governor of Tucumán climbed up to the valley with a small Spanish army and, taking advantage of

24. Terence N. D’Altroy et al., “Inka Rule in the Northern Calchaquí Valley, Argentina,” Journal of Field Archaeology 27 (2000): 5.

25. Estela Noli and María M. Arana, “Los Pichao: Aportes desde la ethnohistoria,” in Investigations at Pichao: Introduction to Studies in the Santa María Valley, North-Western Argentina, ed. Lisbet Bengtsson et al., British Archaeological Reports International Series, 978 (Oxford: J. and E. Hedges, 2001).

26. Manuel Lizondo Borda, Descubrimiento del Tucumán: El pasaje de Almagro, la entrada de Rojas, el itinerario de Matienzo (Tucumán: Univ. Nacional de Tucumán, 1943).




a fratricidal war, forced Juan Calchaquí and his sons to acknowledge Spanish sovereignty over the valley.27

The surrender of Juan Calchaquí did not end the actual autonomy of the valleys. For another century the Calchaquí people intermittently refused to pay tributes, snubbed their encomenderos, eschewed the mita (labor draft) shifts, only selectively adopted the faith preached by a handful of Jesuit missionar-ies, and on several dramatic occasions raised up arms against the Spanish.28 As the bishop of Salta complained in a letter to the Consejo de Indias in 1657: “[The Calchaquí people] are idolatrous in a high degree, they have continuous communication with Satan, for the light of Gospel has never worked among them. . . . they have ruined our towns, valleys, livestock, men, and weapons, and produced heavy losses to Your Majesty.”29 The solution the Spanish found, the bishop goes on to explain, was to sign a treaty that exempted the Calchaquíes from regular tributes, allowing them to conduct long-distance cattle drives to Potosí in exchange for a voluntary mita to the lowland towns.

This arrangement satisfied neither the Calchaquíes, who were disgruntled with the mita, nor the Spanish, who coveted the valley’s rich mineral ores and labor pool. In 1657, Captain Don Francisco Bohorquez, a Spanish adventurer who fancied himself a grandchild of the last Inca, challenged the status quo by having the Calchaquí people recognize him as “their Inca.”30 There ensued a two-year war with the Spanish, in the middle of which Bohorquez capitulated, obtaining a royal pardon. The Calchaquíes ignored Bohorquez’s defection and continued fighting until the outraged Spanish soldiers massacred several thou-sand Calchaquí villagers in 1659 and 1660.31

The devastating defeat in 1660 also signaled the beginning of Spanish

27. Juan Ramírez de Velazco to Consejo de Indias, Salta, 20 Apr. 1588, Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla, Audiencia de Charcas (hereafter cited as AGI, Charcas), leg. 26, doc. 1.

28. Expediente de la visita que hizo el Obispo de Tucumán, Dr. Don Julian de Cortazar, en el valle Calchaquí, in Papeles Eclesiasticos del Tucumán, Documentos del Archivo de Indias, ed. Roberto Levillier (Madrid: J. Pueyo, 1926), 95 – 98.

29. Bishop of Tucumán to Consejo de Indias, Salta, 13 Sept. 1658, AGI, Charcas, leg. 122, doc. 6.

30. Captain Pedro Bohorquez to governor of Tucumán, Santa María, 7 May 1657, AGI, Charcas, leg. 122; Conference on actions to be taken in the Calchaquí Valley (Junta en que se trató las consecuencias y ejecuciones que habían de tener en Valle Calchaquí), San Juan de la Rivera, 4 Aug. 1657, AGI, Charcas, leg. 122.

31. Report on Pedro Bohorquez’s insurrection, Salta, 3 Feb. 1658, AGI, Charcas, leg. 58.




landholding over Calchaquí communities. Even though the Spanish governor granted communal lands to the resettled pueblos, no stipulations were made on the exact limits of those properties. This allowed Spanish hacendados, or large landowners, from Salta and Tucumán to obtain land grants over lands that the communities of Amaicha and Colalao possessed in the eastern slope of the Calchaquí range in present-day Tucumán.32 This process of disposses-sion continued well into the nineteenth century.33 The Calchaquí communi-ties preserved the lands in the valley itself, however. In 1716, the communities of Amaicha, Quilmes, and Colalao obtained a royal ordinance arranging the boundaries of their communal property.34 But the pueblo of Tolombón, which had not obtained such a document, lost part of its lands to its own encomendero in the second half of the eighteenth century.35 Such land grabs by encomenderos or richer members of the communities were probably a common occurrence across the valley.

The legal disputes between Calchaquíes and encomenderos and among encomenderos themselves for the possession of the land grants allow histori-ans to look into the process of ethnic redefinition during the colonial period. The court proceedings define the peoples in the valley variously as Calchaquíes, Diaguitas, Yocaviles, Amaichas, Tafíes, and Tolombones, among other desig-nations. The persons who brought these cases to court treated the different communities as distinct ethnicities and discussed their place of origin as well as the different languages they spoke. For instance, the Tafíes appear in some documents as a group completely separate from the Calchaquíes and in others as part of them. Historian Rodolfo Cruz argues that practices such as these reflect

32. Report on the state of the province of Tucumán by Governor Alonzo de Mercado y Villacorta, Salta, 6 June 1659, AGI, Charcas, leg. 58; land grant in favor of Pedro de Avila y Zárate, Talavera, 1697, Archivo Histórico de Tucumán (hereafter cited as AHT), Protocolos, ser. A, box 3; contract between Francisco de Aragon and Sebastian Rosel, Tucumán 1692, AHT, Protocolos, ser. A, box 3; property title of Juan Román, Tucumán, 1697, AHT, Protocolos, ser. A, box 3.

33. Proceedings on the dispossession of lands belonging to the indians of Colalao and Tolombón, Salta, 1808, AHT, Judicial, box 52, exp. 52.

34. The real cédula or royal ordinance is entirely reproduced in Miguel Figueroa Román and Andrés Mulet, Planificación integral del valle de Amaicha (Tucumán: Univ. Nacional de Tucumán, 1949).

35. Proceedings of census of Trancas Parish, Indian towns of Colalao y Tolombón, San Miguel de Tucumán (Autos de revisita, curato de Trancas, pueblos de Colalao y Tolombón, San Miguel de Tucumán), 16 May 1786, Archivo General de la Nación, Argentina (hereafter cited as AGN), leg. 13.17.2.1, Padrones de Indios de Salta, 33.




the power of Spanish settlers to redefine the ethnicity of the valley’s dwellers according to their economic interest.36

As the Spanish authority became firmly established in the valley during the eighteenth century, the settlers tended to homogenize the Calchaquí communi-ties under a common denomination as indios de padrón — individuals labeled by Spanish census takers as liable to pay the indigenous tribute. The revisita, or census, of 1791 listed 948 indios de padrón in Catamarca, 795 in Tucumán, and 780 in Salta, the majority of whom lived in the Calchaquí valleys.37 The colo-nial officers who visited the indigenous villages in the 1780s and 1790s needed a Quechua translator to communicate with the locals but do not mention the Cacan language. However, perhaps as a result of the presence of missionaries and Spanish landowners, important cultural changes could already be perceived at the end of the colonial period. For instance, in the community of Cafayate, an officer recorded that a translator was not needed because most Indians under-stood Spanish perfectly.38 Yet what defined an indigenous person in the colonial legislation was not language but ascription to an officially recognized pueblo de indios. The legal definition as indios forced the Calchaquíes to pay tributes and labor services but also allowed communities to retain part of their lands under collective ownership, and with it, their identity as indigenous.

This colonial pact was rendered null after the outbreak of hostilities between the rebel patriots and the Spanish in 1810. During the first six years of the War of Independence, the entire northwest became a critical battlefield where patriot armies managed to keep at bay the royal armies sent from Lima. An immedi-ate effect of the war in the Calchaquí valley was that patriot officers stopped collecting the Indian tribute, the main incentive to the colonial administra-tors to retain the indigenous category.39 The onset of the independent republic

36. Manuel Lizondo Borda, Historia de Tucumán, Siglos XVII – XVIII (Tucumán: Univ. Nacional de Tucumán, 1941), 48; Rodolfo Cruz, “La construcción de identidades étnicas en el Tucumán colonial: Los amaichas y los tafíes en el debate sobre su ‘verdadera’ estructura étnica,” in Lorandi, El Tucumán colonial, 65 – 92.

37. These figures show a slight population increase since the early part of the eighteenth century. There is also a noticeable natural increase in the population between the censuses of 1786 and 1791, although the time frame is too small to consider it a trend. Census of tributary Indians (Autos de revisita), Salta, 27 Nov. 1791, AGN, leg. 13.17.2.1, exp. 275.

38. Ibid.39. The accounting books simply declare void the collection of indigenous tributes but

do not explain the reason for this change. Estado del corte y tanteo de la Caja Provincial, 1811 – 13, San Miguel de Tucumán, 8 Aug. 1814, AGN, leg. 10.5.10.2. However, the situation was consistent with the difficulties faced by the bureaucracy of the independent republic




also inspired a new language of citizenship and equality, which undermined the caste system that both exploited and sustained the indigenous communi-ties. The republican rhetoric had immediate impacts in the courts of Tucumán, where individual indigenous men and women used it as means to demand equal treatment as citizens of the fledging nation. In 1812, three separate indigenous women who, as they alleged, were subjected to personal servitude in the houses of two Tucumán landowners and one rural justice of the peace requested to be exonerated from this personal service by virtue of the Decree of Individual Guarantees of 1811.40 In 1813, the Constitutional Assembly debated the place of indigenous subjects in the new republic and finally abolished both tribute and mita. After the formal declaration of independence in 1816, the Calchaquíes, as well as all people registered as indigenous in the Spanish censuses, became Argentine citizens and, in theory, enjoyed whatever limited rights this status entitled them to. Reciprocally, the new government drafted Calchaquí men of all ages into the armies of independence.

The War of Independence and ensuing civil wars that ravaged Argentina between 1810 and 1862 were a major causeway for the creolization of the Cal-chaquí people. Particularly during independence, the valleys and lowlands of the northwest became the critical battleground where the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata managed to sustain its sovereign claim against the loyalist troops dispatched from Peru. Although exact registry of the militias that fought against the Spanish is difficult to find, there is evidence that patriot officials demanded contributions of men and horses from the communities in the valley.41 The recruits from the valleys were stationed in the cities of Salta and Tucumán, where the patriot commander General Manuel Belgrano not only took care of train-ing them as soldiers but also of imposing on them a sense of nationality through carefully choreographed martial rituals.42 Without a doubt, the intense experi-

to collect taxes elsewhere, see Tulio Halperín Donghi, Guerra y finanzas en los orígenes del estado argentino (Buenos Aires: Univ. de Belgrano, 1982).

40. Provincial Junta of Tucumán to Supreme Junta, San Miguel de Tucumán, 28 Jan. 1812, AGN, leg. 10.5.10.1; Freedom of María Santos, servant of Ignacio Bazán, San Miguel de Tucumán, 11 Mar. 1812, AGN, leg. 10.5.10.1; Freedom of María Magdalena, indian servant of José Terán, San Miguel de Tucumán, 20 Jan. 1812, AGN, leg. 10.5.10.1; Cabildo de Tucumán to Provincial Junta of Tucumán, San Miguel de Tucumán, 3 Feb. 1812, AGN, leg. 10.5.10.1.

41. Neighbors of Fuerte de Andalgalá to provincial government of Tucumán, San Miguel de Tucumán, 22 Aug. 1814, AGN, leg.10.5.10.2.

42. “Libro de órdenes del día del Ejército Auxiliador del Perú, 1816,” in Museo Mitre, Documentos del Archivo de Belgrano (Buenos Aires: Impr. Coni Hermanos, 1916).




43. On one occasion in the middle of the war, the militias in the valley shifted sides from the Federales to the Unitarios, or liberals. See Manuel Lizondo Borda, Documentos argentinos: Crisóstomo Alvarez y su campaña libertadora del norte, 1852 (Tucumán: Univ. Nacional de Tucumán, 1957), 18 – 19.

44. Ariel de la Fuente, Children of Facundo: Caudillo and Gaucho Insurgency during the Argentine State-Formation Process (La Rioja, 1853 – 1870) (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000).

45. In 1921, people in the valley still remembered the caudillo rebellions of 1865 and 1870 as dramatic disruptions of their normal life. Ramón Cano and Miguel Cano Velez, Amaicha, 1921 Encuesta Nacional del Magisterio, Instituto Nacional de Antropología (hereafter cited as ENM), leg. Tucumán 58, pp. 23 – 24.

46. Esteban Figueroa, representing the village of Amaicha, to governor of Tucumán, Amaicha, 26 Apr. 1823, AHT, Judicial, box 125, exp. 25, p. 6.

ence of warfare and camaraderie with criollos from different parts of the country furthered the assimilation of the Calchaquí men. Similarly, the country’s long civil war between Federales and Unitarios, which divided the population of the valley between the two opposing sides, forced the Calchaquí people to assume nationwide political identities.43 The wars of independence and the civil wars were powerful forces in erasing the isolation of the valley and incorporating the former indigenous villages into the fledgling national community.

Some Calchaquí communities found that independence opened the pos-sibility of reclaiming lands from the descendants of Spanish hacendados. After a long civil trial, the communities of Amaicha, Quilmes, and Calimonte man-aged to regain their legal holdings. The nationwide liberal reforms that began in 1862 constituted a powerful ideological backlash against the preservation of communal lands. Elsewhere in the northwest, the expansion of Buenos Aires liberalism prompted the explosion of criollo rebellions. Criollo culture, histo-rian Ariel de la Fuente demonstrates, was critical in defining the sides in this conflict.44 The caudillos representing criollo small herders and peasants of the lowlands reacted against the centralizing modernity of Buenos Aires. The val-leys did not side with the caudillos, though. Instead, the Calchaquí villagers aligned themselves with the government loyalists’ troops.45 This alliance with the central government reveals another step taken in assimilating themselves into the larger national community.

In the long battle to retain their lands, the Calchaquí communities tin-kered with their ethnic identity as they deemed fit to better defend their inter-ests. In an 1823 lawsuit against a neighboring landowner, Amaicha comuneros, village members with full rights to the common lands, identified themselves as “originally native from this American country.”46 The petitioners understood that this condition granted them “more rights than the majority of the people who inhabit it” and therefore entitled them to preserve the communal lands




that “even the most usurping of all conquistadors ceded to us.” This language reflects a strategy that appropriated the language of rights of the independence elite without challenging the colonial juridical order, which acknowledged indigenous communal landholdings. But as the liberal juridical order advanced, the Calchaquí comuneros, probably advised by city lawyers, downgraded their indigenous affiliation to “descendents” of the original inhabitants and empha-sized their rights as Argentine citizens.47 In 1892, avoiding the use of any spe-cific ethnic label, the provincial government granted the land to the “rural communes” of Amaicha, Quilmes, and Calimonte, their members officially designated as comuneros.48 By obtaining that recognition, the Calchaquí com-munities effectively challenged a liberal conception of landholding that rejected communal solidarity and glorified private ownership. The victory also entailed acceptance of full membership in the national community.

Despite the success of those communities in retaining their communal lands, the majority of other communities were not so fortunate. Still, many Calchaquí people lived outside the communal villages and either held private property or had no access to property at all. The archives of the 1867 and 1895 national censuses present a bleak reality in which the majority of the adult males are listed as day laborers ( jornaleros) while women’s professions were limited to laundress and seamstress. In contrast, in Amaicha and Quilmes, where property was communal, the majority of male and female adults are listed as farmers (labradores).49 The common name for individuals who were not members of the collectively owned communities was lugareños, or “people from the place,” which apparently did not connote a separate culture from those who were full mem-bers of the communities. The censuses of 1869 and 1895 show many indigenous surnames, some belonging to the same families that lived in those communities in the time of the 1791 census, like the Sasos of Amaicha. Others were internal

47. On the reform of indigenous landholding in Jujuy and Salta, see David Bushnell, Reform and Reaction in the Platine Provinces, 1810 – 1852 (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1983), 91 – 92; and Bushnell, “The Indian Policy of Jujuy Province,” Americas 55 (1999): 584.

48. Figueroa Román and Mulet, Planificación integral del valle de Amaicha, 31 – 33; Carlos Reyes Gajardo, Motivos culturales del valle de Amaicha (Tucumán: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 1966), 50 – 52; Alejandro Isla, Los usos políticos de la identidad: Indigenismo y estado (Buenos Aires: Editorial de las Ciencias, 2002), 74.

49. Tucumán Leales-Encalilla, Buenos Aires, 18 Sept. 1867, AGN, Primer Censo Argentino, Libreto Nro 459; Colalao del Valle, Población Urbana, 15 May 1895, AGN, Libretos del Segundo Censo Nacional, leg. 1359; Colalao del Valle, Población Rural, 15 May 1895, AGN, Libretos del Segundo Censo Nacional, leg. 1359; Amaicha, Población Rural, 15 May 1895, AGN, Libretos del Segundo Censo Nacional, leg. 1359.




immigrants who moved across the artificial provincial borders that sliced the valley into three parts. Still, many indigenous people had Spanish surnames in 1791, and many people over 56 years old with names such as Cruz, Ayala, Gonzalez, Balderrama, and Benarez in the 1869 census may have been legally born as Indians.50

The disappearance of indigenous languages in the Calchaquí valley pre sents something of a mystery. If in 1791 Spaniards needed Quechua translators to talk to residents of most communities in the valley, at the end of the nineteenth cen-tury no visitor reported the use of any language other than Spanish. However, it remains unclear when and how the indigenous languages faded from the lin-guistic landscape. Samuel Lafone Quevedo, an archaeologist who ran a copper mine in the Calchaquí town of Santa Maria before starting his academic career, claimed to have heard a few old people talking in Quechua in 1860 and that its usage was common during the first half of the nineteenth century. He asserts that priests took confessions in Quechua and that merchants traveling to and from Bolivia communicated with each other in Quechua.51 Lafone Quevedo speculates that the transition from Quechua to Spanish was the result of public schooling. But before the federal government founded elementary schools in the valley in 1907, education was nonexistent in any language. The most likely explanation is that as communication with the lowlands became more common over the course of the nineteenth century, Spanish displaced Quechua as the spoken language.

It was not only language that was lost in the nineteenth century. Long-distance cattle commerce had been the center of the valley economy in the colo-nial period. Local farms produced fodder for the passing herds that used the valley as a highway between Northern Chile and Bolivia. Some cattle were also raised for export in the valley itself. But economic changes affecting the entire northwest, especially the decline of mining in Bolivia, civil and international wars, and the development of railroads, slowly eroded this source of income. For those without land, the economy of the valley offered reduced means of subsis-tence. Commercial farms in Tafí and Cafayate controlled by lowland patrician families were better irrigated and connected with the lowland markets, and they specialized in the production of grains and cattle for Salta and Tucumán. The

50. Eusebia Martin, Apellidos indígenas documentados en los archivos provinciales del norte argentino (Buenos Aires: Univ. de Buenos Aires, 1963).

51. Samuel A. Lafone Quevedo, Tesoro de catamarqueñismos: Nombres de lugares y apellidos indios con etimologías y eslabones aislados de la lengua cacana, 3rd ed. (Tucumán: Univ. Nacional de Tucumán, 1927), xxv.




Michel Torino family from Salta even managed to develop profitable vineyards and a winery in Cafayate; their wine eventually became an established national brand. Most lugareños worked the lands of absentee large-scale landowners. The rest of the local producers, either comuneros or lugareños, struggled to find a replacement for the cattle commerce.52

Faraway economic developments also influenced the economic reorienta-tion of the valley. The demographic and economic growth of the pampas and Buenos Aires prompted the reorientation of the lethargic northwestern econ-omy from ranching to sugar production. The political alliance between the patrician families of Tucumán, Salta, and Jujuy and the national elites in Buenos Aires guaranteed full protection for the regional sugar industry. As a result, between 1880 and 1900, more than thirty top-of-the-line sugar mills rose up in the northwestern lowlands, generating more than a hundred thousand jobs and providing for 60 percent of the regional economic output.53 Such economic dynamism rapidly transformed the rural economy in the lowlands from ranch-ing and subsistence agriculture into a brazen form of agrarian capitalism.

The development of the sugar industry dramatically disrupted the course of life in the valley, where the sugarcane planters found an ideal seasonal labor pool. Each year, by mid-May, many of the 20,000 Calchaquíes boarded their doors and windows and migrated en masse toward the lowlands of Tucumán and Salta for la zafra, the cane harvest, only to return at the end of August. The harvesters’ working conditions were universally described as highly exploitative.54 Entire families, including children and the elderly, toiled during

52. Hugo Ferrullo and Gustavo Mendez, “El desarrollo rural en la comunidad de Quilmes (Valle Calchaquí),” Desarrollo Rural 1 (1990); Estela B. de Santamarina, Notas a la antropogeografía del Valle de Tafí (Tucumán: Univ. Nacional de Tucumán, 1945). Archeologist Juan B. Ambrosetti attributes the stagnation of the Calchaquí valley to the decline of cattle exports to Bolivia. This downturn may have motivated the abandonment of fodder fields. Juan B. Ambrosetti, “La hacienda de Molinos, Valles Calchaquíes, provincia de Salta,” Estudios Historia, Ciencias, Letras 3, no. 4 (1903): 158 – 80.

53. Donna J. Guy, Argentine Sugar Politics: Tucumán and the Generation of Eighty (Tempe: Arizona State Univ. Press, 1980), xi, 34 – 35; Patricia Juárez Dappe, “The Sugar Boom in Tucumán: Economy and Society in Northwestern Argentina, 1876 – 1916” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California at Los Angeles, 2001); Roberto Pucci, “Azúcar y proteccionismo en la Argentina,” in Estudios sobre la historia de la industria azucarera argentina, ed. Daniel Campi (Tucumán: Univ. Nacional de Tucumán, 1991), 61 – 96.

54. La Vanguardia (Buenos Aires), 20 Sept. 1902, p. 2; La Vanguardia, 11 Dec. 1897, p. 1; La Vanguardia, 2 Oct. 1897, p. 4; see also Juan Bialet Massé, El estado de las clases obreras argentinas a comienzos del siglo (Córdoba, Argentina: Univ. Nacional de Córdoba, 1968), 105; Donna J. Guy, “The Rural Working Class in Nineteenth Century Argentina: Forced Plantation Labor in Tucumán,” Latin American Research Review 13, no. 1 (1978): 135 – 45.




extended workdays under the whip of the overseers, having no place to spend the night but in makeshift huts thatched with cane leaves. The minuscule wages were often encumbered with debt to either the company store or the grocers in the valley, who acted as hiring agents for the planters. In truth, it was those debts that coerced peasants into the harvest every year. The decline of cattle traffic to Bolivia and Chile seriously thwarted the valley’s already limited cash flow and put the families at the mercy of richer landowners and grocers, who advanced credit in exchange for labor. This system of debt peonage exacerbated social stratification in the valley.

The arrival of capitalism in the northwest brought other changes. In the 1920s, Juan Alfonso Carrizo somberly commented on the “bad habits” that sea-sonal workers brought back to the valley on their return from the lowlands. Among those bad habits, Carrizo included drinking, gambling, swearing, fancy shoes, and, worst of all, tango. Apparently, the workers bought gramophones and tango records from the merchants that surrounded the sugar mills, which according to Carrizo, introduced the pernicious vocabulary and attitudes of Buenos Aires into the local society.55 Other, less moralistic sources partially confirm some of Carrizo’s observations. Not just tango but characteristically lowland criollo musical styles and dances such as chacarera, gato, and zamba became prevalent in the valleys.56 This horizontal cultural exchange between Calchaquíes and criollos from the lowlands is a good example of what Peter Wade calls “mestizaje as lived experience.”57

Carrizo may have exaggerated the pace of change, but he was right to assess the cultural implications of capitalist penetration in this remote corner of Argentina. The changes he points out were the last in a series of transitions the valley experienced at the end of the colonial period. The political discourse of citizenship, recruitment into the national army, erosion of economic indepen-dence, and loss of indigenous language all contributed to the elimination of the colonial construction of race based on categorical distinctions among Spanish, mestizos, and Indians. The ambiguous label of criollo, already used to refer to Argentines in many other parts of the country, became the term that was con-sidered to best fit the Calchaquí people at the beginning of the twentieth cen-tury. In addition to the different historical factors enumerated here, this transi-tion was reinforced by the views of the external actors, such as anthropologists,

55. Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Tucumán, 1:248.56. Tunes collected by Isabel Aretz in Tucumán, 27 Jul. to 1 Dec 1941, Archivo del

Instituto Nacional de Musicología Carlos Vega, Libro de Viajes, 91.57. Wade, “Rethinking Mestizaje,” 44.




teachers, and folklorists, who exerted an important influence in defining the ethnicity of the Calchaquí people.

Indians or Criollos? The Anthropologists’ View

As the Calchaquí valley became more integrated into the Argentine economy and the people assimilated with the broader criollo culture, specialists of all sorts used their power to define the ethnic constitution of the country in terms that better suited elite interests. The early archaeologists and anthropologists who visited the valley, indoctrinated in biological definitions of race, tended to define the Calchaquí people not just as indigenous but as the living remains of ancient civilizations, themselves on their way to extinction. Echoing an agenda common to the development of folkloric and archaeological fields elsewhere, the collection and classification of local cultural artifacts went hand in hand with the desire for extinction of that local culture.

This attitude is clearly discernible in the writings of Juan Bautista Ambro-setti, an archaeologist and folklorist from the University of Buenos Aires who performed intensive fieldwork in the valley between 1895 and 1906. Ambrosetti was born in Entre Ríos to an immigrant Italian family and moved to Buenos Aires to study natural sciences. Appointed a professor of natural history at the University of Buenos Aires, Ambrosetti performed a series of groundbreak-ing research trips to the most distant parts of the country with the support of the Institute of Geographic Studies.58 Early in his career, the Calchaquí valley caught his attention. His field trips were archaeological expeditions and folk-loric surveys rolled into one. He was primarily interested in pre-Columbian ceramics and secondarily in contemporary folk culture.59 His descriptions of the valley, however, did not benefit its inhabitants.

For Ambrosetti, the indigenous condition of the valley culture helped him shed light on his archaeological findings. As Ambrosetti explained: “The cer-emonies of present-day Calchaquíes show such an indigenous character that I do not hesitate to see them as similar to the ones performed in pre-Columbian times.”60 For instance, he described small sculptures found in graves as “fetishes”

58. Juan B. Ambrosetti, Viaje de un maturrango y otros relatos folklóricos (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Centurión, 1963).

59. Juan B. Ambrosetti, “Por el valle Calchaquí,” Anales de la Sociedad Científica Argentina 44 (1897): 87 – 120.

60. Juan B. Ambrosetti, Notas de arqueología calchaquí (Buenos Aires: Imp. la Buenos Aires, 1899), 72.




because he observed that the modern population of the valley using figurines during special rituals. Although Ambrosetti did not practice any anthropomet-ric measurement of the valley dwellers, for him culture and race were associated terms; therefore, if contemporary Calchaquí people performed the same prac-tices as pre-Columbian valley dwellers, then they must be the same people.

Adán Quiroga, another folklorist who toured the valley, shared the view that the valley dwellers were indigenous. As in the case of Charles Nisard, stud-ied by Michel de Certeau, Adán Quiroga was both a law enforcement officer and a folklorist.61 Trained as a lawyer, Quiroga moved from Catamarca to Tucumán in 1886 with a job as legal advisor to the police department. Eventually he obtained an appointment as a judge of the criminal court. Quiroga moved back to Catamarca to be elected mayor of that provincial capital. In 1904, he reached the top security office in the country as subsecretary of the interior during the tenure of Minister Joaquín V. González, also a vocational folklorist and admirer of Calchaquí antiquities. During breaks from work as a government official, Quiroga toured the Calchaquí valley performing archaeological and folkloric research. Although Quiroga never taught at a university, his vocational work was highly regarded in academic circles and eventually published by scholarly editorial houses.62

Adán Quiroga did not hesitate to use the adjective “indigenous” when refer-ring to anything related to the valley. His informants were “el indio Peralta,” or “la india María de Machigasta”; similarly, the towns of Amaicha and Colalao were “pueblos indígenas.” The entire organization of his main work, Folklore Calchaquí, reinforces the idea that the valley’s people were totally and unmistak-ably indigenous.63 Like Ambrosetti, Quiroga seemed to be interested in local folklore as a way of shedding light on the motifs of pre-Columbian artifacts. He assumed that the valley people’s myths and deities of 1895 were the same as those represented in vases and carved figures from the pre-Columbian period.

Ambrosetti and Quiroga did not problematize the issue of whether the val-ley people were indigenous or not — they took it for granted that they were. With the evidence they gathered on rituals, myths, and language, it was impos-sible for them to think otherwise. For them, indigenous meant ancient and ata-vistic, a culture that, like the surrounding archaeological sites, had remained

61. Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, “The Beauty of the Dead: Nisard,” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, ed. Michel de Certeau (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), 119 – 36.

62. “Calchaquí del Dr. Adán Quiroga,” El Orden (Tucumán), 28 May 1896, p. 1. 63. Adán Quiroga, Folklore calchaquí (Buenos Aires: Univ. de Buenos Aires, 1929).




untouched for centuries. Their interest in these local cultures was colored by a clear dislike of modernity combined with a fatalistic vision of the extinction of whoever dared resist its force. The description of the Calchaquíes as indigenous people in the process of extinction resonated with the discourse of the Buenos Aires – based social science establishment led by sociologist José Ingenieros.64

The rapid extinction to which the Calchaquí people were doomed would come as a result of the several deficiencies that the very design of the census of 1914 tried to put in evidence. This design attempted to show the degree of civilization the country had reached during the previous thirty years. For instance, in addition to the standard demographic data, the census includes detailed information of economic activity and lists civic associations, theaters, and museums as tokens of cultural progress. The census also presents housing and health data, which clearly reveal that the people of the northwest were more poorly educated, fed, and housed and suffered a higher incidence of chronic diseases and physical and psychological disabilities than people in other regions. This evidence may have led the social scientists to conclude — and hope — that the healthier European population would eventually displace the illness-ridden Calchaquíes and other nonwhite northwesterners.

But reality proved the Argentine positivists wrong. The impoverished populations of the northwest were not decreasing but growing, and it was clear that they were going to be around for much longer than the Buenos Aires social scientists would have liked. Therefore, other national authorities whose duty it was to deal with the deficiencies pointed out by the census, namely the lamen-table state of public education in the valleys, resolved to intervene and force the cultural creolization of this population. The public education authorities approved curricular programs aimed to unite the national culture around the white Argentina paradigm and assigned to rural teachers the task of produc-ing this transformation in their school districts. A group of rural teachers was charged with putting these plans into effect in the Calchaquí valley and, para-doxically, with recording the local folk traditions before their education plans managed to eliminate them.

The Calchaquí Valley in the National Folkloric Survey of 1921

The National Folkloric Survey ordered by the National Board of Education in 1921 provides an important written source through which historians can explore how rural teachers interacted with the local society in the Calchaquí valley.

64. José Ingenieros, Sociología argentina (Madrid: D. Jorro, 1913), 457.




The survey created a new opportunity for the accumulation of knowledge on rural lore and it represented another step toward the definition of the criollo. As in the case of the first folklorists, the board pursued several goals, such as appealing to nationalist feelings, creating an archive of popular culture, and hastening the penetration of modernity into the surviving local cultures.65 The National Board of Education assigned each rural teacher in the country the task of collecting folklore materials in their districts.66 The survey offers an unusual window into the Calchaquí people from the point of view of the local teachers and, indirectly, into what local communities thought about their culture and ethnicity. From their reports, it is evident that the rural teachers did not define the Calchaquí people as indigenous but as criollos of indigenous ancestry. This definition, I argue, was the direct result of the process of de-Indianization, in which the teachers were not neutral observers but central actors, if not the most critical ones.

Although the quality of the teachers’ reports is uneven and they are gener-ally influenced by the questionnaire designed by board member Juan P. Ramos, the unpublished survey offers a wealth of information on specific localities and descriptions of local life. Foremost, it gives us a complex picture of how rural teachers interacted with their host societies. To regulate the data collection process, the board distributed printed sheets with a model survey accompa-nied by a brochure that gave instructions on specific procedures. The brochure instructed teachers to pay attention to “superstitious ceremonies,” fables, myths, sayings, and ballads of “Indians and gauchos.”67 After receiving the instructions in May of 1921, rural teachers across the country worked on the assignment for four months. The results were collected by local school districts and sent to the National Board in October of that year.

Despite their lack of training as folklorists, the teachers in the Calchaquí valley were able to report a vast array of aspects of local daily life and culture. Their personal knowledge of the communities gave them an advantage over urban researchers. Both Ambrosetti and Quiroga complained that it was very

65. Angel Gallardo, “Proyecto de renovación de votos profesionales,” El Monitor de la Educación Común, no. 580 (1921): 55 – 56; Consejo Nacional de Educación Argentina, Folklore Argentino (Buenos Aires: Consejo Nacional de Educación, 1921); “Concurso de folklore argentino,” El Monitor de la Educación Común, no. 581 (1921): 111 – 12.

66. Juan P. Ramos, “Instrucciones a los maestros para el mejor cumplimiento de la resolución adoptada por el Honorable Consejo sobre folklore argentino,” El Monitor de la Educación Común, no. 580 (1921): 3 – 26; Julio Picarel, “Orientación cultural nacionalista,” El Monitor de la Educación Común, no. 581 (1921): 221 – 22.

67. Ramos, “Instrucciones a los maestros,” 3 – 26.




hard to obtain information from the Calchaquí people and that the rustic herd-ers looked at them with mistrust. Teachers enjoyed the advantage of residing permanently in the area, and they shared the same rough living conditions as their neighbors. Yet they were also outsiders and could observe the rural com-munities from the vantage point of modern educated citizens and local repre-sentatives of the national government.

Adrián Canelada and Ramón and Miguel Cano were among those teachers. Born and educated in Spain, Canelada immigrated to Argentina after return-ing from the War of 1898 in Cuba. After living a few months in Tucumán city, Canelada obtained a job as a teacher at one of the newly formed national schools in the Calchaquí valley. His destination was Calimonte, a lonely rural school halfway between Amaicha and Colalao. He served the school for forty years and moved to Amaicha after retirement.68 The Board of Education ranked his among the six best individual reports in the national folklore survey.69 Brothers Ramón and Miguel Cano, two other teachers who contributed extensively to the folkloric survey, were born in the valley, although they were also outsiders of a sort. Their family had arrived from Salta city after their father bought a forage farm in Colalao in the early 1890s. Both brothers studied in the normal school of Tucumán and returned to the valley to teach at the national school of Amaicha. They studied music and became interested in the local musical culture. They were among the few teachers who could supply musical notations of folk songs for the survey archive. Twenty years later, they were still living in Amaicha and had become local officials, and they served as both informants and guides to the ethnomusicologists who toured the area.70

As a result of their intimate knowledge of their localities, teachers such as Canelada and the Cano brothers were able to identify many aspects of local culture that the first folklorists failed to perceive and report. The survey, for instance, revealed how ingrained were beliefs in sorcery, witchcraft, and faith healing among the Calchaquí people. The teachers in the Calchaquí valley named different local individuals who were reputed to be witches and sorcer-ers, reported incidents of sorcery and faith healing to which they were direct

68. Adrián Canelada, Mis nostalgias en el Valle Calchaquí (Tucumán: Univ. Nacional de Tucumán, 1994).

69. “Distribución de Premios entre maestros que colaboraron en la recopilación de materials folklóricos,” El Monitor de Educación Común 64, no. 873 (1945): 77 – 88.

70. Isabel Aretz, Música tradicional argentina: Tucumán, historia y folklore (Tucumán: Univ. Nacional de Tucumán, 1946); Colalao del Valle, Población Urbana, 15 May 1895, AGN, Libretos del Segundo Censo Nacional, leg. 1359; Guía comercial de Tucumán (Tucumán: Mercurio, 1931).




witnesses, and provided extended lists of herbal medicines and folk medical procedures, revealing the scant penetration of modern medical services. The teachers’ detailed accounts suggested that they were well informed about local folk medicine, probably because they may have used those services themselves on occasion. On a different level, the teachers’ reports were candid and many times expressed the internal differences in their communities, often referring to class divisions or personal feuds, dynamics that professional folklorists were not able to see during their short stays in the valley.

Knowing that they had been sent as envoys of progress and aware that they had to live up to the standards they purportedly represented, teachers distanced themselves from the culture they described in their reports. All of them referred to the locals with a distant “estas gentes” (these people) and then went on to enu-merate their odd and primitive ways. Canelada described the Calchaquí people as “of a permanently serious countenance, as ones who may be concealing a mystery,” and also as possessors of an “atavistic indolence” that prevented them from making any effort to do anything that was not prescribed by custom.71 Rather than using the label “indigenous,” the teachers preferred to use ethni-cally neutral terms such as “gente del lugar” (local people), “vallistos” (people of the valley), or “habitantes de la zona” (inhabitants of the area), or, more generally, “criollos.” At the same time, the teachers recognized that the Calchaquí people were descendents of indigenous people, even though they did not use that term to identify them.72

Defining local religion in the valleys was an important part of defining the people’s ethnicity. For the early folklorists such as Ambrosetti and Quiroga, the peculiar religion of the Calchaquí people revealed the indigenous ascription of the valley dwellers. Ambrosetti defined the valley’s religion as a “promiscuity of beliefs” in which Catholic saints were subordinated to the “fetishist” ancient Calchaquí religion.73 Adán Quiroga attempted to organize those mythologies coherently around a series of myths that he identified as “Incaic,” minimizing the Catholic intervention. From the reports of the National Folkloric Survey of 1921, it appears that the people of the valley shared some of the basic tenets of the colonial Andean religion, but their religion was still, in the eyes of the teach-ers, no more than a local variation of popular Catholicism.

71. Report of teacher Adrián Canelada, School no. 217, Calimonte, 1921 Encuesta Nacional del Magisterio (hereafter cited as ENM), box Tucumán, leg. 54, pp. 115 – 18. The archive of this folkloric survey is hosted by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología in Buenos Aires.

72. Report of teacher Adrían Canelada, 124.73. Ambrosetti, Notas de arqueología calchaquí, 69 n. 1.




74. Ambrosetti, Notas de arqueología calchaquí, 71.75. Report of teacher Adrían Canelada, 72 – 74; report of teacher Rosario R. de Nieto,

School no. 5, Amaicha del Valle, 1921, ENM, box Tucumán, leg. 230, pp. 6 – 7; report of teacher Damián Pereyra, School no. 62, El Molle, 1921, ENM, box Tucumán, leg. 250, pp. 9 – 11; report of teacher Francisca de Garmendia, School no. 10, Amaicha del Valle, 1921, ENM, box Tucumán, leg. 134, p. 7.

76. Report of teacher Ramón Cano, School no. 10, Amaicha del Valle, 1921, ENM, box Tucumán, leg. 57, p. 3.

77. Report of teacher Lola Nieto, School no. 5, Quilmes, 1921, ENM, box Tucumán, leg. 229, p. 1.

78. Report of teacher Canelada, 13.

Calchaquí people practiced a few rituals of clear Andean lineage during the early part of the twentieth century. In Amaicha, Colalao, and Quilmes, shep-herds conducted the annual ceremony of señaladas or cattle branding, a ritual that early folklorists have used as an example of the exceptional character of the local culture.74 The señalada was simply the annual branding of the animals, a procedure required and regulated by law across the country. In the valley, however, it acquired special local characteristics. After the branding of cattle was finished, the master of ceremonies ordered that a hole be dug in one of the corners of the corral. There the party offered pieces of the animals’ ears to the Pachamama, “Mother Earth” in the pan-Andean cosmology. The master of ceremonies bundled the offering in the herd owner’s son’s poncho together with coca leaves; the blood of one or more animals sacrificed at that moment; a generous provision of chicha (maize beer), aloja (a fermented beverage from a local fruit), or cane liquor; and the smoked cigarettes of those present. After that, people walked around the corral driving the flock while singing prayers to Llastay, protector of livestock, and to Pachamama, pleading for the growth of the flock and for the good fortune of the herd owner.75

Although the teachers recognized these rituals as peculiar to the region and at odds with the prevailing criteria of rationality and modernity, they did not see them as indigenous rituals. Rather, they understood them as local superstitions, and even though teachers saw the rituals as “atavistic,” they also perceived the existence of processes of change.76 Teacher Lola Nieto reproduced a conver-sation with one of the village elders, who complained that the local Catholic priests were “making people lose their faith” by battling against popular rit-uals.77 Similarly, while describing the devotion to “Santa Bárbara,” Canelada contended that many such local traditions had became the subject of derision by youth “because of the advancement they believe they possess,” and that people who still believed tended to conceal it, afraid of the scorn of the youth.78




The teachers also reported a series of cultural practices, which perhaps because of their pervasiveness they failed to see as products of cultural assimila-tion. Canelada includes among tales of enchanted mountains and ghostly appa-ritions that he heard from local storytellers a story about a famous boxer who was the center of attention of the specialized press and obtained the prize of Muscular Force World Champion.79 The story, filled with references to urban life and European countries, gives evidence of the oral transmission of novelties learned through contact with the outside world. Teachers also describe a series of folk dances and musical genres that are characteristic of the lowlands. These dances were so well established as a form of popular entertainment that the teachers could not perceive their foreignness. In addition to folk dances, teacher Ramón Cano transcribes lyrics of milongas, criollo songs from Buenos Aires that had become popular in the early 1900s; one of those milongas was authored by legendary tango singer Carlos Gardel.80

Overall, the several hundred pages of teachers’ reports on the Calchaquí rural culture convey the impression that they were describing a non-Western local culture in the process of change; however, they restrained themselves from calling this culture indigenous. Their task, as spelled out in scores of National Board of Education bulletins and publications, was to instill a homogenous sense of nationality and to uplift the children of rural dwellers to the minimum stan-dards of instruction demanded by the central government. It might have been in the best professional interest of the teachers to portray the Calchaquí people as backward in order to highlight the efforts of the newly founded public schools to reverse that condition. Teacher Rosario R. de Nieto, of Amaicha, asserted that the people in her school district “preserve primitive traditions and beliefs,” although she never called the people themselves indigenous.81 The complete absence of the term indigenous among the hundreds of pages of teacher folkloric reports is a clear suggestion that the term was no longer in use among the local communities. The teachers presented a very complex portrait of the rural com-munities where they lived, but at the same time they proved that the Calchaquí people were effectively becoming criollos and therefore creolizing a number of practices and beliefs that in the past were part of their indigenous heritage.

79. Ibid., 181 – 84.80. Report of teacher Ramón Cano, 16 – 24.81. Report of teacher Rosario Nieto, 3.




The “White Industry” of the Northwest and the Folklorization

of the Calchaquí People

More than a hundred years after independence, the Calchaquí people seemed to be immersed in the process of assimilation into the Argentine mainstream. This assimilation resulted from actual practices of the Calchaquíes, but also from external pressure of state agents. In the 1930s, the pressure came from folklorists who reached the Calchaquí valley in search of the Argentine folk. What followed was a process of folklorization that reinforced the ongoing cre-olization. Here, folklorization refers to state and/or elite policies devised to styl-ize a range of lower-class cultural practices into a canon of artifacts able to be performed, reproduced, or exhibited. The ultimate goal of folklorization poli-cies is to bolster cultural nationalism by emphasizing local, regional, or national differences in a context of transnational cultural exchanges.82 A common effect of folklorization is the isolation of cultural artifacts from the meaning that the practitioners originally assigned to them and the social context in which they were produced.83 Folklorists “collected” elements of Calchaquí culture, such as music and songs, as well as carnival traditions, and put them in a singular place of expectation within the Argentine folkloric canon.

The folklorization of the Calchaquíes is intrinsically associated with the politics and culture of the sugar industry of the northwest. Due to a combina-tion of economic factors aggravated by the depression of the 1930s, this industry depended heavily on national government subsidies and tariff protection to stay afloat.84 Not surprisingly, sugar industrialists found that their economic goals could be better achieved by taking part in electoral politics. Even more relevant to this study is that a powerful group of sugar industrialists took their politics to the cultural arena and became directly involved in a massive project of folk-lore research and education. In the middle of this project, the ethnicity of the Calchaquí people again became an issue of speculation, this time by defining them as “whites.”

Ernesto E. Padilla, sugar mill owner, industry leader, and Conservative governor of Tucumán between 1912 and 1916, was the first politician to under-stand the political usages of the rural culture of his province. During his tenure at the provincial executive branch, he developed several projects to preserve the

82. David Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1983); Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1997).

83. Whisnant, All That Is Native, 6.84. Guy, Argentine Sugar Politics, 91 – 97, 113 – 17.




archaeological sites in the valleys as well as current practices such as the pro-duction of local handmade textiles. Later he moved to Buenos Aires, where he represented the province of Tucumán in the National Congress, which did not seem to present an obstacle to his continued advocacy of the sugar industry. He was also very much involved in the public education system and cultural institu-tions, being appointed minister of education in 1930 and later chair of the Board of Education of Buenos Aires. Between 1920 and 1940, Padilla led a power-ful clan of sugar industrialists and conservative politicians from the northwest, which had direct control over the Ministry of Education, the National Board of Education, and the University of Tucumán. This structure facilitated Padilla’s plan to create a corpus of national folklore that emphasized the northwest, the Calchaquí valley in particular, as the center of authentic Argentine culture.

The story of the cultural intervention of the sugar industry in the Calchaquí valley plays out as a perfect metaphor of the white Argentina myth. In Con-gress, Deputy Padilla and fellow Tucumán representative Juan Simón Padrós fought to obtain a legal recognition of the sugar industry as a “white industry.” This unusual label had nothing to do with the color of the product but with the ethnicity of the workers who toiled in fields and mills. Padilla and Padrós invoked the example of Australia, which in 1914 included the sugar industry under the “White Australia Act,” banning Aboriginal and Melanesian workers and receiving in compensation protective tariffs against cheap Javanese sugar.85 Argentines wanted similar protection against Cuban and Brazilian sugar, which, according to the industrialists’ twisted explanation, competed favorably with Tucumán sugar because of the exploitation of “inferior races.”86 Tucumán industrialists claimed to be forced to hire only white criollo workers, “whose higher living standards could not be compared to the colored workers of Java, Hawaii, etc.”87 The industrialists took pride in providing jobs for the large cri-ollo population of the northwest but demanded a protective tariff in recognition of their patriotic commitment. The industrialists obtained the legal protection

85. Emilio Schleh, La industria azucarera (Buenos Aires: Ferrari Hermanos, 1935), 58; “La cuestión azucarera,” La Industria Azucarera 169 (1917): 20; Kay Saunders, Workers in Bondage: The Origins and Bases of Unfree Labour in Queensland, 1824 – 1916 (St. Lucía: Univ. of Queensland Press, 1982).

86. República Argentina, Cámara de Diputados, “Investigación parlamentaria sobre la actuación del diputado nacional ingeniero Juan Simón Padrós,” in Compilación legal sobre el azúcar, ed. Emilio Schleh (Buenos Aires: Centro Azucarero Nacional, 1943).

87. “Los salarios de los trabajadores rurales en Luisiana y en Tucumán,” La Industria Azucarera 235 (1922): 183.




they desired in 1928, when the federal government created a special regime for the industry based on the principles of “white industry.”88

Industrialists had to brace against mounting criticism from the Left, which mocked the argument of the businessmen, noting that Tucumán workers received very few of the purported benefits created by the special protection. Furthermore, the metropolitan leftist press consistently defined the sugar work-ers as either indigenous or dark-skinned criollos.89 To counter those attacks, the industrialists supplied the sympathetic press with articles showing off the supposed benefits workers enjoyed in the sugar mills and claiming that workers were white criollos (perhaps counting on the deficient early twentieth-century graphic technology).90 To reinforce their argument from a cultural point of view, the sugar industrialists recruited a group of sympathetic folklorists who, for their own academic motives, were interested in demonstrating that the rural culture of the northwest was purely Spanish and Catholic rather than indig-enous and pagan.

Prominent in this group were ballad collector Juan Alfonso Carrizo, his assistant Bruno Jacovella, and ethnomusicologist Isabel Aretz. This group toured the entire northwest between 1928 and 1943, amassing an enormous quantity of ethnographic data, which they published in several volumes lavishly financed by the Sugar Industry Association.91 Carrizo’s and Aretz’s contribu-tion to Argentine folklore was too vast and complex to call it simply a prop for the sugar industry’s obscure designs. But it calls attention to the researchers’ insistence, most evident in Carrizo’s case, on denying any non-Western influ-ence in the makeup of the northwestern rural culture. Carrizo, himself a north-westerner of mixed ancestry, goes as far as to assert that the vast majority of the criollo population in Tucumán was purely descended from colonial Spanish settlers.92 He even specifies that in the Calchaquí valley a few people were mes-tizos, but otherwise Carrizo tends to identify Calchaquíes as criollos, defined as

88. Laudo dictado por el presidente de la Nación en el conflicto cañero-industrial de Tucumán (Buenos Aires: Centro Azucarero Argentino, 1928), 6.

89. La Vanguardia, 25 June 1904; Tierra Libre, July 1928, p. 3; Tierra Libre, Feb. 1928, p. 4.

90. El Orden, 29 Jan. 1927, p. 4.91. Aretz, Música tradicional argentina; Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Tucumán; Juan

Alfonso Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Salta (Buenos Aires: A. Baiocco y cía., 1933); Juan Alfonso Carrizo, “Trovas de la independencia recogidas en Salta y Jujuy,” La Prensa, 25 May 1933; Juan Alfonso Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Jujuy (Tucumán: M. Violetto, 1934); Juan Alfonso Carrizo, Cancionero popular de La Rioja (Buenos Aires: A. Baiocco y cía., 1942).

92. Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Tucumán, 1:11.




descendents of colonial Spanish settlers. Carrizo, who had studied the colonial documents of the Spanish conquest of the valley in the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries, claimed that the indigenous population had been annihilated or dispersed and replaced by pure-blooded Spaniards, an interpretation that nei-ther the documents nor common sense allows.

Indeed, Carrizo sufficiently proves that a large number of Calchaquí bal-lads, sayings, and riddles were nothing but local versions of European Span-ish folklore. Different versions of such Spanish lore existed across the Spanish Americas, from Texas to Chile, as Carrizo’s erudite footnotes inform us, but that did not make all the Spanish speakers of the western hemisphere white. Carrizo preferred to ignore this contradiction in his argument and, building on then-current diffusionism, concluded that if Calchaquí people sang seventeenth- century Spanish ballads it was because they were descendents of Spanish con-quistadors. His protectors in the sugar industry were elated with Carrizo’s theory and findings. One of them, Alberto Rouges, owner of the Santa Rosa sugar mill, wrote a flattering preface for Carrizo’s folklore collection, praising it as the discovery of the Spanish roots of Argentine culture buried under the avalanche of cosmopolitanism that had swept the country since 1880. In fact, as the private letters exchanged among Rouges, Carrizo, and Padilla suggest, it was Rouges himself who suggested this hypothesis to Carrizo and directed him for the greater part of his fieldwork.

This way of representing Calchaquí culture directly affected the works of Augusto Raúl Cortazar, the most respected Argentine folklorist at that time. In 1944, Cortazar obtained a folklore grant from the Culture Commission, a federal agency, to study the folklore of the Calchaquí valley with the help of Carrizo, who was a member of the committee that awarded the grant.93 Cortazar had earlier published a book on the “cultural influences in Argentine folklore.” In this volume, Cortazar seemed to agree with the Latin American ideology of mestizaje, which defines Latin American culture as a mixture of indigenous and Iberian elements (he does not mention the African part). However, when he narrows down this definition to the Argentine case, he finds that “looking at the cases of indigenous survival in our time, if we confronted them with the total-ity of our present civilization, we will realize their minuscule contribution and exceptional character. . . . Considering only the popular sector . . . I believe that

93. Argentine Republic, Comisión Nacional de Cultura: Su labor en 1944 (Buenos Aires: Comisión Nacional de Cultura, 1945), 25 – 26.




evidence shows that the physiognomy, the lifestyle [tono de vida], the political, economic, and legal organization is generally European.”94

When Cortazar published the results of his fieldwork in the Calchaquí val-ley in a monograph on the Calchaquí carnival, he introduced the book with a long (and rather interesting) analysis of the Mediterranean origins of the pre-Lent carnival to which, later in the book, he attributed carnival rituals in the valleys.95 Thus, Cortazar followed Carrizo’s emphasis on the European roots of Calchaquí culture.

Carrizo’s characterization of northwestern folklore as Spanish, and there-fore white, became an axiom for the two following decades, mostly because Carrizo and his assistant Jacovella controlled the Institute of Tradition, later called the Institute of Folklore, which was the source of federal funding for folklore research. But the wishful denial of the indigenous roots of the Cal-chaquí valley thrived in a soil fertilized with the myth of white Argentina — the same myth that sugar industrialists cleverly used to obtain protection for their industry.

It was not only academic folklorists who discovered this region. Popular folk musicians, who gained access to commercial radio after a decree by the mil-itary government in 1943, adopted musical styles from the northwestern valleys, especially the guitar and drum – based zamba, and adapted them to the tastes of wider audiences. Among a series of musicians and poets from Salta and Tucumán stands Hector Chavero, better known by his stage name Atahualpa Yupanqui, who reached wide recognition with his highly stylized folk rhythms and socially minded lyrics that celebrated the life of the rural criollos and evoked the arid but astonishing landscape of the Andean valleys. Many of his songs, especially “El arriero” (“The Cattle Driver”) and “Lunita tucumana” (“Tucumán’s Little Moon”) became staples in public school music lessons, introducing generations of Argentines to the northwestern folklore and inscribing in the collective iden-tity not just the name of the remote valley but respect and admiration for its people. In a way, the creolized and folklorized Calchaquí people traded the loss (however undesired) of an autonomous ethnic identity for a place in the sym-bolic core of the nation.

94. Augusto Raúl Cortazar, Confluencias culturales en el folklore argentino (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1944), 61 – 63.

95. Augusto Raúl Cortazar, El carnaval en el folklore calchaquí, con una breve exposición sobre la teoría y la práctica del método folklórico integral (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1949).




Conclusion

In his 2002 ethnography of the Calchaquí town of Amaicha, Alejandro Isla enu-merates eight alternative ways residents describe themselves and their neighbors, including the terms comuneros, lugareños, aborígenes, gauchos, criollos, Calchaquíes, Tucumanos, and Argentinos.96 These overlapping categories reflect not just the flexibility of self-identification but also the historical process of creolization in the Calchaquí valley. From being a stronghold of indigenous resistance against the Spanish, the valley was slowly but effectively integrated into the colonial economy and, later, into the nation-state. Integration into the nation-state, ini-tiated at the time of the War of Independence and buttressed by the interven-tion of the public schools, brought about important changes in the way the state classified the Calchaquí people.

In this article I have analyzed the process of creolization of the Calchaquí communities, taking into account the political, legal, and economic changes that framed the transition from indigenous to criollo as well as the academic discourses that assimilated the valley’s peoples and cultures into the national imaginary. Following the examples of work on Colombia, Nicaragua, and Peru by authors such as Peter Wade, Charles Hale, Jeffrey Gould, Nancy Appel-baum, and Marisol de la Cadena, I have sought to demonstrate that Argentina also participated in the same general trend of simplifying the ethnic diversity in the country by assimilating smaller groups into a national totality. The main difference is that while in other Latin American countries the mainstream was defined as mestizo, in Argentina it was defined as white. These policies of assim-ilation are most clearly seen in the Calchaquí valley.

In this region of the country, the political and legal processes of creoliza-tion started immediately after the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1810. Lawsuits brought to the civil courts of Tucumán show how indigenous people used the language of equal citizenship introduced by the patriots to lighten their burden of personal services traditionally due to the white settlers and to secure their lands against the encroachment of large estates. During the War of Independence, the incorporation of the Calchaquí people into the patriots’ army represented another step in the assimilation of the valley into the fledgling national community. Nevertheless, what may have made a greater impact in this process of creolization was the transformation of the Calchaquí peasants into a semiproletarian labor pool for the sugar industry. The annual migrations to the sugar plantations located in the lowlands of Tucumán, and to a lesser extent, of Salta, had the consequence of immersing the Calchaquí people in the cash

96. Isla, Los usos políticos de la identidad, 74.




economy. In the lowlands, entire Calchaquí families became exposed not just to the criollo culture of the lowlands but also to the nascent commercial popular culture imported from Buenos Aires. Equally determinant in the process of creolization was the creation of national schools in 1907, which imposed the national language as well as the official ideology of Argentine nationality.

At the turn of the century, as economic and cultural changes were distanc-ing the Calchaquí people from their indigenous past, a series of experts offered their views on Calchaquí ethnicity. A first group of anthropologists, based on their observations of cultural practices, defined the Calchaquíes as indigenous. Later, the teachers who reported to the National Board of Education described many of the same indigenous rituals noted by the anthropologists but defined the Calchaquíes as criollos. And finally, in the 1930s and 1940s, folklorists led by Carrizo not only defined the Calchaquíes as criollos but, emphasizing the Spanish ancestry of their culture, catapulted Calchaquí local culture to the spe-cial position of authentic Argentine folklore. In compliance with the myth of white Argentina to which Carrizo adhered, that authentic folk could be defined only as European. This scholarly discourse added force to the sugar industry’s efforts to define its workers as white and thus obtain special fiscal treatment from the federal government. The combination of legal, political, and economic pressures, together with an academic discourse that fostered assimilation but at the same time extolled the virtues of traditional culture, explains how the Cal-chaquíes lost their indigenous status in a little more than a century.

It should be noted that, despite the steps taken to assimilate the Calchaquí people into the Argentine mainstream, the issue of how they identified them-selves remained unresolved. Calchaquíes preserved several of the practices and beliefs that would allow them to identify as Andean indigenous people. For instance, the cult of Pachamama, still practiced today, and some specific forms of magic and faith healing connect them with the larger Andean world. They also acknowledged that the pre-Columbian ruins were built by their ancestors and resisted the desecration of burial sites by archaeologists. Furthermore, the community of Amaicha retained its communal landholding. However, neither the preservation of communal land nor of traditions and beliefs guaranteed the survival of indigenous identity. Isla reported that some Calchaquíes would be offended if they were called “indios.” At present, this trend has reversed, and the growing emphasis on multiculturalism is encouraging many Calchaquí people to reassert themselves as indigenous.97

97. I observed this tendency to reclaim indigenous identity among local intellectuals in my interviews with members of Cooperativa Amauta in Los Sazos, Tucumán, in 2002.




Defining an ethnic group is a matter of power, often of competing pow-ers. The borders and contents of an ethnic group are shaped by the interplay between the members of the group and forces such as the state, academia, and economic elites. Government officials, folklorists, teachers, and missionaries, among others, have usually decided the ethnicity of the country’s minorities without soliciting their opinion. Folklorists, in particular, took the lead in rede-fining the Calchaquí people. Since the task of constructing a folkloric canon was undertaken when the foundational myth of white Argentina was still hege-monic, there was little chance that the Calchaquí people, identified by the folk-lorists as one of the most authentic Argentine folk societies, could have been defined as anything but criollo.



Documents

Indigenous or Criollo the Myth of White Argentina in Tucumán’s Calchaquí Valley