Indigenous peoples in Argentina
Argentina has thirty-five indigenous groups or Argentine Amerindians, according to the Complementary Survey of the Indigenous Peoples of 2004,[1] in the first attempt in more than a hundred years that the government tried to recognize and classify the population according to ethnicity. In the survey, based on self-identification or self-ascription, around 600,000 Argentines declared to be Amerindian or first-generation descendants of Amerindians, that is, 1.6% of the population. The most populous of these were the Mapuche, Kolla, Toba, Guaraní, Wichí, Diaguita, Mocoví, and Huarpe peoples.[1] Many Argentines also claim at least one indigenous ancestor: in a recent genetic study conducted by the University of Buenos Aires, more than 56% of the 320 Argentines sampled were shown to have at least one Amerindian ancestor, of which 10% had Amerindian ancestors in both parental lineages.[2] Jujuy Province, in the Argentine Northwest, is home to the highest percentage of households (11%) with at least one indigenous person or a direct descendant of an indigenous people; Chubut and Neuquén Provinces, in Patagonia, have upwards of 8%.[3]
Prehistory
The earliest evidence of indigenous peoples in what today is Argentina yet discovered is the Piedra Museo archaeological site in Santa Cruz Province, found to date from 11,000 BCE.[4] The Cueva de las Manos, in the same province, is over 10,000 years old.[5] Both are among the oldest evidence of indigenous culture in the Americas, and have, with a number of similarly ancient sites elsewhere in the hemisphere, challenged the "Clovis First" hypothesis on the settlement of the Americas (the assumption, based on lacking evidence to the contrary, that the Clovis culture was the first in the Western Hemisphere).[6]
History
By the 1500 year, there were many different indigenous communities in modern Argentina. They were not an unified group but many different ones, with varied languages, developments and relations with each others. As a result, they did not face the arrival of the Spanish colonization as a single block, and had varied reactions towards the Europeans. The Spanish people were highly racist to the indigenous populations, to the point that they holded in doubt that they had souls. For this reason, they kept very little historical information about them.[7]
In the XIX century major population movements altered the original Patagonian demography. Between 1820 and 1850 the original Tehuelche people were conquered and expelled from their territories by invading Mapuche armies. By 1870 most of northern Patagonia and the south east Pampas were Araucanized.[8] During the Generation of 1880, European immigration was strongly encouraged as a way of occupying an empty territory, configuring the national population and, through their colonizing effort, gradually incorporating the nation into the world market. These changes were perhaps best summarized by the anthropological metaphor which states that “Argentines descend from ships.” [9] The expansion of European immigrant communities and the railways westward into the Pampas and south into Patagonia was met with Malón raids by displaced tribes. This led to the Conquest of the Desert in the 1870s, which resulted in over 1,300 indigenous dead.[10][11] Indigenous cultures in Argentina were consequently affected by a process of invisibilization, promoted by the government during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th.[12]
The extensive explorations, research and writing by Juan Bautista Ambrosetti and other ethnographers during the 20th century encouraged wider interest in indigenous people in Argentina, and their contributions to the nation's culture were further underscored during the administration of President Juan Perón in the 1940s and 1950s as part of the rustic criollo culture and values exalted by Perón during that era.[13] Discriminatory policies toward these people and other minorities officially ended, moreover, with the August 3, 1988, enactment of the Antidiscrimination Law (Law 23.592) by President Raúl Alfonsín,[14] and were countered further with the establishment of a government bureau, the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Racism (INADI), in 1995.[15] Corrientes Province, in 2004, became the first in the nation to award an indigenous language (Guaraní) with co-official status,[16] and all 35 native peoples were recognized by both the 2004 Indigenous Peoples Census and by their inclusion as self-descriptive categories in the 2010 census; indigenous communities and Afro-Argentines thus became the only groups accorded any recognition as ethnic categories by the 2010 census.[17]
Indigenous groups by region
Northeast
This region includes the provinces of Chaco, Corrientes, Entre Ríos, Formosa, Misiones, Santa Fe, and parts of Santiago del Estero Province.
Northwest
This region includes the provinces of Catamarca, Jujuy, La Rioja, Salta, San Juan, parts of Santiago del Estero Province, and Tucumán.
Central
This region includes the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and the provinces of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, La Pampa, Mendoza, and San Luis.
South
This region includes the provinces of Chubut, Neuquén, Río Negro, Santa Cruz, and Tierra del Fuego.
See also
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Indigenous peoples of the Americas portal |
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Argentina portal |
References
- ^ a b Encuesta Complementaria de Pueblos Indígenas
- ^ [1]Estructura genética de la Argentina, Impacto de contribuciones genéticas - Ministerio de Educación de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Nación
- ^ Indec. Porcentaje de hogares por provincia que se reconoce descendiente de un pueblo indígena (Spanish)
- ^ Welcome Argentina: Expediciones Arqueológicas en Los Toldos y en Piedra Museo (Spanish)
- ^ Cueva de las Manos. UNESCO WHC website.
- ^ Smithsonian: Paleoamerican Origins
- ^ Galasso, pp. 111-112
- ^ Neuquén: Los pueblos originarios y los posteriores part I, part II
- ^ Trinchero, H. (2006). The genocide of indigenous peoples in the formation of the Argentine Nation-State1. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(2), 121-135. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
- ^ "Argentina Desert War 1879–1880". Onwar.com. 2003. http://www.onwar.com/aced/data/alpha/argentina1879.htm.
- ^ Jens Andermann. "Argentine Literature and the 'Conquest of the Desert', 1872–1896". Birkbeck, University of London. http://www.bbk.ac.uk/llc/subjects/span_lat_amer/span_lat_amer_staff/ja. Retrieved 2009-09-02.
- ^ Miguel Alberto Bartolomé, «Los pobladores del “desierto”», Amérique Latine Histoire et Mémoire, Numéro 10-2004 - Identités: positionnements des groupes indiens en Amérique Latine, -En ligne-, mis en ligne le 21 février 2005. Consulté le 9 septembre 2006; Navarro Floria, Pedro: "Un país sin indios: la imagen de la Pampa y la Patagonia en la geografía naciente del Estado Argentino", en Scripta Nova Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de Barcelona.- Noviembre (No. 51): 1999.- ISSN 1138-9788
- ^ Karush, Matthew, and Chamosa, Oscar (2010). "The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid-Twentieth Century". Duke University Press. http://books.google.com/books?id=IXQ-EW2IVBsC&pg=PA113&lpg=PA113&dq=Peron+%2Bcriollos&source=bl&ots=qGLW4nQN22&sig=4t7jD9DshghZOdEX_ZLQcUBBDUA&hl=en&ei=LhS6TfLnE8yjtgfnovjdBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false.
- ^ Ley 23.592 Antidiscriminatoria (Spanish)
- ^ Sitio oficial del instituto Nacional contra la Discriminación (INADI) (Spanish)
- ^ Ley Provincial Nº 5.598, Corrientes (Spanish)
- ^ INDEC. Censo 2010. (Spanish)
- ^ a b c d "Indigenous Peoples in Argentina." International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. (retrieved 28 April 2011)
Bibliography
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