Fictions about the indigenous body: La Martina Chapanay

Abstract

The paper herein stemmed from my attachment and approach to Warpe struggle by associating historical processes and non-fiction literature to investigations of contemporary, historical and patrimonial production and apprehension of the indigenous body. This investigation is about the figure called "La Martina Chapanay''. For this purpose, my analysis especially takes into account the following texts of three different authors: La Chapanay (1884) written by Pedro Echagüe, Martina Chapanay. Realidad y mito (1962) written by Marcos Estrada and Martina Chapanay, montonera del Zonda (2000) written by Mabel Pagano. This selection not only responds to a cluster approach, due to the fact that it focuses on describing the indigenous body, but also, it responds to a discursive approach, since this analysis of narrative texts is done under biographic terms, focusing on the way that each fiction (re)writes, names, silences, humiliates and claims La Martina's body. Herein, I use he word fictions in a broad cultural sense that involves not only discursive but also ideological constructions (Arnés, 2016). In this regard, I notice in these texts that some particular historical clusters of alterity, otherness (Briones, 2005) work around the production of meanings about the Warpe body as a historical and collective subject.