Dissents in the southern border – 19th century

Abstract

The unfinished and partially published manuscripts of Santiago Avendaño, interpreter and mediator between the Pampa Indians and the civil and military Christian society, were produced between 1854 and the beginning of the 1870s, in the marginal space of the southern border and from another edge, that of its author, ex-captive of hesitant identity that acted between two worlds, generating perhaps mistrust in both. In these borders, the Manuscripts elaborate a double critical gesture: rupture with the doxa that confined the Indians to barbarism, establishing their inability to access any form of civilization, and dissent, hardly manifested, with the weaknesses of the nation-state that was being formed after Caseros.

To investigate the hesitations and contradictions of a complex approach text, we have chosen, whithin the framework of the discourse analysis and according to the methodology proposed by E. Arnoux (2006), to follow the nation object and its components, narrowing that search in this article to a fragment that shows an episode of maximum tension between local officials accused of corruption and a tribe of Indian friends. The double critical gesture is articulated with the construction of the damaged homeland object. The Manuscripts show in this search a double vocation of testimony: that of the native populations of the Pampas experience, on their way to the place of ethnic minority that the budding nation state was preparing for them, and that of the positions of its author who defended confusingly an inclusive nation project.