//////////////////// The Afterlife of Destruction

Gastón R. Gordillo
© 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Typeset in Minion by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gordillo, Gastón.
Rubble : the afterlife of destruction / Gastón R. Gordillo.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5619-6 (pbk : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5614-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Gran Chaco—Antiquities.  2. Ruins, Modern—
Gran Chaco.  3. Rubble—Gran Chaco.  4. Indians of
South America—Gran Chaco—Government relations. 
5. Collective memory—Gran Chaco.  I. Title.
f2876.g67 2014
982'.301—dc23 2014001932

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of

the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

Frontis: Detail of map of the Gran Chaco

by Father Joaquin Camaño (1789).

Cover: AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko

For Shaylih
Mankind is merely the experimental material, the
tremendous surplus of failures: a field of ruins.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Only in traces and ruins . . . is there ever hope of

coming across genuine and just reality.
—Theodor Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy”
 Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Constellations  1

Part One  |  Ghosts of Indians

One A Haunted Frontier 31
Two On the Edge of the Void  53

Part Two  |  Lost Cities

The Destruction of Space 77

Three Land of Curses and Miracles 85
Four The Ruins of Ruins 111

Part Three  |  Residues of a Dream World

Treks across Fields of Rubble 125

Five Ships Stranded in the Forest 131
Six Bringing a Destroyed Place Back to Life 153
Seven Railroads to Nowhere 169
 Part Four  |  The Debris of Violence
Bright Objects 185

Eight Topographies of Oblivion 191
Nine Piles of Bones 209
Ten The Return of the Indians 229

Conclusion: We Aren’t Afraid of Ruins 253

Notes 271

References 287

Index 303
Acknowledgments

I first began thinking about the project that led to this book when in 1999 I
learned through various media accounts that Professor Alfredo Tomasini,
from the Universidad de La Plata, was investigating the heavily overgrown
debris of old Spanish towns and Jesuit stations on the western edge of the
Argentine Chaco. By then, I had been doing research elsewhere in the Chaco
for over a decade, and, like many others, I assumed that “nothing remained”
of those places. The news of the ongoing resilience of those ruins piqued my
curiosity. The rest, as the expression goes, is history. Years later, in 2007, I
met Alfredo Tomasini in the field in Quebrachal, and we had a stimulating
dialogue about our respective explorations of rubble, in his case as a histori-
cal archaeologist. While his passion for the preservation of the places he has
studied and rescued from oblivion may prevent him from agreeing with some
of the points made about ruins in this book, I want to acknowledge my ad-
miration for his archaeological work as well as the way he inspired me to do
ethnographic research on the social afterlife and politics of rubble.
My deepest gratitude goes to the many men and women who opened their
homes to me at the foot of the Andes and in the Chaco and generously helped
me navigate the geographies and nodes of rubble examined in this book.
While this is an open list, I want to acknowledge, in particular, Agustín del
Río and Eduardo Poma in Metán; Miguel Teseyra, Juan Angel Albud, and
Hipólito Corvalán in Río Piedras; José Velárdez, Benito Guzmán, Liliana
Guzmán, Benito Paz, and especially Nilo Rodríguez in El Galpón; Oscar and
Carlos Moya in Balbuena; Toto Sarmiento, Alfredo Parada, Mercedes Parada,
and especially Alejandrina Saravia, Juan Saravia (Sr.), and Juan Saravia (Jr.)
on the ranches around Chorroarín; Tony Jeréz and Roberto Beleizán in
Joaquín V. González; Armando Orquera in Las Lajitas; Leonor Kuhn, Jorge
xii | Acknowledgments

Miy, and Julia Alsogaray in El Piquete; Dardo Díaz, Luis Alberto Romero,
Pedro Correa, Gabriel Acosta, and Julio López in Rivadavia and Santa Rosa;
Cristián Molina in El Fuerte; Miguel Farías in Gaona; Beto Moreno and Félix
Moreno in Quebrachal; Policarpio Fernández and his family in El Vencido;
Juan Moreno, Néstor Numacata, and the late Jobino Sierra e Iglesias in San
Pedro de Jujuy; Dominga Mendieta in Chalicán; and Santos Vergara, Riqui
Zarra, Dardo Díaz, Leandro Alagastino, and Pocho Sucumba in Orán. In El
Galpón, Horacio Thomas and Luis Caram went out of their way to assist me
with invaluable documents and generously shared their time and insights
with me. In San Pedro de Jujuy and Libertador General San Martín, Omar
Jeréz’s enthusiastic support helped open many doors. In the city of Jujuy, Ana
Teruel’s knowledge of the history of the western Chaco helped me navigate
several of the places I describe in this book. Special thanks to Oscar Delgado
and Carlos Ordóñez, who introduced me to and taught me about the rubble
created by agribusiness around Apolinario Saravia and General Pizarro.
This book has benefited enormously from colleagues and friends who gave
me critical feedback about the manuscript in whole or in parts. My dialogues
with Jon Beasley-Murray about the politics of affect and about ruins, their
negativity, and their affirmative resilience were particularly influential. I was
very fortunate to have as interlocutors two of the most important scholars
currently working on ruins and ruination: Ann Stoler and Anna Tsing. Their
poignant questions and comments were crucial to refine my argument. I
am particularly grateful to Anna Tsing for teaching one of the last drafts of
this manuscript in her seminar at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
and for giving me the opportunity to personally discuss its contents with
her students. Lucas Bessire’s careful reading of the manuscript and our dia-
logues about “the labor of the negative” in relation to the Gran Chaco were
particularly important. My reviewers from Duke University Press provided
invaluable insights and suggestions. I am particularly grateful to Mary Weis-
mantel for forwarding me her thought-­provoking review. I believe this book
is better because she challenged me to go further. Valerie Millholland, my
editor at Duke, was supportive of this project from the start. My conversations
with Axel Lazzari, and his outstanding dissertation at Columbia University,
are inseparable from my ideas about phantom Indians. Of the many other
people whose observations or assistance contributed to this book, I want to
thank Alfredo González-­Ruibal, Diego Escolar, Tania Li, Hugh Raffles, John
Comaroff, Elizabeth Ferry, Nikete Della Penna, Gustavo Verdesio, Benjamin
 Acknowledgments | xiii

Noys, Courtney Booker, Lena Mortensen, Julie Hollowell, Andrew Martin-

dale, Mark Healey, Alec Dawson, Daniel Manson, Clayton Whitt, Huma
Mohibullah, and Ana Vivaldi.
While I was working on the final revisions, I presented the core argument
of Rubble to very receptive and challenging audiences and benefited from
their extraordinary comments, questions, and criticisms. I am particularly
grateful to Akhil Gupta and Jessica Cattelino at the Department of Anthro-
pology, University of California, Los Angeles; Marie-­Eve Carrier Moisan and
Alexis Shotwell at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton
University; John Burdick, Thomas Perreault, and Justin Reed at the sympo-
sium “The Latin American City” at Syracuse University; Anna Tsing, Andrew
Matthews, Lisa Rofel, and Stephanie McCallum at the Department of An-
thropology, University of California, Santa Cruz; and Jake Kosek and Gillian
Hart at the Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley,
where I also benefited from conversations with my colleague and comrade
Don Moore.
Fieldwork for this project was made possible by a generous grant from
the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc). A
Hampton Grant from the University of British Columbia funded my prelim-
inary fieldwork in 2003. I began writing this book at the Bellagio Residence
and Study Center, in Bellagio, Italy, in April 2007, where I benefited from the
best imaginable setting to begin writing and organizing my thoughts around
what eventually became Rubble. I thank the Rockefeller Foundation for the
opportunity and the talented scholars and artists with whom I shared my
ideas, as well as Pilar Palaciá for being such a gracious host. The completion
of this book was made possibly by the support of the John Simon Memorial
Guggenheim Foundation, which granted me precious time for thinking and
writing.
But this book is what it is thanks, especially, to Shaylih Muehlmann: my
toughest and most supportive critic, and most important, the best companion
I could dream of on this haunting journey through fields of rubble.
map i.1. The western edge of the Argentine Gran Chaco in the provinces of Salta and
Santiago del Estero. Map by Eric Leinberger.
 Cognition of the object in its constellation
is cognition of the process stored in the object.
—Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectic

Introduction | Constellations

I
n the past decade, the expansion of agribusiness has submitted the forests
of northern Argentina to their largest and most accelerated devastation on
record. Private security guards and the police have evicted thousands of
people from their homes while bulldozers obliterated millions of trees with
one purpose in mind: to create soy fields. For regional living forms, human
and nonhuman, this spatial expansion of industrialized agriculture has been a
machine of destruction set to crush all obstacles to the maximization of prof-
its. In May 2003, I arrived at one of the hotspots of the “soy boom”: the area
in the province of Salta where the forests of the Gran Chaco plain meet the
foothills of the Andes. The action of bulldozers was then gaining momentum,
after the Argentine neoliberal bubble of the 1990s had burst the year before
amid a devastating recession. Ironically, my goal in being there was to begin
an ethnographic study of ruins. The debris I had in mind was not the one
produced by agribusiness, but rather those created by older histories of dis-
ruption associated with Spanish colonialism, like traces of forts and mission
stations. But I quickly learned that it was not possible to separate older ruins
from new ones, and not just because bulldozers were crushing older forms of
debris along with the new. In this confusion of traces from multiple eras, the
very notion of “ruins” began to feel inadequate. After exploring a relatively
wide region over four years while documenting the spatial and social legacy
of multiple forms of destruction, I gradually learned that a more useful way
to examine ruins in their myriad forms is to conceptually disintegrate them
2 | Introduction

and treat them as rubble. And this forced me to think of rubble from new
angles, and not simply as a set of objects but also as a concept.
This book examines rubble as a conceptual figure that can help us under-
stand the ruptured multiplicity that is constitutive of all geographies as they
are produced, destroyed, and remade. But because this concept is insepar­
able from the actual, textured nodes of debris I encountered on the western
edge of the Argentine Chaco, I use this introduction to present how I began
thinking about rubble not abstractly but spatially and ethnographically. That
experience exposed me to places so thoroughly constituted by rubble that I
was forced to rethink what space is, how it is produced, how it is destroyed,
and what is created by this destruction.
For several centuries, the geography that this book explores was a turbulent
frontier defined by multiple efforts on the part of the Spanish empire and sub-
sequently the Argentine state to defeat the indigenous insurgencies that until
the late 1800s controlled the Gran Chaco, the tropical lowlands that today
cover much of northern Argentina as well as eastern Paraguay and south-
east Bolivia. The landscape I encountered in 2003 had changed dramatically
since those days. The most important towns were relatively recent, most of
them created by the railroad expansion of the 1920s. Ranches raising cattle on
forested land had dominated the foothills since the 1800s and still prevailed
where the uneven topography keeps mechanized soy farms at bay. More
notably, indigenous people no longer lived in rural areas. The closest rural
indigenous villages are deeper in the Chaco, on the Bermejo River further
north. This region is known in the province of Salta as tierra gaucha, “gaucho
country,” the land of cowboys who self-­identify as criollos (a term that evokes
a mixed racial background) and who are presented by state commemorations
as the historical enemies of “the Indians of the Chaco.”
When I first arrived in this region, I wanted to explore to what degree
the overgrown ruins from the Spanish era strewn at the foot of the Andes
were meaningful to the criollo people living around them. While I wanted
to interrogate ruins as objects in which space, history, decay, and memory
coalesce, the meaning of the word ruin seemed transparent enough: a ma-
terial relic from the past. It was the alleged pastness of these objects that
began crumbling during that trip, as well as the boundedness I inadvertently
projected onto their materiality. There was one place that stood out in my
early reeducation away from ruins and toward rubble: the debris of what was
once a Jesuit station and that I eventually learned to see as the church of La
Manga.
 Introduction | 3

The Disintegrated Ruin

In the 1700s, the Jesuit order had a strong presence on the Chaco frontier
around the margins of the Juramento River (called Salado downstream). One
of its main mission stations was named San Juan Bautista de Balbuena. In my
first week in the region, I deduced the location of its ruins by comparing cur-
rent and historical maps. On Route 16, the main road connecting the moun-
tains to the Chaco, the presence of a village called Balbuena not far from the
Juramento River indicated that the name of the Jesuit station proved resilient
and that its ruins were probably nearby (see map I.2, page 12). People living
by the side of the road confirmed that the ruins were a few kilometers west of
Route 16, on a relatively difficult-­to-­reach cattle ranch amid forested hills and
creeks. The man who guided me there was Alfredo, in his fifties and a typical
gaucho. He and his wife lived about four kilometers from the site, tendering
cattle for an absentee landowner. I arrived at their home on foot, having left
my small rental car behind because deep potholes made the trail impassable.
Alfredo was an outspoken and animated man, and he promptly offered to
take me to the ruins, which he simply called la iglesia — “the church.”
We followed a trail in the forest for about an hour, and Alfredo shared
many personal anecdotes and stories about the church. The most intriguing
one was his reference to the fiestones, or “large parties,” that residents had
held out there in the past, which he described as exuberant events of a Diony-
sian nature. The dissonance between his depiction of festivity and my austere
image of a Jesuit mission led me to assume that he was referring to a legend,
a local myth of sorts. When the ruins finally emerged amid the vegetation, I
was in awe. The building was in remarkably good shape. This is, in fact, the
best-­preserved ruin from the days of the Spanish empire that currently exists
on the western edge of the Argentine Chaco. While the front of the church
had collapsed, the other walls stood about seven meters high. The altar was
well preserved, and a door to the right, leading to the sacristy, formed an arch
decorated with a stucco frame. Vegetation shrouded the place: vines crawled
on the walls and a tree stood at the center. I was thrilled, I realize now, because
those clearly delineated forms — walls, arches, an altar — contrasted sharply
with the mounds I had visited at other sites, where recognizable forms had
been reduced to rubble.
As we explored the site and I took photos, Alfredo emphasized that the
place was very old. “At least a hundred years,” he repeated several times. I
4 | Introduction

Figure I.1. At “the church” with Alfredo. Photo by author.

told him the place was even older, for it had been built “in the eighteenth
century.” My performance of erudition meant little to him. He pointed to the
tree standing in the middle of the church: “This tree must be a hundred years
old. This place is very old!” He then punched the stucco frame above the door
to the sacristy. A piece of stucco fell off. “See?” he said. He punched it again,
casually. Another section broke off. “Look, this place is really old! At least a
hundred years. These chunks come off easy!”
As Alfredo was calmly but enthusiastically eroding the materiality of the
wall, one punch at a time, I was horrified. My first impulse was to ask him
to stop that senseless destruction, but I felt paralyzed. I was puzzled by the
sudden realization of the chasm that existed between his view of the site and
my own disposition toward those ruins; I was also perplexed by the visceral
reaction I was having at the sight of minor damage being inflicted on that
wall. Alfredo’s casual punches and my physical discomfort revealed that each
of us had been socialized under culturally specific habits that predisposed us
to engage with material debris from the past in strikingly disparate ways. The
object that I considered a ruin, in sum, affected our bodies very differently.
Where Alfredo saw an abandoned church charged with stories and memories
that was so “old” that a punch was enough to make a dent in its walls, I saw a
 Introduction | 5

valuable historic site that demanded reverence, to the point that any damage
to it, however minute, amounted to a sacrilege of sorts.
That brief episode at the church with Alfredo was a moment of illumina-
tion that forced me to start questioning the dense genealogy of assumptions
about ruins that I was bringing to the field. It also confronted me with a ques-
tion of an ontological nature: what, exactly, is a ruin? Prior to visiting the site,
I knew of “the ruins of San Juan Bautista de Balbuena” only through books
and therefore as an abstraction about the past. My impulsive veneration of the
ruin’s form, in this regard, resulted from my affective distancing and bodily
estrangement from that place as an ancient relic. Alfredo, in contrast, inter-
acted with the site as part of his work and daily habits and thus experienced
it as something tangible, earthly, an old church. His casual punching of the
stucco revealed an engagement with an object that he was familiar with at a
sensuous, bodily level and that he did not perceive as a fetish to be revered.
In questioning my own abstracted veneration of the ruins’ material form, I
gradually learned to see such objects through the lens of the most concrete,
unglamorous term we have to name what is created by the destruction of
space: rubble. But this shift in perspective also forced me to do away with the
mainstream downgrading of rubble as shapeless, worthless debris, and in-
stead to explore rubble as textured, affectively charged matter that is intrinsic
to all living places.
The counterpoint between my disposition toward the materiality of the
church and Alfredo’s, however, was not the result of a dualistic opposition
between “elite mind” and “subaltern body,” as if my abstractions were not
embodied and as if his bodily contact with that object were not informed by
abstractions, if of a different sort. My visceral reaction to the punch revealed
that my abstractions about that ruin were profoundly bodily and affective.
And Alfredo’s physical engagement with the ruin drew from abstractions
of a religious yet immanent nature, which anticipated the type of subaltern
perceptions and critical abstractions that this book explores in detail. These
perceptions include awareness of the forces that have produced the rubble
of the present, and of the way these nodes of rubble form constellations
defined by their afterlife. My experience at the site also set the tone for the
affective analy­sis of rubble this book advocates: an analysis of how rubble
affects human bodies and, more important, of how the same object may af-
fect people with different class and cultural backgrounds very differently. My
approach to affect is inspired by Spinoza, but also moves past his vitalism to
6 | Introduction

engage the affective dimensions of matter through the negativity and ruptures
embodied in rubble.
The experience at the church prompted me to start exploring the sensory
multiplicity of rubble by way of submitting the concept of “the ruin” to what
Theodor Adorno called “a logic of disintegration.” In Negative Dialectics
Adorno highlighted the critical power of negativity to disintegrate the pos-
itivity of the given, of things as they seem to be, and thereby to undermine
any reified fantasy of a complete, seamless whole. He had learned from his
friend and mentor Walter Benjamin that the spectacle of positive spatial
forms is central to the “bourgeois dream-­world.” This is how Benjamin re-
ferred to capitalism’s ideological phantasmagoria, a ghostly positivity that he
saw crystallized in the architecture of nineteenth-­century Paris. Benjamin
and Adorno were particularly interested in ruins as allegories of a critical
disintegration of these allegedly positive objects, for the ruin is a clear trope of
destruction and negativity. My analysis draws from this Adornian and Benja-
minian project but pushes it further to critically interrogate the very concept
of the ruin and turn it to rubble. While “the ruin” certainly evokes rupture,
it also evokes a unified object that elite sensibilities often treat as a fetish that
ought not be disturbed. That was, in fact, the elite common sense with which
I began my research. This book seeks to show that this common sense is not
politically innocent, but founded on a disregard for the piles of rubble that
surround the objects that the heritage industry names “ruins.”

From Ruins to Rubble

One of the first things that I learned in my first weeks of fieldwork was that
my questions about ruinas (“ruins”) usually encountered blank stares. Most
people, especially in rural areas, simply did not understand what the word
ruin meant. I had to rephrase my question and ask again, this time about
“old walls” or “piles of old bricks”: in short, about what middle-­class visitors
would otherwise call “rubble.” Only then, when I specifically referred to the
concrete, textured physical forms adopted by rubble, they nodded and told
me about this or that site.
Local people’s estrangement from the concept of ruins and the distinct
spatial sensibility that lies behind it were brought home one day in July 2005,
when I was spending time with a family I befriended a few kilometers from
the ruins of the Jesuit mission of Balbuena. Like Alfredo, they called the place
“the church,” or more concretely “the church of La Manga,” after the name
 Introduction | 7

Figure I.2. The tower of Miraflores on the edge of soy fields. Photo by author.

of the cattle ranch it is on. A typical gaucho family, they owned a few head
of cattle but also worked for wages on cattle ranches and at a nearby wheat
farm, a symbol of changing times in which many cowboys also work part
time in agriculture. The landowner had given them oral permission to live
there and build their own corrals, a precarious arrangement that is common
in the region. Over dinner, Marcelo, the head of the family, referred to other
abandoned buildings near the church. His son Juan then asked me, “You call
those old houses ‘ruins,’ don’t you?” His question was disarming in its blunt
confirmation that the concept was alien to them. It was also clear that my use
of the word had piqued his curiosity. I said yes and Juan nodded, repeating
the word a couple times, ruinas, as if intrigued by its meaning. He seemed
amused that old houses could be referred to that way. It took me a while to
realize that what people found strange about the concept of “the ruin” is that
it is a homogenizing abstraction that does not resonate with the sensuous
texture of actual places and objects.
As is clear in the case of “the church of La Manga,” people throughout
the region referred to the sites that I abstracted as “ruins” using a language
that was inseparable from those sites’ tangible forms. The fifteen-­meter brick
structure that makes up what used to be the Jesuit mission of Miraflores is
locally called la torre de Miraflores (the tower of Miraflores). People call the
rubble of Esteco “the city of Esteco,” because of the many mounds that reveal
8 | Introduction

the layout of an old city. And the remains of Spanish forts, made up of mounds
or piles of bricks forming a walled perimeter, are called fuertes (forts).1
The absence of a concept of “ruins” and the use of terms that describe
the tangible form of rubble is, in fact, widespread among subaltern popula-
tions all over the world. Mayan people in Yucatán, Mexico, refer to the ruins
that dot the peninsula as xlapak (“old walls”) (Ginsberg 2004, 97). The cur-
rent names of many Mayan ruins that have become tourist sites are, in fact,
the descriptive terms that local people used to refer to them when they were
first excavated. Tulúm, for instance, means “the fort.” Likewise, Chacmultún
stands for “mounds made of red stone” and Labná for “abandoned house.”
These examples illustrate that local people do not see these sites as places of
transcendental value but as nodes of rubble on the ground. This also reminds
us that the places called “ruins” are always the ruins of something. In naming
a place after the something that has been destroyed, people in Yucatán and in
northern Argentina bring to light that the concept of “ruins” is alien to sub­
altern sensibilities partly because it abstracts the multiplicity of places, forms,
and textures that define actually existing nodes of rubble.
The spatial abstraction projected onto rubble has a clear genealogy. Draw-
ing on Marx’s (1977) emphasis that capitalism turns sensuous human labor
into a commodity and therefore into abstract labor, Lefebvre (1991) argued
that capitalism generates the same abstraction in space. Commoditization,
he emphasized, reduces the sensory, multifaceted texture of places to quan-
tifiable, homogeneous abstractions to be sold and bought: “abstract space.”
“The ruin” is part of this abstraction of space, but one that is often ideologi-
cally erased in narratives that present it as priceless spatial quality, that is, as
“heritage.” What the ruin-­as-­abstraction highlights is the object’s pastness.
The vast literature on ruins has demonstrated that “the ruin” is a concep-
tual invention of modernity and of its efforts to present itself as a break from
the past.2 David Lowenthal has shown that this created a historically novel
sensibility: imagining the past as a foreign country that is unlike the present.
“It is no longer the presence of the past that speaks to us, but its pastness”
(Lowenthal 1985, xviii). The pastness of the past is crystallized in efforts to
present ruins as objects separated from the present. And modernity’s concern
with decay and, especially, with the attempt to overcome decay through tran-
scendence turns ruins into fetishes that ought to be preserved and revered.
This is also why since the late 1800s nation-­states have petrified their hege-
monic views of the past in “ruins.” Ruins deemed valuable become places to
be protected from the decay that constitutes them, but as part of a process that
 Introduction | 9

in marking these objects as old highlights the modernity of the present. This
gesture, as Nietzsche (1997) observed, is guided by an “antiquarian” attitude
that “mummifies” the past. In the twenty-­first century, this mummification
of ruins has reached planetary proportions. The heritage industry has turned
countless ruins into tightly managed places where visitors pay to contemplate
a relic that they are ordered to photograph but not to touch. These ruins are
objects without afterlife: dead things from a dead past, whose value originates
far in time. The best-­kept secret of the heritage industry is that its ruins are
rubble that has been fetishized.3
As argued by Quetzil Castañeda in his analysis of the Mayan ruins of
Chichén Itzá in Mexico, what makes ruins “authentic inventions of moder-
nity” is that they are “the copy of an original that never existed.” The rubble
of the former Mayan city has been selectively and strategically reorganized
and given new form and layout by archaeologists and Mayan workmen “ac-
cording to their own imaginings of the past.” The resulting place, made up
of reconstructed heaps of debris, is currently presented as “the transcenden-
tal sum total” of that place’s “past, present, and future histories,” enfolded
into a timeless material presence. The ruins, Castañeda writes, “cannibalized
the aura of their authentic originals by ‘standing’ in the unique place of the
latter’s debris” (1996, 48–49). This means, I would add, that “the ruins of
Chichén Itzá” were manufactured as an orderly, positive object because they
sit on the disjointed, fragmented rubble of a destroyed city. This also means
that the aura of the ruins draws from the rubble they cannibalized. The reifi­-
cation of the past in a bounded, fenced-­off place also hides that beyond the
fenced perimeter lie constellations of rubble created by ongoing forms of
disruption.
The modernist preoccupation with ruins, in short, has included a long and
sustained struggle against the uncoded negativity of rubble. A major source of
discomfort has long been the fact that “rubble” signals, for elite dispositions,
the disintegration of recognizable forms. The most famous representative of
the romantic glamorization of ruins, Rose Macaulay, admits that “ruin lov-
ers” dislike piles of rubble for having “no grace, no form.” Massive piles of
rubble are for them “excessive,” confusing, “too much,” “only antiquity and
immensity” (1984, 129). Georg Simmel, likewise, tried to conceptually sepa-
rate ruins from rubble. He argued that in order to speak of a ruin, “the work
of man” should not to have dissolved into “the formlessness of mere matter.”
Otherwise, we are dealing with “a mere heap of stones” (1959, 261). The noted
art historian Alois Riegl recognized that the distinction between ruins and
10 | Introduction

rubble is purely aesthetic, in the sense that ruins with recognizable forms are
more “picturesque.” Yet he also defines rubble as an object lacking form, and
with “no trace of [its] original creation” (1982, 32–33). At heart, these attempts
to draw a line between ruins and rubble seek to create a hierarchy of debris,
in which rubble is looked down upon as a lesser, inferior type of matter, as
“material without significance” that is “destined to be removed,” as Helmut
Puff put it (2010, 254).
These are the modernist and class-­based dispositions that have informed
multiple efforts to turn “formless” rubble into monumentalized ruins, as in
Chichén Itzá. That the idea of “rubble” is unsettling is also clear in that schol-
ars avoid using the term even when referring to debris that “lacks form” but is
deemed historically significant, such as that of Babylon or Troy. Even though
these cities have long been reduced to heaps of debris, scholars and officials
present them as “ruins” because they are deemed objects of transcendental
significance. “The ruin,” in short, is the attempt to conjure away the void of
rubble and the resulting vertigo that it generates. This is also why the ab-
stracting reifications about the past projected onto ruins are much more than
purely rational articulations; they are, primarily, affective dispositions, inte-
gral to the way elite actors are disturbed by the negativity of broken objects.
Rubble is never formless, for the simple reason that, as Levi Bryant has
argued, no material object lacks form.4 A heap of rubble, after all, does have
a particular shape. The most common form adopted by piles of rubble is the
mound, the most distinguishable form of rubble worldwide and a regular
presence during my fieldwork. For Simmel, most of the sites described in
this book would qualify not as “ruins” but as “mere heaps of stone.” And
that is precisely the truth of rubble: its power to unsettle glamorized views of
ruins. But this book proposes to view all ruins (independently of their form)
as rubble. This means that I do not aim to abandon the word ruin, but to see
the objects thus called as rubble. I will thereby use the word ruin regularly
in this book, but understood as the raw, disjointed nodes of ruptured multi-
plicity that is immanent to rubble. “Rubble,” in short, is for me a concept of
both theoretical and political importance because it deglamorizes ruins by
revealing the material sedimentation of destruction.
The shift I propose from ruins to rubble is inspired by the work of two
leading anthropologists who have been thinking hard, and ethnographically,
about processes of ruination without reifying ruins. Anna Tsing’s (2005) work
on friction introduced a new ethnographic sensibility to the study of the rup-
tured geographies produced by capitalist forms of global connectivity, which
 Introduction | 11

promise dazzling spectacles only to generate material frictions that create

rubble. In her words, “When the spectacle passes on, what is left is rubble and
mud, the residues of success and failure” (2005, 74). Ann Stoler (2008; 2013),
in turn, has proposed to shift our gaze away from ruins and toward processes
of ruination, thereby highlighting the active forces of destruction that create
the palimpsests of “imperial debris” that exist all over the world. I draw from
these perspectives on friction and ruination to rethink the very nature of
space by way of the destruction that creates it. I am interested, in particular,
in exploring the spatial, political, and conceptual implications of the fact that,
as Macaulay points out, “we live in an extremely ruinous world” (1984, xvii).
This means conceiving of rubble as the lens through which to examine space
negatively: by way of the places that were negated to create the geographies
of the present.
Rubble, however, is not simply a figure of negativity. Rubble exerts posi-
tive pressure on human practice and is constitutive of the spatiality of living
places. But this is a presence defined by constellations that are more often than
not disregarded in mainstream sensibilities. For this reason, their examina-
tion demands an ethnographic archaeology oriented toward identifying and
interconnecting on the ground the traces of places that have been destroyed.

Constellations of Rubble: An Object-­Oriented Negativity

The fieldwork this book is based on was a demanding, often unsettling, al-
ways surprising journey that took me to a wide array of places located in dif-
ferent geographies: from the rolling, forested hills closer to the Andes, where
the mountains are a tangible presence to the west, to places in the Chaco
hundreds of kilometers away, where I was immersed in a flat and still largely
forested vastness, which around towns like Las Lajitas was being destroyed
by agribusiness.
Capturing such a complex, rugged geography and its nodes of rubble in
writing poses multiple challenges. How to give a sense of what ruptured places
look and feel like? Lefebvre would answer, making explicit his debt to phe-
nomenology: through the body, because “it is by means of the body that space
is perceived, lived, and produced” (1991, 162). We owe to Maurice Merleau-­
Ponty, in particular, the observation that it is through the body’s orientation
that we perceive, live, and produce places, for “we cannot dissociate being
from orientating being” (1962, 295). I seek to orient the reader based on my
own experiences of orientation in order to provide a general “mapping” of
12 | Introduction

Map I.2. Southeast of the province of Salta. Map by Eric Leinberger.

this terrain before exploring it in more depth in the rest of the book. I cannot
but begin by describing how this geography disoriented me when I arrived in
southeast Salta for the first time.
On my first day in the region, in May 2003, when the ruins I examine in
this book were still an abstraction for me, I drove from the city of Salta, which
is located in a valley in the mountains, south and downhill toward Metán,
the largest city in southeast Salta (pop. 30,000). That was to be my first stop,
for I knew that the overgrown rubble of the city of Esteco was somewhere in
the vicinity: a frontier town that, according to the legend, was destroyed by
an earthquake in 1692 (see part II). But before reaching Metán, I decided to
drive around to get a feel for the geography that I was seeing for the first time.
 Introduction | 13

At the crossroads where Route 16 branches east, I turned toward the Chaco.
As I was leaving the mountains behind, the rolling hills sliding down toward
the plains felt strangely disorienting. I was there looking for the rubble of
places like Esteco, whose violent history I knew well, but all I saw were the
positive places and objects of the present: cattle ranches, trucks, a gas station,
rolling hills, farms, a patch of forest, more farms, more trucks. I was aware
that the debris of older histories would be overgrown and out of sight. Yet the
disorientation remained. Those places seemed devoid of any trace from other
epochs. “Maybe not much is left,” I thought, feeling for a moment slightly
insecure about my project, affected by the seemingly positive solidity and
wholeness of the present. Space itself seemed to have been wiped clean of
traces from the days of Esteco. This is, after all, what a historian wrote about
Esteco’s materiality: “Nothing remains” (Frigerio 1987, 79). As it was getting
dark, I turned around and headed to Metán.
Those first moments in the region stood out for me for the way I was af-
fected by the positivity of the forms of the terrain, irrespective of the fact that
I knew I would not see any ruins that day. The places that affected me were the
living, functional places that give shape to dominant social relations and that
one captures visually, for instance, while driving on fast-­paced roads. These
are also the forms that reveal that space is produced, as Lefebvre taught us, in
a profoundly material sense. Yet these are also the forms that naturalize the
present by erasing the destruction that created it as well as the constellations
of debris that testify to that disruption. After all, I began my project inspired
by Lefebvre’s observation in The Production of Space that “no space vanishes
utterly, leaving no trace” (1991, 164), thereby assuming that the region still
contained traces of places that had vanished, but not utterly. But that day, my
estrangement from those traces was also the effect of seeing those places visu-
ally, and from the distance of a vehicle, as a landscape. Many of the thousands
of people who drive on those roads every day, after all, also see that geography
as a disembodied landscape and are unaware of the massive size and scope of
the nodes of rubble I began discovering in the next few weeks.
Adorno argued that the dominant common sense under capitalism tire-
lessly emphasizes the positivity of social and material reality, the value of
things as they are, while simultaneously erasing what these things negated
and destroyed in order to acquire their positive form. This is why Benjamin
and Adorno valued ruins as nodes of negativity with the power to disturb this
positivity crystallized in space. Ruins, certainly, have a positivity of their own,
as this book shows. They exist, after all, as Robert Ginsberg (2004) and Jon
14 | Introduction

Figure I.3. “Nothing remains of Esteco.” The trees to the right shroud the western
edge of the rubble of the lost city of Esteco (May 2003). Photo by author.

Beasley-­Murray (2011) rightly insist. But this is a distinct positivity because

nodes of rubble are also traces of destruction and decay that, when they have
not been tamed as “heritage,” dominant sensibilities usually seek to disre-
gard. Rubble is easy to overlook and assume as inexistent if one is not paying
enough attention. If one sticks to paved roads like Routes 16 and 5 in southeast
Salta, like soy farmers do, it is easy to be misled by those seemingly positive
landscapes seen from afar.
My orientation during my fieldwork was guided by what Bruno Latour
(2005) calls the tracing on the ground of the interconnections that, in this
case, residents made between different places and objects and that I made
through my own observations. And this became an object-­oriented analysis
not unlike the one proposed by Latour and a growing number of authors
who rightly argue that the materiality of objects is not reducible to what hu-
mans make of them.5 Yet unlike most of these authors, I focused on ruptured,
fraught objects that denaturalize the present; I also examined the forms of
fetishization through which these ruptures are disregarded and silenced. My
orientation was thereby guided by an object-­oriented negativity, a concept I
analyze at the beginning of part III: a sensibility that, inspired by Benjamin
and Adorno, seeks to politicize object-­oriented approaches through an atten-
tiveness to destruction, violence, and reification.
 Introduction | 15

Figure I.4. The first, unexpected ruins of my fieldwork: the remains of an old
tobacco farm near the rubble of Esteco. Overgrown tobacco dryers line up in the
background. Photo by author.

After I settled down in Metán, I began asking around about Esteco, and it
was soon apparent that the rubble, while overgrown and invisible from the
roads, was still there. On that first day of disorientation, I was at one point
only two hundred meters from “the lost city,” which looked from the road like
an ordinary patch of forest surrounded by fields. The rubble of Esteco was,
in fact, a major node in the constellations I explore in this book. But it was
also there that I was confronted with the confusion of traces from different
epochs. As I approached the forest of Esteco through an internal dirt road,
eager to encounter the “first ruins” of my fieldwork, I came across the much
more noticeable ruins of the buildings of a tobacco farm that had collapsed
the previous decade. The abandoned and overgrown tobacco dryers were
three stories high and the most visible node of rubble in the area. Former
workers’ homes were also in ruins. The overgrown rubble of the city from the
seventeenth century was a bit farther. Also nearby I discovered a monument
that marked the site of a battle that took place in 1812, during the continental
insurrections that brought down the Spanish empire in South America.
In interacting with residents, I soon understood that their view of Esteco
was inseparable from the more recent forces of social decay that had ruined
the farm and their participation in the annual ceremonies of commemoration
16 | Introduction

carried out around the monument. Multiple historical forces had piled up dif-
ferent nodes of rubble in the same geography: from traces left by earthquakes
and by different types of anti-­imperial insurrections to the debris of more
recent processes of boom and bust.
As I gradually moved east toward the Chaco, I encountered similar pa-
limpsests emerging from deceivingly positive landscapes. The area between
Metán and Chorroarín (see map I.2) is a transition zone between the moun-
tains and the Chaco defined by rolling hills, a few ridges, forests, fields, and
cattle farms. As I stopped in each town for a few days to get a first impression
of the surrounding areas, I encountered the same confusion and entangle-
ment of debris. In that area, the Jesuit legacy sedimented in the rubble of
mission stations from the 1700s, like the church I visited with Alfredo, was
an important component of local subjectivities. But how people related to this
debris was affected by more recent forms of rubble. “The tower of Miraflores,”
the most visible of the Jesuit ruins because of its height, was standing next
to soy fields that hid the debris of destroyed forests. A place abandoned in
the 1810s because of the insurrections against the Spanish stood next to the
quasi-­invisible detritus of the forests razed by agribusiness. That was my first
direct encounter with the soy fields that would become ubiquitous a hundred
kilometers farther, around Las Lajitas.
The debris produced by a prior wave of neoliberal disruption was also
constitutive of this geography. When I visited the church of La Manga with
Alfredo, he informed me that, eight kilometers away, a small town called
Chorroarín had been obliterated in the early 1990s by the privatization of the
state-­run Argentine Railroads. Passenger services were terminated, and many
small towns whose lives revolved around the flow of trains were reduced to
rubble. The ruins of railway stations, in fact, became ubiquitous everywhere
I went. And, as I show in the next section, the rubble of Chorroarín was inti-
mately entangled with that of the church of La Manga.
In leaving those rolling hills behind and reaching the flat edge of the Chaco
around the towns of Joaquín V. González and Las Lajitas, I was at last con-
fronted with the most recent and ongoing wave of neoliberal destruction cre-
ated by soy farming. This subregion of southeast Salta is known as “Anta”
(after the large department of the same name), a name that to this day evokes
a gaucho geography. Classic texts that celebrate the gauchos of Salta, like Juan
Carlos Dávalos’s Los gauchos (1928), focus on the experience of the cowboys of
Anta, who traditionally raised cattle on forested land, with little capital, and
without recourse to feed lots or fences. By 2003, Anta had become the epicen-
 Introduction | 17

Figure I.5. An area of midsized cattle farms between Chorroarín and Route 5, in the
heart of gaucho country, where the rugged terrain keeps bulldozers at bay. Photo by
author.

ter of the soy boom in the province of Salta.6 The Center-­Left national gov-
ernment of Néstor Kirchner would in the following years encourage soy ex-
ports to China and India to finance the economy out of a profound recession.
For the agribusinesses eager to push the soy frontier north toward the Chaco
(from the core soy-­producing region in the center of Argentina), those forests
worked by gauchos were blank, abstract, and available space to be readily ap-
propriated to plant a highly profitable commodity. The gaucho geographies of
southeast Salta became what Chris Hedges has called “sacrifice zones”: geog-
raphies destroyed at the altar of profits and, in the case of Argentina, of the
promise of a socially inclusive progress (see Hedges and Sacco 2012).
By the time I began my fieldwork, Anta had become a land of dramatic
contrasts. On the strip of land parallel to the mountains that enjoys greater
humidity due to the proximity of the Andes, space was dominated by highly
capitalized farms that use genetically modified seeds, sophisticated machin-
ery, heavy amounts of agrichemicals, and few laborers. The corporate nature
of soy farming contrasted sharply with the working-­class, gaucho outlook
that had dominated the region until then and that had informed the experi-
ence of most residents I interacted with.
18 | Introduction

Figure I.6. Harvesting machines at work near Las Lajitas (2006). Photo by author.

In this geography immersed in rapid changes, I still managed to find

rubble from older epochs, like the heavily overgrown mounds of a Spanish
fort from the 1700s, sitting at the edge of the sea of soy fields near Las Lajitas.
It was there that I began noticing the ghostly presence of Indians in criollo
experiences of the regional geography. The haunting memory of the Chaco
insurgencies was in fact ubiquitous in the region, as I show in chapter 1. In
Anta, the presence of the Chaco toward the east is particularly unavoidable
and constitutive of local orientations. If one drives east from Las Lajitas or
south from Joaquín V. González, the strip of soy fields eventually ends and
the dry, forested topography of the Chaco takes over. Amid these forests, res-
idents took me to the sites where steamships from the nineteenth century
had marooned and to some of the oldest nodes of rubble created by the failed
Spanish attempts to conquer the Chaco in the 1500s.
In Anta, however, the most famous and prominent node of rubble was El
Piquete, a ghost town located on the forested hills west of Las Lajitas, one
of the last bastions of gaucho practices in southeast Salta. In September the
rubble attracts thousands of pilgrims. By then, I was learning that religious
processions were central to the rhythms of the region. But the annual proces-
sions to the ruins of “Piquete de Anta” stood out because, as people said, the
 Introduction | 19

Figure I.7. Man and son from Las Lajitas who came in pilgrimage to the rubble of
Piquete de Anta (2006). The man is about to participate in a gaucho parade. Photo
by author.

town “was destroyed by the railroads.” My visit to this place confronted me

with the destructive forces unleashed as collateral damage by the construc-
tion of the modern infrastructure that followed the conquest of the Chaco.
The irony was that the same railroads that destroyed El Piquete laid in ruins
all over the region. These nodes of rubble were, in other words, also in dia-
logue with each other. To complicate things even more, the ruins of El Piquete
were also entangled with the rubble of the lost city of Esteco, even though
they are over a hundred kilometers apart by road, for they both evoke the
cataclysmic earthquake of 1692, which is central to state mythology in Salta.
In short, I arrived at the foot of the Argentine Andes looking for “ruins”
and found something much more complex, perplexing, and politically and
conceptually more revealing: a meshwork of nodes of rubble defined by a
dizzying multiplicity of forms, sizes, origins, and significance. I arrived there
looking for debris from a distant past, and residents taught me that those
nodes of rubble, recent and old, were part of the affective and social configu-
rations of the present. And the one process of destruction I initially intended
to focus on, the conquest of the Chaco by the Spanish and Argentine militar-
ies, opened up a multiplicity of destructions: from the liberating destruction
20 | Introduction

created by indigenous and gaucho insurgencies against the Spanish empire to

the disruptions produced by more recent waves of modernity and progress.
It was this array of entanglements that forced me to examine ruins as nodes
that form constellations.
Benjamin used the concept of “constellations” as a “thought image” that
evokes a non-­causal connectivity defined by multiplicity, rupture, and frag-
mentation.7 “Constellations” also offered for him a new way of looking at his-
tory and its actualization in the present. This is apparent in his essay “Theses
on the Philosophy of History,” in which he outlined a view of history defined
by interruption, debris, constellations, and catastrophe in opposition to the
“homogeneous, empty time” embodied by the ideology of progress.8 In Nega­
tive Dialectic, Adorno drew from Benjamin to highlight the power of the con-
cept of constellations, in particular, to counter the fetishization of objects. “The
history locked in the object,” Adorno argued, “can only be unlocked by their
constellation”: that is, by the “positional value of the object in its relation to
other objects.” This is why, in his words, “Cognition of the object in its constel-
lation is cognition of the process stored in the object” (Adorno 1973, 163–64).
Constellations point to processes that are stored in objects but that are also
outside of them: an outside that is multicentered and has a plastic, elusive
form, for constellations have no clear boundaries and superimpose on each
other, forming palimpsests. Doreen Massey (1994; 2005) was the first geog-
rapher to propose to conceive of places as outward-­looking nodes defined
by their immersion in wider constellations. I propose to add disruption and
debris to this perspective, to show that spatial constellations are made up not
only of inhabited places but also of the nodes of rubble they are enmeshed
with. And nodes of rubble are part of constellations because they are far from
being dead matter.

The Afterlife of Rubble

Benjamin wrote about the concept of “afterlife” in relation to works of art and
texts that live on in their translations. He emphasized that “life” should not
be limited to “organic corporeality” but to “everything that has a history of its
own.” “In the final analysis,” he wrote, “the range of life must be determined
by history rather than by nature” (1968, 71). This is why inanimate matter such
as rubble can be considered to have an afterlife, or “a history of its own.” And
this afterlife of rubble is, indeed, determined by history and the constellations
 Introduction | 21

interwoven around it. The node of rubble that locals call the church of La
Manga is a case in point.
When I first visited the church with Alfredo, I assumed that the site had
remained abandoned for at least two centuries, since the 1810s. The vegeta-
tion shrouding those walls seemed to exude an ancient, pristine temporality:
the confirmation that what I saw as a “Jesuit ruin” had remained frozen in
time, disconnected from the surrounding geographies. That was the mirage
of “the ruin” as an abstraction: my own projection onto that place of the social
death that the heritage industry associates with ruins as relics whose value is
reducible to what happened there in a distant, long-­dead past, erasing what-
ever happened there since. My image of a place where history had stood still
quickly evaporated when I learned from the people living on nearby ranches
that the building had survived for so long not because it was abandoned but
because ordinary people had used it as an improvised church, and therefore
subjected it to occasional repairs, over several generations. On subsequent vis-
its, I noticed those repairs in sections of the walls. I also learned why Alfredo
had told me that “large parties” were organized there.
Residents on the surrounding ranches remember that every year on 16 Au-
gust, the day of Saint Roche, hundreds of men and women from surround-
ing ranches and from the town of Chorroarín converged on the church of
La Manga for several days to venerate images of the Virgin Mary and Saint
Roche housed inside since the days of the Jesuit missionaries. People carried
the images in procession and celebrated with music, dancing, and drinking
all night long. This festive atmosphere was largely possible because no priests
were involved.9 Grassroots religious celebrations of this sort, organized from
without the sphere of the Church, are still popular in rural areas and are
characterized by wariness toward intrusions by los curas (the priests). Located
on an outlying ranch, the church provided an ideal place to re-create events
of this sort. The building was still partly in ruins and was abandoned most of
the year.10 But it had been appropriated the way rubble is all over the world,
put to use to new ends.
Martin Heidegger (1975) argued that the defining quality of places is that
they gather, attracting people, memories, and affects around them. This
means that places are nodes rather than containers: points toward which re-
lations and lines of movement converge and from which they move out to
entangle other nodes (Ingold 2011). Nodes and the flows they generate are the
constitutive elements of spatial constellations. The debris of the Jesuit mission
22 | Introduction

of San Juan Bautista de Balbuena became, indeed, a social node: the church of
La Manga, a gathering place for the families working on nearby cattle ranches
for generations.11 Old gauchos who live on ranches associate the ruins’ gravi-
tational pull with the social rhythms created in the area by the railroads, a few
kilometers to the east, and in particular by the train station of Chorroarín.
Created in the 1920s by the traffic of trains, the station congregated a small
town that became the main hub in the area. The demand for firewood and
hardwoods loaded at the station encouraged the expansion of logging camps
in surrounding areas, including La Manga. As part of this geography, a village
congregated next to the church until the 1970s. An overgrown cemetery and
the ruins of an old school, a hundred meters away, are now the main traces
of that place.
Bryant has proposed the term “bright objects” to refer to those objects that
attract because of the way they relate to other objects. These objects become
“a hub or key node in a network, exercising gravity that influences and defines
the paths of most other objects in its vicinity.”12 He calls those objects with
a relatively weak pull “dim objects,” and those with little capacity to exercise
gravity over others “dark objects.” The brightness of an object, he notes, does
not emanate from the object itself, but is the result of the networks it is part of;
it thereby may be resilient, temporary, or fleeting, depending on conjunctural
circumstances.
Among human bodies, the gravitational pull of objects is their affective
intensity: their capacity to affect. Spinoza (1982) argued that affects are the
capacity of being affected by other objects and the capacity to affect other
objects: the pre-­discursive relations through which bodies are always already
made outwardly in relation to the world.13 How clusters of rubble affect hu-
mans, and how bright their gravitational pull is, is mediated by socially con-
stituted sensibilities that are not just cultural but what Bourdieu (1977) called
habitual: that is, they involve a bodily, not fully conscious disposition to be
affected in particular ways. Among the gauchos living around the church of
La Manga, this was a disposition to be affected by traces from the Jesuit past
and to create around them religious encounters of a festive nature.
The relative brightness and affective power of the church surfaced in the
spatial reach of its gravitational pull, gathering people from places located
dozens of kilometers away. But this pull eventually receded and became rel-
atively dim; that is, noticed and made meaningful by those living in the im-
mediate vicinity, but not much farther. The logging camps around the church
of La Manga were dismantled in the 1970s. Shortly thereafter, the man who
 Introduction | 23

looked after the images of Saint Roche and the virgins near the church died,
and the celebrations soon came to an end, as did the affective pull toward that
place. Its brightness receded, and the church and the village next to it were
rapidly overgrown. Today, the place is known only among those living in the
surrounding area. And the rubble of the church is locally inseparable from
the rubble of the town of Chorroarín, abandoned shortly thereafter because
of the privatization of the railroads.
In the nearest town, Joaquín V. González, most people have never heard of
the church of La Manga, even though the local (and small) museum keeps a
few photos and objects from the place. Some officials are aware of its existence
and have begun declaring in public that “the Jesuit ruins” of the region — 
that also include the more prominent and visible tower of Miraflores — 
demonstrate the potential of southeast Salta as a tourist attraction. These
ruins, however, are off the beaten track and difficult to reach. While the gau-
chos living on surrounding ranches remember the celebrations at the church
with nostalgia, most of them currently see the building simply as an aban-
doned object: as rubble. Yet they have an affective appreciation for this place
that does not depend on its reification. If officials ever turn this place into a
“Jesuit ruin” open to the public, its afterlife as a place of festive religious en-
counters will most likely be relegated to oblivion.

Ethnography at the Edge of the Void

My preliminary trip of 2003 led to a four-­year research project in the region
involving a total of fourteen months of fieldwork, which I completed in Au-
gust 2007. In the area of hills closer to the Andes, my main bases were the
towns of Metán, Río de las Piedras, and El Galpón. In the lowlands of Anta, I
was based in Joaquín V. González and Las Lajitas. With the mobility granted
by small rental cars, I spent most of my time in the rural areas around these
towns, often on fincas (cattle ranches) owned by absentee landowners and
tended by gauchos like Alfredo. While the core of the research took place in
the transition zone of rolling hills separating the mountains from the Chaco,
I also did fieldwork deeper in the Chaco, on the Bermejo River’s old course
around Rivadavia (the site of stories about steamships stranded in the forest
and huge mass graves) and in the north of Santiago del Estero (the site of the
ruins of a Jesuit mission and of the most important pilgrimage destination
among criollos in Anta). I also traveled twice to the mountains that were a
regular presence to the west on the eastern edge of the province of Jujuy,
24 | Introduction

for those ridges had been used by Spanish troops to scan the Chaco below.
Finally, I also did fieldwork in the lowlands of Jujuy, which in the 1700s was
part of the western Chaco frontier. There, I analyzed the rubble of a fort with
a distinct afterlife that I examine in chapter 10.
This fieldwork experience was, needless to say, challenging and very dif-
ferent from the localized ethnography I had conducted in previous years in
the heart of the Chaco in Toba villages on the marshlands formed by the
Pilcomayo River, over three hundred kilometers away (Gordillo 2004). There,
my field site was formed by a network of villages located relatively close to
each other, where I created long-­term friendships and relations. In south-
east Salta, in contrast, “the field” comprised an entirely different and more
diverse geography, certainly much vaster and more difficult to apprehend.
Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson argue that overcoming bounded notions
of the field demands “a form of motivated and stylized dislocation,” in which
“a shifting” of locations is fundamental “for the discovery of phenomena that
would otherwise remain invisible” (1997, 36–37, emphasis added). Indeed, it
was only through my own sense of dislocation among multiple places that I
was able to apprehend the layout of the constellations of rubble described in
this book, and that have long remained invisible to urban eyes.
And this takes me to a few final methodological observations. Exploring
constellations of rubble in a multiplicity of places demanded much more than
multi-­sited fieldwork. It required an equally constellational approach to eth-
nography that forced me to submit the very notion of “the field” to a process
of disintegration. A localized, more traditional ethnography in each of these
places would certainly have provided a local depth that a constellational ap-
proach cannot. But the questions about multiplicity that guided my ethnog-
raphy aimed for depth of a different nature, one that will be clear by the end
of this book and that I would have missed had I done fieldwork at only two or
three places. Among the many illuminating moments I experienced during
this journey, one thing stands out, methodologically, for me: the fact that I
was forced to think about rubble not only in the context of shifting spatial
dislocations, but also when the materiality of ruins was damaged and I was
confronted with a void felt “in the guts.” Gilles Deleuze (1994) asks, contra
Descartes: What does it mean to think? Are we thinking when we say “this is
a table”? No, he responds, we only think when we are forced to think against
our common sense. In my case, I was forced to think against the assumptions
about ruins and decay that dominate the present in those moments of felt
rupture: with Alfredo at the church of La Manga, with a much more massive
 Introduction | 25

Figure I.8. Unidentified ruin a few kilometers from Quebrachal—an illustra­tion of

the uncountable excess of rubble. Photo by author.

destruction of rubble I analyze in chapter 4, and especially when I witnessed

the destruction of space created by the expansion of agribusiness.
The concepts of constellations and rubble have a close affinity with each
other because both are defined by pure multiplicity: a multiplicity that defies
representation. This is why, as Shaylih Muehlmann (2012) argues in relation to
rhizomes, constellations of rubble are “uncountable.” This means, needless to
say, that I encountered in this region more nodes of rubble than I could have
ever grasped or made sense of. Although both Alain Badiou and Deleuze are
important presences in this book because they are the most influential con-
tinental philosophers on multiplicity, what sets Badiou apart from Deleuze is
his more explicit engagement with negativity. Badiou (2005) argues, in this
regard, that the nonrepresentational nature of the pure multiplicity of being
can only be approached through the figure of “the void.” I seek to show that
the pure multiplicity of rubble is the void that haunts modernity.

In this ethnography I regularly delve into history in order to illustrate

the processes through which particular places were reduced to rubble. But I
also draw on the texture of these places, their destruction, and their genera-
26 | Introduction

tive appropriation to reflect on several interrelated conceptual themes. This

is why three of the four parts in this book are preceded by more theoretical
intermezzos in which I examine in more detail conceptual problems cen-
tral to my analysis: the destruction of space as central to understanding the
production of space (The Destruction of Space); a spatialized, object-­oriented
rethinking of the dialectic (Treks across Fields of Rubble); and a discussion of
the ways in which a critical understanding of negativity can learn from the
affirmative philosophies of Spinoza and Deleuze, and vice versa, in order to
examine becoming through rupture, in particular to analyze the debris of
violence (Bright Objects).
In part I, I present the main actors in my narrative, the rural poor of south-
east Salta. I begin by analyzing how most criollos engage with the rubble
that dots the region through a sensibility shaped by their gaucho habits, their
embrace of popular Catholicism, and a haunting presence: the absence of the
Indians who those places now in ruins had been built to contain. This haunt-
ing is inseparable from people’s perceptions that Indians are their savage an-
cestors (chapter 1). I subsequently examine the historical emergence of the
Chaco as an insurgent vortex that destroyed several Spanish cities and made
their rubble invisible for several centuries. I tell the history of the conquest
of the Chaco through the lens of the recurring anxieties, among Spanish and
Argentine officials, about the vanishing of traces of the state. The ghosts of
Indians who currently haunt the region are the phantom evocations of the
forces that once reduced sites of state power to rubble (chapter 2).
In part II, I examine the contemporary afterlife of the places destroyed
by those insurgencies, the two cities of Esteco. I focus, in particular, on the
rubble of the second city of Esteco, north of Metán, whose collapse in 1692 was
so traumatic that to this day the ruins are considered to be cursed and prompt
massive ceremonies of conjuring in surrounding towns. Yet I also draw a
counterpoint between these ruins and those of the first, and forgotten, city of
Esteco, located farther east in the Chaco, which reveals some of the cultural
legacies of the spatial ruptures generated by conquest (chapter 3). The rubble
of the cursed lost city at the foot of the Andes is also notable because of an
event that took place there in 2005, which made apparent the ways in which
subaltern views of rubble challenge the elite fetishization of ruins (chapter 4).
In part III, I examine some ruins of the project of progress created in the
Chaco once it was conquered by the Argentine state. These ruins constitute
the rubble of the promises of prosperity that the Argentine elites claimed
 Introduction | 27

would pour into the region, today actualized in the promises articulated by
the agribusinesses that are destroying the gaucho geographies of Anta. Draw-
ing on Benjamin’s view of progress as a destructive process that is presented as
a “dream world,” I take up the contemporary afterlife of distinctly capitalist
and modernist forms of expansion and ruination. This discussion includes,
first, a journey to the dry riverbed of the Bermejo River, in the interior of the
Chaco, where I examine the detritus of steamships that in the nineteenth
century were defeated by the ruggedness and plasticity of the terrain (chapter
5). I then analyze the rubble of the town of El Piquete, the former “capital of
Anta,” and the processions that repetitively and briefly bring it back to life
(chapter 6). I conclude part III with an exploration of the derelict railroads
created in the 1990s by neoliberal structural adjustment, which only a few
decades earlier epitomized the mobility and the democratizing connectivity
of industrial modernity (chapter 7).
In part IV, I analyze the material detritus of the centuries of violence re-
quired to turn the Chaco into state territory. These traces have generated mul-
tiple attempts by officials and the Catholic Church to relegate the memory of
state violence to oblivion (chapter 8). The constellations formed by the debris
of violence in rural areas nonetheless elude affective capture by the state, as
I show next. In particular, I look at how the very form of the human bones
and mass graves that dot the region have long made rural residents aware of
the extent of the violence unleashed by the conquest of the Chaco (chapter 9).
I then focus on a qualitatively different debris of violence: first, the people of
Wichí background who, fleeing violence elsewhere, arrived in three towns in
southeast Salta in waves throughout the 1900s; second, the performative ways
in which some criollos seek to come to terms with, and pay homage to, the fact
that they descend from Indians. I end the narrative of the book by analyzing
the appropriation of a trace of state terror that immerses it in a festive expres-
sion of indigeneity (chapter 10).
Rubble draws from multiple conceptual traditions but, in the last instance,
its core argument is inspired by Benjamin’s and Adorno’s efforts to open paths
to negate the destructiveness of the present. No book that claims to be heir
to Benjamin can overlook the fact that he was interested in arcades, fetishes,
ruins, destruction, afterlife, violence, and phantasmagorias to contribute to
a collective awakening from the nightmare of the bourgeois dream world.
This book therefore examines rubble from multiple dimensions, “but not for
the sake of rubble,” to paraphrase Benjamin (1978, 303). In the conclusion I
28 | Introduction

open up the constellations of rubble examined in the book to draw parallels

with constellations of rubble elsewhere in the world in order to reflect, among
other themes, on the intimate connections between rubble and insurrections,
especially as they relate to attempts by the rural poor on the western edge of
the Chaco to interrupt the march of the bulldozers. After all, as Chris Hedges
and Joe Sacco (2012) put it, these are days of destruction, but they are also
days of revolt.
 Notes

Introduction: Constellations
1. The term used to refer to faint debris without recognizable shape, such as bricks on
the ground, is vestigios (vestiges).
2. See Roth 1997; Jusdanis 2004; Dawdy 2010; Castañeda 1996, 2001; Woodward 2001;
and Schönle and Hell 2010a, among many others.
3. Ethnographic studies of ruins and heritage sites, pioneered by Michael Hertzfeld’s
(1991) analysis of the conflicts created by the spatial reification of the past on Crete, have
provided rich evidence of this fetishization and of the tensions and dissonance this cre-
ates with local experiences. See, among others, Castañeda 1996, 2001; Abu El-­Haj 2001;
Breglia 2009; Mortensen 2009; Benavides 2009; Meskell 2011.
4. See Levi Bryant, “Hylomorphism: The Myth of Formlessness,” Larval Subjects (blog),
13 April 2012, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/hylomorphism-­the-­myth
-­of-­formlessness/.
5. See Bennett 2010; Bryant 2011; Harman 2002; Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 2011.
6. Soy farming began in the area in the 1990s, but the devaluation of the Argentine
peso in 2002 created particularly favorable conditions for export-­oriented crops.
7. More importantly, Benjamin’s methodology was constellational, for it was based
on the collection of multiple quotations and objects of all sorts. One of his favorite
quotes by Baudelaire captured this constellational approach to debris and fragmenta-
tion: “Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Every-
thing that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned,
everything it has crushed underfoot, he catalogues and collects” (Benjamin 2007, 251).
8. In the last thesis (XVIII), Benjamin argued that historical analysis should avoid
“telling a sequence of events like the beads of a rosary” and grasping, instead, “the
constellation” that the present forms with the past. And this is a constellation in which
the present is “shot through with chips of Messianic time” (1968, 263). “Messianic time”
is how Benjamin named the rupturing of the linear narrative of progress, through an
272  |  Notes for Chapter One

interruption that points both toward a future of (revolutionary) redemption and the
unearthing of the hidden potentialities of the past. This constellational view of history
is both temporal and spatial because it disrupts the fantasy of bounded, separate objects
(“the beads of a rosary”) by seeing them as fragments defined by multiplicity.
9. Occasionally, residents said, priests from other towns came to preside over mass at
the church, but would leave the area promptly afterward.
10. In the 1940s, I was told, the church deteriorated, and in the following decades the
celebrants congregated around a neighbor’s home two hundred meters away, on a clear-
ing next to a stream. Yet the celebration continued to include a procession to the ruins.
11. Various reports indicate that the ruins were already a node in the 1860s, when
census officials found that a village existed next to them (as I discuss in chapter 1).
12. See Levi Bryant, “Five Type of Objects: Gravity and Onto-­cartography,” Larval Sub­
jects (blog), 17 June 2012, https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/06/17/five-­t ypes-­of
-­objects-­gravity-­and-­onto-­cartography/
13. Affects are thereby born in the “in-­between-­ness” of encounters between objects
and have a bodily yet elusive, hard-­to-­articulate materiality that is “presubjective with-
out being presocial.” See Mazzarella 2009, 291; Massumi 202; Seigworth and Gregg
2010; Beasley-­Murray 2010a.

One. A Haunted Frontier

1. When criollos began moving to Buenos Aires in the 1930s, they were racialized in
more markedly derogatory terms, such as cabecita negra (little black head) (Ratier 1972).
2. See also Ocampo 2004; Prieto 2006.
3. The criollos’ mestizaje became an officially acceptable racial mixture, opposed to
the degrading mixture that created the “Kollas” of the highlands (Lanusse and Lazzari
2005, 236).
4. In 1963, the folklorist Bruno Jacovella articulated this idea when he wrote that “the
criollo mentality . . . only perceives the Indian and his culture as something remote,
strange, or barbaric, as mythical enemy” (cited in Ocampo 2004, 189).
5. Elsewhere in Argentina, few people self-­identify as mestizos, given the mainstream
tendency to publicly disavow an indigenous background.
6. This gesturing has also been noted among rural residents in western Argentina,
who present themselves as descendants of Indians yet different from them (Escolar
2007).
7. Marisol de la Cadena (2000), for instance, has analyzed how in the Andes mes-
tizo market women (cholas) position themselves as mestizas who embrace indigeneity.
She also shows, however, that this embrace is not unambiguous, for these “indigenous
mestizas” distance themselves from “Indians” and from the savagery and rural poverty
evoked by this term. See also, among many others, Nelson 1999; Hale 2006; Weismantel
2001; Tilley 2005.