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9 - The savage outside of White Argentina
- from PART II - RACE AND NATION IN THE NEW CENTURY
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- By Gastón Gordillo, University of British Columbia
- Edited by Paulina Alberto, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Eduardo Elena, University of Miami
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- Book:
- Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina
- Published online:
- 05 March 2016
- Print publication:
- 21 March 2016, pp 241-267
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- Chapter
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Summary
In early December 2013, several urban centers in Argentina experienced a wave of turmoil that brought to light the sensibilities that have historically racialized the national geography – a racialization whose existence has long been denied by Argentine official discourse. In the province of Córdoba, thousands of police officers demanded a salary increase by withdrawing from the streets and remaining in their barracks, while undercover officers instigated the looting of stores in order to create a public demand for their presence. The news of the lack of police repression quickly spread, and thousands of men and women from poor neighborhoods began storming stores and supermarkets to grab anything they could, from food to television sets. The unrest spread to other provinces, most notably Tucumán, where the same pattern of a police walkout and subsequent looting unfolded. With several cities shaken by riots, a significant portion of the population felt that the streets were dissolving amid a vortex formed by the expansiveness of los negros [the blacks] – the racialized term used in contemporary Argentina to name the poor and people of indigenous or mestizo [mixed] background.
On the streets as well as in social media and the online forums of Argentine newspapers, thousands of people called for the violent extermination of “esos negros de mierda [those fucking blacks].” Armed vigilantes promptly began shooting at “los negros” as if the latter were savage hordes determined to overrun settlers circling the wagons on a hostile frontier. When La Nación (Argentina's leading conservative newspaper) informed its readers that “a young man” was shot dead in Córdoba, marking the first deadly victim of the violence, most readers posting comments on the paper's online edition celebrated his death as an act of civilizing justice. Many objected to the use of the phrase “a young man” to name what was just a negro. One reader further dehumanized the victim by declaring, “Too bad it's only one. I wish there were two hundred negros dead.” Similar comments flooded Twitter under the hashtag #Negros de mierda. When the violence subsided two days later – after the federal government sent forces to Córdoba and the provincial government there and in Tucumán acquiesced to police demands – over ten people were dead and hundreds were wounded.
Longing for Elsewhere: Guaraní Reterritorializations
- Gastón Gordillo
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- Journal:
- Comparative Studies in Society and History / Volume 53 / Issue 4 / October 2011
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 04 October 2011, pp. 855-881
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- Article
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In September 2003, dozens of Guaraní families from the town of Hipólito Yrigoyen in northwest Argentina decided to take back La Loma, the forested hill that stands at the edge of town and from where they had been expelled decades earlier by the San Martín del Tabacal sugar plantation. On the verge of a cliff from where they could see the town and behind it the sugarcane fields, men, women, and children began clearing a space near their old cemetery in order to plant and begin building homes. In their makeshift camp, people raised an Argentinean flag and erected signs that read “Our Land” and “Argentinean Land.” The participants in the takeover whom I talked to a few months later remembered that their return to La Loma generated an enormous collective enthusiasm and the hope of living “like before,” working the land, raising animals, and free from the urban poverty and overcrowding of Hipólito Yrigoyen. However, six days later, when over a hundred people had gathered in the dark around a bonfire, police officers stormed the place shouting, “Move out!” Some officers accused them of being “undocumented Bolivians”; others asked where the Argentinean flag was, offended the flag was there. Twenty men and two women were arrested, handcuffed, and forced to walk single file down the hill, in an atmosphere of screams and scuffles that included shots in the air and the beating of a young man. A person from the community recalled what the plantation spokesperson subsequently said about their claim, based on the fact that many of their ancestors were plantation workers who came from Bolivia: “What do these immigrants think they're asking for? They should go ask for land in Bolivia.”