Discursos de aboriginalidad entre los lule-vilela del MOCASE. Tensiones entre la demanda estatal de etnicidad y apertura indigenista de las identidades criollas

• Main Author: Pablo Concha Merlo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centro Científico y Tecnológico-CONICET, Mendoza & Universidad Nacional de La Pampa 2021-06-01
• Series: Corpus: Archivos Virtuales de la Alteridad Americana
• Subjects: Aboriginality; ethnic identity; Lule-Vilela; peasant-indigenous; social movements.
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/corpusarchivos/4600

This article is based on an ethnographic work carried out between 2014 and 2019. It reflects on the characteristics assumed by the discourses of aboriginality between members of the Peasant Movement of Santiago del Estero-Via Campesina (MOCASE-VC) ascribed to the Lule-Vilela ethnic identity, in the Copo and Alberdi departments of the Argentine province of Santiago del Estero. The objective is to track, describe and analyze mobilized signifiers in order to present themselves in different contexts of daily life, as members of said indigenous ethnic group, and the relationship of these identity practices with hegemonic processes that model them, such as national/provincial formations of alterity and the current processes of fragmentation of the identity space on a global scale. The sustained argument claims that discursive constructions highlight a productive oscillation between two forms assumed by said identity. On the one hand, it is possible to observe the predominance of a more accentuated ethnic-political ascription, whose emergence takes shape in contexts of political-legal demand to state institutions. On the other, it is possible to observe a budding indigenism as an alternative form of politics of alterity, whose discursive circulation acquires a greater presence within the networks of the movement. In the context of this indigenous opening of local Creole identities, nodal signifiers such as peasant-indigenous, descendant, and race / blood are analyzed.