Dynamics in a frontier society

Tandil, Argentina, 1840-1880

Abstract

Until the second decade of the 19th century, the territory south of the Río Salado was indigenous. Twenty-five years later, immigrants began to arrive in the center of the territory (Tandil) that would later become the province of Buenos Aires. Specialists in indigenous peoples and immigrants have come a long way in understanding them since the early 1980s. However, while some needed to atomize the object of study by nationality and even regionalisms, the others placed a mostly anthropological emphasis on studying important cacicatos while advancing in categories that allowed unraveling an indigenous world that was believed to be heterogeneous. A third group analyzed and discussed ideas about the criollos, discovering that the gaucho was an almost exotic character and that he was talked about without going into his abysmal distance between the local elite and the poor, deprived of any possibility until 1880.

The gaze was binary: indigenous and criollo, while the foreigners moved on stage like actors accompanied by the light of a
reflector, as in the opera. We propose to advance in a holistic view, taking the Basque case as a witness, taking historicity into
account and reviewing the documentation in search of energizing the whole. Also, to recover the substantial relationship with
an environment that was presented until some time ago as a suggestive scenery, with exceptions regarding the indigenous world.