Indigenous or Criollo PDF

Indigenous or Criollo: The Myth of White
Argentina in Tucumán’s Calchaquí Valley
Oscar Chamosa
In 1937, after spending almost ten years collecting ballads, tales, and riddles in
northwestern Argentina, folklorist Juan Alfonso Carrizo wrote about the rural
residents of Tucumán province in these terms: “The race of almost the entire
population is white of the Spanish type. [Although] there are a small number of
mestizos in the Calchaquí valley, I did not see any of the autochthonous type;
neither do any statistics report the existence of such.”1 In other words, Car-
rizo defined the population of the valley as criollo, a flexible ethnic term that
Argentines used to describe both the descendents of colonial Spanish settlers,
and people of mixed indigenous and European background, or mestizos. Car-
rizo’s assertion seems to suggest that at some point in history, Spanish settlers
had entirely displaced the Andean agriculturists who had occupied the valley
since the precolonial period. That, however, never happened. Colonial docu-
ments show that most residents of the valley were indigenous individuals who,
similarly to the neighboring Kollas in northern Jujuy, were subjected to Span-
ish administration and forced to pay tribute and provide forced labor (mita).2
Throughout the nineteenth century, few immigrants made the valley their
home, and visitors referred to the local population as indios. Moreover, villag-
ers kept the same indigenous family names recorded in colonial censuses. Yet,
despite demographic continuities, the Calchaquí communities did experience
a transition from being indigenous to being criollo in legal and cultural terms.
In this article, I explore the creolization of the Calchaquí valley, arguing that
the categorization of the Calchaquí people as criollos was the product of legal,
Thanks to Patricia Richards as well as to the editors of HAHR and anonymous reviewers for
their valuable commentaries and suggestions.
1. Juan Alfonso Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Tucumán, 3 vols. (Tucumán: Univ.
Nacional de Tucumán), 1:37.
2. The region also includes the valley of Quebrada of Humahuaca, in Jujuy, which
together with adjacent Puna is populated by both criollos and Kollas, an Andean indigenous
group; see Gustavo Paz, “Resistencia y rebelión campesina en la Puna de Jujuy, 1850 – 1875,”
Boletín del Instituto Ravignani, 3rd ser., 4 (1993): 68 – 89.
Hispanic American Historical Review 88:1

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-079
Copyright 2008 by Duke University Press
72 HAHR / February / Chamosa
linguistic, and economic changes as well as part of an elite effort to represent

Argentina as a white country.3 Furthermore, in analyzing how the myth of
white Argentina related to the other prevailing assimilationist theories in the
region, I also explore the meaning of creolization as a critical constituent of the
myth of white Argentina.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, while other Latin American national
elites took pains to represent their countries as homogeneously mestizo, Argen-
tine elites preferred to represent their nation as uniformly white. Ethnicity and
national identity are now understood as the result of historical processes rather
than as essential entities.4 In the case of Latin America, historical literature’s
growing emphasis on nation formation and ethnic relations sheds light on state
policies of assimilation that consistently favored homogeneity over diversity.
These policies coalesced in the nation formation myth of mestizaje in most of
Latin America, and the myth of the white nation in Argentina.5 The existing
literature on ethnicity and race in Argentina at the turn of the century tends to
focus on the promotion of European immigration and the decimation of the
indigenous populations of Chaco and Patagonia as the main policies imple-
mented by the Argentine state to “whiten” its population.6 In contrast to current
Latin American historiography, Argentine historians have tended to focus on
the assimilation of European immigrants rather than on the assimilation of the
non-European population into the national mainstream.7 Against that current,
3. Mónica Quijada, “Indígenas: Violencia, tierras y ciudadanía,” in Homogeneidad

y nación: Con un estudio de caso: Argentina, siglos XIX y XX, ed. Mónica Quijada, Carmen
Bernard, and Arnd Schneider (Madrid: CSIC, 2000), 28.
4. Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture
Difference (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), 14; John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff,
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 69.
5. Marisol de la Cadena, “Are Mestizos Hybrids? The Conceptual Politics of Andean
Identities,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (2005): 219 – 84; Jeffrey Gould, “Gender,
Politics, and the Triumph of Mestizaje in Early 20th Century Nicaragua,” Journal of Latin
American Anthropology 2 (1996): 2 – 30; Charles R. Hale, “Mestizaje, Hybridity, and the
Cultural Politics of Difference in Post-Revolutionary Central America,” Journal of Latin
American Anthropology 2 (1996): 36 – 46; Peter Wade, “Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and
Lived Experience,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (2005): 239 – 57.
6. Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 139; Carol A. Smith, “The Symbolics of Blood:
Mestizaje in the Americas,” Identities 3 (1997): 503.
7. See for example Fernando Devoto, La inmigración italiana en la Argentina (Buenos
Aires: Biblos, 1985); Alejandro E. Fernández et al., La inmigración española en la Argentina
(Buenos Aires: Biblos, 1999); Alberto Sarramone, Los abuelos inmigrantes: Historia y
sociología de la inmigración argentina (Azul, Argentina: Biblos Azul, 1999).
The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumán’s Calchaquí Valley 73
Northwestern Argentina. Map by the author.

authors such as Mónica Quijada and Carmen Bernard recognize the necessity
to review the myth of white Argentina and place the country in the broader dis-
cussion of nation formation in Latin America.8 Others, mostly anthropologists,
have focused on how the state tried to impose a unifying view of nationality on
indigenous groups in Chaco and Patagonia.9 However, less attention has been
paid to the policies that attempted to assimilate the different pockets of popula-
tion that had not been significantly affected by immigration. These populations
included people of African descent in the cities, especially Buenos Aires, criollos
in the pampas and lowlands of the northwest, and a few pockets of indigenous
people who had been subjected to the Spanish crown: Guaranis in the north-
east, Kollas in the province of Jujuy and part of Salta, and the Calchaquí people
in Salta, Tucumán, and Catamarca.
The case of the Argentine northwest, and especially the Calchaquí valley, is
especially significant in exploring how the myth of white Argentina operated in
a local context. First, the population of the region remained mostly criollo after
the large wave of immigration settled down in the country. Second, the folklore
of Salta and Tucumán and of the Calchaquí valley in particular played a promi-
nent role in the cultural policies of Argentine nationalism in the mid-twentieth
century, presenting the apparent contradiction of a country that defined itself
as white but celebrated a local non-European culture as its national folklore.
I analyze that contradiction and propose that educational officials, folklor-
ists, and Tucumán’s sugar industrialists made a concerted effort to represent
the Calchaquí communities as criollo folk societies. The same cultural policies
that downplayed the indigenous origin of the Calchaquí culture emphasized its
Spanish elements.
The scholarly representation of the Calchaquí people has shifted over time,
as can be seen in three chronologically consecutive sets of sources. The first
are the writings of pioneering Argentine anthropologists and folklorists who
visited the valley in the 1890s and saw the local societies still operating within
indigenous cultural parameters. In 1921, elementary teachers assigned to the
valley by the national government produced a series of reports that show a cul-
8. Mónica Quijada and Carmen Bernard, “Introducción,” in Homogeneidad y nación, 9.

9. Héctor Vázquez, Procesos identitarios y exclusión sociocultural: La cuestión indígena en
Argentina (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2002); Gastón Gordillo and Silvia Hirsch, “Indigenous
Struggles and Contested Identities in Argentina: Histories of Invisibilization and
Reemergence,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8 (2003): 4 – 30, Gastón Gordillo,
Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco (Durham: Duke
Univ. Press, 2004).
ture in transition, in which local societies retained aspects of their traditional

beliefs and rituals but moved toward assimilation with the rest of the nation.
The work of professional folklorists who performed fieldwork in the region in
the 1930s and 1940s provides additional description. Among them, Juan Alfonso
Carrizo is credited with creating an enormous folkloric archive and building a
folkloric canon that established the criollos of the northwest as quintessentially
Argentine. Carrizo notoriously downplayed the indigenous background of the
valley and made an effort to cast it as a reservoir of ancient Spanish traditions,
allegedly the original core of the Argentine nationality. By combining histori-
cal narrative with the analysis of intellectual discussions, I demonstrate that
the creolization of the Calchaquí culture resulted from a juxtaposition of lived
experiences and academic discourse.
Assimilation Ideologies and the “White Country” Myth
During the nation formation period, 1880 – 1910, Latin American modernizing

elites, anxious to appear as European as possible, attempted the forced creoliza-
tion of indigenous peoples by introducing education reforms and land and labor
legislation that undermined the existing communities and turned them into
mestizos, ladinos, or criollos, according to the local terminology.10 At the same
time, most Latin American countries adopted a foundational myth of mestizaje,
which asserted that Latin American nations were the result of a harmonious
mixture of European, indigenous, and African “races.” Argentina followed poli-
cies of creolization comparable in almost every aspect to other Latin American
countries, but it differed critically in that the nation was regarded as white rather
than mestizo.
The myth of mestizaje avows that twentieth-century Latin American
nations were not composed of individual, segregated races. On the contrary,
they were the product of a four-century-long process of amalgamation among
indigenous Americans, Europeans, and Africans (el indio, el español, and el negro,
in the masculine, third-person parlance of the time). In light of the rampant
scientific racism then prevalent, the myth of mestizaje sounded like a sooth-
10. Marisol de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in
Cuzco, 1919 – 1991 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000); Jeffrey Gould, To Die in This Way:
Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880 – 1965 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press,
1998), 40 – 50; Jean Muteba Rahier, “Introduction: Mestizaje, Muletaje, Mestiçagem in Latin
American Ideologies of National Identities,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8 (2003):
40 – 51.
ing invitation to racial democracy. That, however, is a misleading perception.

As anthropologist Carol A. Smith states, “A nation-building myth such as that
concerning mestizaje creates inequality at the same time it presumes to create
homogeneity.”11 To understand this apparent paradox, Smith points to the dif-
ferent levels at which the myth of mestizaje operated. In the first place, mestizaje
referred to the reproduction of individuals whose parents belonged to differ-
ent groups of ancestry. Second, mestizaje occurred when indigenous individu-
als or communities, as well as people of African descent, adopted an identity as
mestizo and were widely recognized as such. Finally, according to Smith, mes-
tizaje became a political discourse that created the mestizo national subject and
assigned specific value to this identity. Although the three aspects of mestizaje
were interrelated, the imperative of political and cultural homogenization super-
seded the actual process of biological mixture or cultural subscription to mestizo
identity, leaving behind a myriad of indigenous and African-descended commu-
nities whose identities differed from the national common denominator.
The resilience of these groups in maintaining their ethnicity demonstrates
that the process of unification was highly incomplete, Smith argues. However,
as authors Jeffrey Gould and Charles Hale showed, the deepening gap between
official mestizo ideology and local ethnic heterogeneity prompted agents of the
state to resort to repressive policies.12 Smith concludes that what weakened the
myth of mestizaje was the persistence of a racial and social hierarchy, the leg-
acy of Iberian domination, which continued to value fairer skin and European
ancestry over the indigenous and African components of the alleged mixture.
By preserving this hierarchy, the actual implementation of mestizaje ideologies
meant little more than assimilating the part of the population with indigenous
and African ancestry into the cultural traits of the European elite. In a way,
the process of mestizaje or creolization implied a “whitening” of groups and
individuals of indigenous and African descent, who held the burden of leaving
behind elements of their ancestral cultures and adopting the mores of the Euro-
pean settlers and their descendents.
In contrast to their Latin American peers, early twentieth-century Argen-
tine intellectuals declined to embrace the assimilationist principle of mestizaje
as the foundational myth of the nation. Instead, as Mónica Quijada points
11. Carol Smith, “Myths, Intellectuals, and Race/Class/Gender Distinctions in the

Formation of Latin American Nations,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2 (1996): 149.
12. Gould, “Gender, Politics, and the Triumph of Mestizaje,” 4 – 33; Charles R. Hale,
Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894 – 1987 (Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 26.
out, Argentines preferred to think of themselves as an entirely white nation.13

Although assimilationist principles were popular among Argentine intellec-
tuals, they understood assimilation as a unilateral process of whitening. The
myth of Argentina as a white country pervaded the state-sponsored discourse
on race and effectively precluded Argentines from adopting even a self-serving
and romanticized view of subordinated ethnic groups. The turn-of-the-century
elite not only created this myth but also succeeded in exporting it abroad. Even
today, some English language reference works, such as the Columbia Encyclope-
dia and CIA World Factbook, describe the Argentine population as 98 percent
white.14 This myth, although vaguely supported by the existence of a relatively
large and sustained European immigration, was even more deceptive than the
myth of mestizaje. In fact, the part of the Argentine population that was either
European-born or of European descent could not have reached more than 60
percent at its peak in the 1920s. The myth did not account for the racial identity
of the remaining 40 percent of the Argentine population. Furthermore, a sizable
indigenous population existed in several parts of the country at the same time
that Buenos Aires was exporting the white country myth to foreign investors.
In their creation of the white Argentina myth, the founding fathers were
conscious of this discrepancy, but they filled the gap with a good dose of wishful
thinking.15 The easiest way to deal with this problem, as George Reid Andrews
notices, was to refuse to acknowledge the existence of the nonwhite popula-
tion, for instance by excluding racial categories from the national censuses and
from public discourse.16 In the preliminary study of the 1895 national census,
the census officers explained that they decided not to account for race because
“the majority of the interviewees would identify themselves as white.” And yet,
the same census officers estimated the total nonwhite population at a flimsy 5
percent. As for mestizos in particular, the census officers said: “There is in the
whole country a very small quantity of mixed-race individuals, the result of the
13. Quijada, “Indígenas: Violencia, tierras y ciudadanía,” 28.

14. “Argentina,” The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2001 – 4); “Argentina,” Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook (Washington, DC:
CIA, 2005).
15. By “founding fathers of the myth of white Argentina” I refer to the group of
positivist thinkers that initiated the study of social sciences in Argentina, including José
Ingenieros, José Ramos Mejía, and Alejandro Bunge, among others; see Nicola Miller, In the
Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish
America (London: Verso, 1999).
16. George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800 – 1900 (Madison:
Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1980).
commerce between whites and Indians . . . who constitute the remains of a race
in the process of extinction.” To emphasize this statement the census officers
add: “The racial question, so noticeable in the United States, does not exist in
Argentina, where it will not take much time for the population to become com-
pletely unified, creating a new and beautiful white race produced by the contact
among all the European nations, made fruitful in the South American soil.”17
Statements like these, common among turn-of-the-century Argentine social
scientists, cast serious doubts on the accuracy of their methods, to say the least.
Although the 1895 and 1914 censuses did not specify race or ethnicity, it
is possible to estimate the geographical distribution of the European and cri-
ollo populations to demonstrate the non-European character of the northwest.
The provinces of the Andean northwest received only a marginal number of
the several million Italian and Spanish immigrants who settled in Argentina in
the period between 1870 and World War I. The majority of the Europeans —
predominantly Italian — settled in the coastal cities and in the extensive farm-
lands of Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos, Santa Fe, and Córdoba provinces, the area
known as the pampas. The most European of all districts in Argentina was the
city of Buenos Aires, which contained a third of the national population. There,
immigrants constituted two-thirds of the adult male population. The provinces
in the pampas followed the city in percentage of immigrants. In these provinces’
small towns, the newcomers, familiarly called gringos, enjoyed privileged access
to land and credit and thus displaced criollos from the most profitable activi-
ties.18 The census of 1914 shows that of three million people living in the prov-
inces of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, not counting the city of Buenos Aires, one
million were European immigrants and one and a half million were children
of European mothers, which made the pampas a white country of sorts — the
pampa gringa.19 However, even if immigrants and their children outnumbered
criollos, the latter still constituted at least the remaining quarter of the pampas’
rural population. A completely different situation was found in the five prov-
17. República Argentina, Segundo Censo Nacional, levantado el 10 de Mayo de 1895, 5 vols.
(Buenos Aires: Comisión Nacional del Censo, 1898), 2:xlvi – viii.
18. Jeremy Adelman, Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands
of Argentina and Canada, 1890 – 1914 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994); Ezequiel Gallo,
La Pampa gringa: La colonización agrícola en Santa Fe (1870 – 1895) (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA,
1983); Gastón Gori, La pampa sin gaucho: Influencia del inmigrante en la transformación de los
usos y costumbres en el campo argentino en el siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: Raigal, 1952).
19. These figures are derived from Argentina Comisión Nacional de Censos, Tercer
Censo Nacional, levantado el 1º de Julio de 1914, 10 vols. (Buenos Aires: L. J. Roso, 1916 – 19),
2:178 – 248, 4:76 – 102.
inces of the northwest, where criollos were an overwhelming majority. While

some immigrants settled in the cities of Tucumán and Salta, immigrants, many
of them of Syrian-Lebanese origin, constituted only 2.6 percent of a total rural
population of six hundred thousand; the rest were criollos.20 Therefore, there
were at least one million criollos in the rural areas, divided evenly between the
pampas and the northwest. In the latter region, criollos were not only the major-
ity but they also lived in close-knit communities that favored the continuation
of their culture.
A simple solution that elite intellectuals found to accommodate the pre-
immigration population in the myth of white Argentina was to regard criollos
not as a mestizo group but instead to emphasize their European ancestry. The
lack of definition in the census regarding race contributed to making the racial
connotation of the term criollo even more ambiguous. In the colonial period, the
criollo category referred to only the American-born white elite, just as it did in
the rest of the Spanish colonies. After the beginning of the massive European
immigration, the use of criollo expanded to include any native Argentine regard-
less of race. White descendents of colonial Spanish, as well as people of African
descent, mestizos (also called gauchos, and sometimes even chinos), or descendents
of previously tributary indigenous peoples could equally be called criollos. Fur-
thermore, Argentine writers who participated in the literary movement called cri-
ollismo defined their characters by culture, not race. Black gauchos, for instance,
were common in criollista works, especially those for the theater, as were Euro-
pean immigrants who adopted gaucho customs and language.21 Criollismo suc-
ceeded under the assumption that autochthonous gauchos were rapidly disap-
pearing, swept aside by the rise of the white rural middle class. What remained
was a cultural type, whose adoption by the children of European immigrants
represented the ultimate triumph of the myth of white Argentina.22
The myth of white Argentina reflected the general trend toward assimi-
lation that reigned in the political discussion on nation and ethnicity across
Latin America. Elsewhere, state officials and intellectuals pressured the former
20. The total rural population in the provinces of Jujuy, Salta, Tucumán, and Santiago
del Estero and Catamarca was 600,000. Argentina, Tercer Censo Nacional, 2:294 – 347.
21. Ana Cara-Walker, “The Art of Assimilation and Dissimulation among Italians and
Argentines,” Latin American Research Review 22 (1987): 37 – 67; Micol Seigel, “Cocoliche’s
Romp: Fun with Nationalism at Argentina’s Carnival,” Drama Review 44 (2000): 56 – 83;
Alberto Gerchunoff and Ricardo Feierstein, Alberto Gerchunoff, Judío y Argentino: Viaje
temático desde “Los gauchos judíos” (1910) hasta sus últimos textos (1950) y visión crítica
(Buenos Aires: Míla, 2000).
22. Miller, In the Shadow of the State, 172 – 73.
colonial indigenous communities to rapidly assimilate into the nation. While

in most Latin American countries assimilation implied that indigenous people
could pass as mestizo, in Argentina to assimilate meant to adopt an intermedi-
ate category of criollo, which as a result of the cultural politics of the time was
ultimately equivalent to Europeanness. The whitening of the nonimmigrant
Argentine population occurred primarily on the desktops of government offi-
cials and in academic journals and other printed media. But in the villages and
districts where the non-European Argentines lived, whitening was a remote and
abstract concept, which sometimes had not even been heard of. However, the
assimilation engineered by the state was not just a matter of shifting labels in a
census form; it also fostered changes in practices and norms in local communi-
ties. In the next section, I will revisit the long-term history of the Calchaquí
valley, highlighting the key moments and factors that signaled its integration
into the national community.
Indigenous Roots and Creolization in the Calchaquí Valley
The history of the Calchaquí valley can be summarized as a progressive loss of

political and economic autonomy and assimilation into broader political entities.
Before the fifteenth century, the valley was populated by agriculturalists who
apparently spoke a common language, identified as Cacan, but lacked central-
ized organization. In the mid-fifteenth century, these polities became gradually
incorporated into the Inca empire, which brought to the area both settlers and
the Quechua language.23 In the mid-sixteenth century, rulership of the Cal-
chaquí valley passed from the Incas to the Spanish and the population became
indigenous subjects of the Spanish crown. Finally, in the nineteenth century,
the Calchaquí people became citizens of the Argentine Republic. At that time,
they also lost the ethnic definition as indios that the Spanish had assigned and
were officially designated as criollos.
Claims of an overall indigenous heritage are based on the history of the val-
ley, as abandoned terraces, ruins of walled towns, rich burial sites, and splendid
pieces of ceramic and carved rocks give evidence of the valley’s pre-Columbian
splendor. The cultural uniqueness of the valley seems to be facilitated by its geo-
graphic location. The steeply winding road that connects the Tucumán lowland
23. Verónica Williams and María B. Cremonte, “Mitmaqkuna o circulación de bienes?

Indicadores de la producción cerámica como identificadores étnicos, un caso de estudio en
el Noroeste argentino,” in El Tucumán colonial y Charcas, ed. Ana María Lorandi (Buenos
Aires: Univ. Nacional de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, 1997), 75 – 83.
town of Acheral and the village of El Mollar up in the valleys was built in 1946.
Before that time, travelers had followed switchbacks up and down on the backs
of mules. Looking at the sharp ravines and the thickly vegetated damp cliffs
that threaten to engulf the modern road after each rain, it is difficult to imagine
the weary muleteers and their animals treading this unlikely path. The val-
ley’s sense of geographic isolation and cultural individuality may be misleading,
however; interconnection among the different oases that punctuate the central
and southern Andes was and is more the norm than the exception. Geographic
isolation did help the valley communities to shield themselves against what they
perceived as endangering exogenous forces, although many of those attempts
ended with a greater loss of independence.
The first of these defining moments in the history of the valley was the
forceful incorporation of the Cacan-speaking independent polities into the Inca
empire, a process completed no later than 1470. The Cuzco rulers not only uni-
fied the different polities of the valley but also imposed a characteristic architec-
tural and artistic style linked with the Inca state cult.24 The Inca may have also
transplanted settlers from Peru (mitmaqkuna), who brought to the region the
Quechua language, extensive maize cultivation, and Inca rituals.25 The result
was a thorough political inclusion of the Calchaquí valley into the southern
provinces of the empire of the Inca, and the orientation of its economy around
the central Andes magnet of the Cuzco region.
After the fall of Cuzco in 1536, the Calchaquí people regained their inde-
pendence and defended it heroically against the Spanish. Led by the chief Juan
Calchaquí and other leaders, protected by high and narrow passes, and with
their battle practices strengthened by the adoption of horses, the Calchaquí
warriors kept the Spanish invaders at bay for several decades.26 In the meantime,
the Spanish had stabilized several settlements in the eastern lowlands, including
the present-day provincial capitals of La Rioja, Catamarca, Tucumán, Salta, and
Jujuy, which specialized in supplying cattle for the rising market of Potosí. The
official name of this province was Tucumán. In 1588, the governor of Tucumán
climbed up to the valley with a small Spanish army and, taking advantage of
24. Terence N. D’Altroy et al., “Inka Rule in the Northern Calchaquí Valley,
Argentina,” Journal of Field Archaeology 27 (2000): 5.
25. Estela Noli and María M. Arana, “Los Pichao: Aportes desde la ethnohistoria,”
in Investigations at Pichao: Introduction to Studies in the Santa María Valley, North-Western
Argentina, ed. Lisbet Bengtsson et al., British Archaeological Reports International Series,
978 (Oxford: J. and E. Hedges, 2001).
26. Manuel Lizondo Borda, Descubrimiento del Tucumán: El pasaje de Almagro, la entrada
de Rojas, el itinerario de Matienzo (Tucumán: Univ. Nacional de Tucumán, 1943).
a fratricidal war, forced Juan Calchaquí and his sons to acknowledge Spanish
sovereignty over the valley.27
The surrender of Juan Calchaquí did not end the actual autonomy of the
valleys. For another century the Calchaquí people intermittently refused to pay
tributes, snubbed their encomenderos, eschewed the mita (labor draft) shifts,
only selectively adopted the faith preached by a handful of Jesuit missionar-
ies, and on several dramatic occasions raised up arms against the Spanish.28 As
the bishop of Salta complained in a letter to the Consejo de Indias in 1657:
“[The Calchaquí people] are idolatrous in a high degree, they have continuous
communication with Satan, for the light of Gospel has never worked among
them. . . . they have ruined our towns, valleys, livestock, men, and weapons, and
produced heavy losses to Your Majesty.”29 The solution the Spanish found, the
bishop goes on to explain, was to sign a treaty that exempted the Calchaquíes
from regular tributes, allowing them to conduct long-distance cattle drives to
Potosí in exchange for a voluntary mita to the lowland towns.
This arrangement satisfied neither the Calchaquíes, who were disgruntled
with the mita, nor the Spanish, who coveted the valley’s rich mineral ores and
labor pool. In 1657, Captain Don Francisco Bohorquez, a Spanish adventurer
who fancied himself a grandchild of the last Inca, challenged the status quo by
having the Calchaquí people recognize him as “their Inca.”30 There ensued a
two-year war with the Spanish, in the middle of which Bohorquez capitulated,
obtaining a royal pardon. The Calchaquíes ignored Bohorquez’s defection and
continued fighting until the outraged Spanish soldiers massacred several thou-
sand Calchaquí villagers in 1659 and 1660.31
The devastating defeat in 1660 also signaled the beginning of Spanish
27. Juan Ramírez de Velazco to Consejo de Indias, Salta, 20 Apr. 1588, Archivo
General de Indias, Sevilla, Audiencia de Charcas (hereafter cited as AGI, Charcas), leg. 26,
doc. 1.
28. Expediente de la visita que hizo el Obispo de Tucumán, Dr. Don Julian de
Cortazar, en el valle Calchaquí, in Papeles Eclesiasticos del Tucumán, Documentos del Archivo
de Indias, ed. Roberto Levillier (Madrid: J. Pueyo, 1926), 95 – 98.
29. Bishop of Tucumán to Consejo de Indias, Salta, 13 Sept. 1658, AGI, Charcas,
leg. 122, doc. 6.
30. Captain Pedro Bohorquez to governor of Tucumán, Santa María, 7 May 1657, AGI,
Charcas, leg. 122; Conference on actions to be taken in the Calchaquí Valley (Junta en que
se trató las consecuencias y ejecuciones que habían de tener en Valle Calchaquí), San Juan de
la Rivera, 4 Aug. 1657, AGI, Charcas, leg. 122.
31. Report on Pedro Bohorquez’s insurrection, Salta, 3 Feb. 1658, AGI, Charcas, leg.
58.
landholding over Calchaquí communities. Even though the Spanish governor

granted communal lands to the resettled pueblos, no stipulations were made
on the exact limits of those properties. This allowed Spanish hacendados, or
large landowners, from Salta and Tucumán to obtain land grants over lands
that the communities of Amaicha and Colalao possessed in the eastern slope
of the Calchaquí range in present-day Tucumán.32 This process of disposses-
sion continued well into the nineteenth century.33 The Calchaquí communi-
ties preserved the lands in the valley itself, however. In 1716, the communities
of Amaicha, Quilmes, and Colalao obtained a royal ordinance arranging the
boundaries of their communal property.34 But the pueblo of Tolombón, which
had not obtained such a document, lost part of its lands to its own encomendero
in the second half of the eighteenth century.35 Such land grabs by encomenderos
or richer members of the communities were probably a common occurrence
across the valley.
The legal disputes between Calchaquíes and encomenderos and among
encomenderos themselves for the possession of the land grants allow histori-
ans to look into the process of ethnic redefinition during the colonial period.
The court proceedings define the peoples in the valley variously as Calchaquíes,
Diaguitas, Yocaviles, Amaichas, Tafíes, and Tolombones, among other desig-
nations. The persons who brought these cases to court treated the different
communities as distinct ethnicities and discussed their place of origin as well
as the different languages they spoke. For instance, the Tafíes appear in some
documents as a group completely separate from the Calchaquíes and in others as
part of them. Historian Rodolfo Cruz argues that practices such as these reflect
32. Report on the state of the province of Tucumán by Governor Alonzo de Mercado
y Villacorta, Salta, 6 June 1659, AGI, Charcas, leg. 58; land grant in favor of Pedro de
Avila y Zárate, Talavera, 1697, Archivo Histórico de Tucumán (hereafter cited as AHT),
Protocolos, ser. A, box 3; contract between Francisco de Aragon and Sebastian Rosel,
Tucumán 1692, AHT, Protocolos, ser. A, box 3; property title of Juan Román, Tucumán,
1697, AHT, Protocolos, ser. A, box 3.
33. Proceedings on the dispossession of lands belonging to the indians of Colalao and
Tolombón, Salta, 1808, AHT, Judicial, box 52, exp. 52.
34. The real cédula or royal ordinance is entirely reproduced in Miguel Figueroa
Román and Andrés Mulet, Planificación integral del valle de Amaicha (Tucumán: Univ.
Nacional de Tucumán, 1949).
35. Proceedings of census of Trancas Parish, Indian towns of Colalao y Tolombón, San
Miguel de Tucumán (Autos de revisita, curato de Trancas, pueblos de Colalao y Tolombón,
San Miguel de Tucumán), 16 May 1786, Archivo General de la Nación, Argentina
(hereafter cited as AGN), leg. 13.17.2.1, Padrones de Indios de Salta, 33.
the power of Spanish settlers to redefine the ethnicity of the valley’s dwellers
according to their economic interest.36
As the Spanish authority became firmly established in the valley during the
eighteenth century, the settlers tended to homogenize the Calchaquí communi-
ties under a common denomination as indios de padrón — individuals labeled by
Spanish census takers as liable to pay the indigenous tribute. The revisita, or
census, of 1791 listed 948 indios de padrón in Catamarca, 795 in Tucumán, and
780 in Salta, the majority of whom lived in the Calchaquí valleys.37 The colo-
nial officers who visited the indigenous villages in the 1780s and 1790s needed
a Quechua translator to communicate with the locals but do not mention the
Cacan language. However, perhaps as a result of the presence of missionaries
and Spanish landowners, important cultural changes could already be perceived
at the end of the colonial period. For instance, in the community of Cafayate, an
officer recorded that a translator was not needed because most Indians under-
stood Spanish perfectly.38 Yet what defined an indigenous person in the colonial
legislation was not language but ascription to an officially recognized pueblo de
indios. The legal definition as indios forced the Calchaquíes to pay tributes and
labor services but also allowed communities to retain part of their lands under
collective ownership, and with it, their identity as indigenous.
This colonial pact was rendered null after the outbreak of hostilities between
the rebel patriots and the Spanish in 1810. During the first six years of the War
of Independence, the entire northwest became a critical battlefield where patriot
armies managed to keep at bay the royal armies sent from Lima. An immedi-
ate effect of the war in the Calchaquí valley was that patriot officers stopped
collecting the Indian tribute, the main incentive to the colonial administra-
tors to retain the indigenous category.39 The onset of the independent republic
36. Manuel Lizondo Borda, Historia de Tucumán, Siglos XVII – XVIII (Tucumán: Univ.
Nacional de Tucumán, 1941), 48; Rodolfo Cruz, “La construcción de identidades étnicas en
el Tucumán colonial: Los amaichas y los tafíes en el debate sobre su ‘verdadera’ estructura
étnica,” in Lorandi, El Tucumán colonial, 65 – 92.
37. These figures show a slight population increase since the early part of the
eighteenth century. There is also a noticeable natural increase in the population between
the censuses of 1786 and 1791, although the time frame is too small to consider it a trend.
Census of tributary Indians (Autos de revisita), Salta, 27 Nov. 1791, AGN, leg. 13.17.2.1,
exp. 275.
38. Ibid.
39. The accounting books simply declare void the collection of indigenous tributes but
do not explain the reason for this change. Estado del corte y tanteo de la Caja Provincial,
1811 – 13, San Miguel de Tucumán, 8 Aug. 1814, AGN, leg. 10.5.10.2. However, the situation
was consistent with the difficulties faced by the bureaucracy of the independent republic
also inspired a new language of citizenship and equality, which undermined

the caste system that both exploited and sustained the indigenous communi-
ties. The republican rhetoric had immediate impacts in the courts of Tucumán,
where individual indigenous men and women used it as means to demand equal
treatment as citizens of the fledging nation. In 1812, three separate indigenous
women who, as they alleged, were subjected to personal servitude in the houses
of two Tucumán landowners and one rural justice of the peace requested to
be exonerated from this personal service by virtue of the Decree of Individual
Guarantees of 1811.40 In 1813, the Constitutional Assembly debated the place of
indigenous subjects in the new republic and finally abolished both tribute and
mita. After the formal declaration of independence in 1816, the Calchaquíes,
as well as all people registered as indigenous in the Spanish censuses, became
Argentine citizens and, in theory, enjoyed whatever limited rights this status
entitled them to. Reciprocally, the new government drafted Calchaquí men of
all ages into the armies of independence.
The War of Independence and ensuing civil wars that ravaged Argentina
between 1810 and 1862 were a major causeway for the creolization of the Cal-
chaquí people. Particularly during independence, the valleys and lowlands of the
northwest became the critical battleground where the United Provinces of the
Río de la Plata managed to sustain its sovereign claim against the loyalist troops
dispatched from Peru. Although exact registry of the militias that fought against
the Spanish is difficult to find, there is evidence that patriot officials demanded
contributions of men and horses from the communities in the valley.41 The
recruits from the valleys were stationed in the cities of Salta and Tucumán, where
the patriot commander General Manuel Belgrano not only took care of train-
ing them as soldiers but also of imposing on them a sense of nationality through
carefully choreographed martial rituals.42 Without a doubt, the intense experi-
to collect taxes elsewhere, see Tulio Halperín Donghi, Guerra y finanzas en los orígenes del
estado argentino (Buenos Aires: Univ. de Belgrano, 1982).
40. Provincial Junta of Tucumán to Supreme Junta, San Miguel de Tucumán, 28 Jan.
1812, AGN, leg. 10.5.10.1; Freedom of María Santos, servant of Ignacio Bazán, San Miguel
de Tucumán, 11 Mar. 1812, AGN, leg. 10.5.10.1; Freedom of María Magdalena, indian
servant of José Terán, San Miguel de Tucumán, 20 Jan. 1812, AGN, leg. 10.5.10.1; Cabildo
de Tucumán to Provincial Junta of Tucumán, San Miguel de Tucumán, 3 Feb. 1812, AGN,
leg. 10.5.10.1.
41. Neighbors of Fuerte de Andalgalá to provincial government of Tucumán, San
Miguel de Tucumán, 22 Aug. 1814, AGN, leg.10.5.10.2.
42. “Libro de órdenes del día del Ejército Auxiliador del Perú, 1816,” in Museo Mitre,
Documentos del Archivo de Belgrano (Buenos Aires: Impr. Coni Hermanos, 1916).
ence of warfare and camaraderie with criollos from different parts of the country
furthered the assimilation of the Calchaquí men. Similarly, the country’s long
civil war between Federales and Unitarios, which divided the population of the
valley between the two opposing sides, forced the Calchaquí people to assume
nationwide political identities.43 The wars of independence and the civil wars
were powerful forces in erasing the isolation of the valley and incorporating the
former indigenous villages into the fledgling national community.
Some Calchaquí communities found that independence opened the pos-
sibility of reclaiming lands from the descendants of Spanish hacendados. After
a long civil trial, the communities of Amaicha, Quilmes, and Calimonte man-
aged to regain their legal holdings. The nationwide liberal reforms that began
in 1862 constituted a powerful ideological backlash against the preservation of
communal lands. Elsewhere in the northwest, the expansion of Buenos Aires
liberalism prompted the explosion of criollo rebellions. Criollo culture, histo-
rian Ariel de la Fuente demonstrates, was critical in defining the sides in this
conflict.44 The caudillos representing criollo small herders and peasants of the
lowlands reacted against the centralizing modernity of Buenos Aires. The val-
leys did not side with the caudillos, though. Instead, the Calchaquí villagers
aligned themselves with the government loyalists’ troops.45 This alliance with
the central government reveals another step taken in assimilating themselves
into the larger national community.
In the long battle to retain their lands, the Calchaquí communities tin-
kered with their ethnic identity as they deemed fit to better defend their inter-
ests. In an 1823 lawsuit against a neighboring landowner, Amaicha comuneros,
village members with full rights to the common lands, identified themselves as
“originally native from this American country.”46 The petitioners understood
that this condition granted them “more rights than the majority of the people
who inhabit it” and therefore entitled them to preserve the communal lands
43. On one occasion in the middle of the war, the militias in the valley shifted sides
from the Federales to the Unitarios, or liberals. See Manuel Lizondo Borda, Documentos
argentinos: Crisóstomo Alvarez y su campaña libertadora del norte, 1852 (Tucumán: Univ.
Nacional de Tucumán, 1957), 18 – 19.
44. Ariel de la Fuente, Children of Facundo: Caudillo and Gaucho Insurgency during the
Argentine State-Formation Process (La Rioja, 1853 – 1870) (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000).
45. In 1921, people in the valley still remembered the caudillo rebellions of 1865 and
1870 as dramatic disruptions of their normal life. Ramón Cano and Miguel Cano Velez,
Amaicha, 1921 Encuesta Nacional del Magisterio, Instituto Nacional de Antropología
(hereafter cited as ENM), leg. Tucumán 58, pp. 23 – 24.
46. Esteban Figueroa, representing the village of Amaicha, to governor of Tucumán,
Amaicha, 26 Apr. 1823, AHT, Judicial, box 125, exp. 25, p. 6.
that “even the most usurping of all conquistadors ceded to us.” This language
reflects a strategy that appropriated the language of rights of the independence
elite without challenging the colonial juridical order, which acknowledged
indigenous communal landholdings. But as the liberal juridical order advanced,
the Calchaquí comuneros, probably advised by city lawyers, downgraded their
indigenous affiliation to “descendents” of the original inhabitants and empha-
sized their rights as Argentine citizens.47 In 1892, avoiding the use of any spe-
cific ethnic label, the provincial government granted the land to the “rural
communes” of Amaicha, Quilmes, and Calimonte, their members officially
designated as comuneros.48 By obtaining that recognition, the Calchaquí com-
munities effectively challenged a liberal conception of landholding that rejected
communal solidarity and glorified private ownership. The victory also entailed
acceptance of full membership in the national community.
Despite the success of those communities in retaining their communal
lands, the majority of other communities were not so fortunate. Still, many
Calchaquí people lived outside the communal villages and either held private
property or had no access to property at all. The archives of the 1867 and 1895
national censuses present a bleak reality in which the majority of the adult males
are listed as day laborers ( jornaleros) while women’s professions were limited to
laundress and seamstress. In contrast, in Amaicha and Quilmes, where property
was communal, the majority of male and female adults are listed as farmers
(labradores).49 The common name for individuals who were not members of the
collectively owned communities was lugareños, or “people from the place,” which
apparently did not connote a separate culture from those who were full mem-
bers of the communities. The censuses of 1869 and 1895 show many indigenous
surnames, some belonging to the same families that lived in those communities
in the time of the 1791 census, like the Sasos of Amaicha. Others were internal
47. On the reform of indigenous landholding in Jujuy and Salta, see David Bushnell,
Reform and Reaction in the Platine Provinces, 1810 – 1852 (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press,
1983), 91 – 92; and Bushnell, “The Indian Policy of Jujuy Province,” Americas 55 (1999): 584.
48. Figueroa Román and Mulet, Planificación integral del valle de Amaicha, 31 – 33;
Carlos Reyes Gajardo, Motivos culturales del valle de Amaicha (Tucumán: Fondo Nacional de
las Artes, 1966), 50 – 52; Alejandro Isla, Los usos políticos de la identidad: Indigenismo y estado
(Buenos Aires: Editorial de las Ciencias, 2002), 74.
49. Tucumán Leales-Encalilla, Buenos Aires, 18 Sept. 1867, AGN, Primer Censo
Argentino, Libreto Nro 459; Colalao del Valle, Población Urbana, 15 May 1895, AGN,
Libretos del Segundo Censo Nacional, leg. 1359; Colalao del Valle, Población Rural, 15 May
1895, AGN, Libretos del Segundo Censo Nacional, leg. 1359; Amaicha, Población Rural, 15
May 1895, AGN, Libretos del Segundo Censo Nacional, leg. 1359.
immigrants who moved across the artificial provincial borders that sliced the
valley into three parts. Still, many indigenous people had Spanish surnames
in 1791, and many people over 56 years old with names such as Cruz, Ayala,
Gonzalez, Balderrama, and Benarez in the 1869 census may have been legally
born as Indians.50
The disappearance of indigenous languages in the Calchaquí valley presents
something of a mystery. If in 1791 Spaniards needed Quechua translators to talk
to residents of most communities in the valley, at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury no visitor reported the use of any language other than Spanish. However,
it remains unclear when and how the indigenous languages faded from the lin-
guistic landscape. Samuel Lafone Quevedo, an archaeologist who ran a copper
mine in the Calchaquí town of Santa Maria before starting his academic career,
claimed to have heard a few old people talking in Quechua in 1860 and that its
usage was common during the first half of the nineteenth century. He asserts
that priests took confessions in Quechua and that merchants traveling to and
from Bolivia communicated with each other in Quechua.51 Lafone Quevedo
speculates that the transition from Quechua to Spanish was the result of public
schooling. But before the federal government founded elementary schools in
the valley in 1907, education was nonexistent in any language. The most likely
explanation is that as communication with the lowlands became more common
over the course of the nineteenth century, Spanish displaced Quechua as the
spoken language.
It was not only language that was lost in the nineteenth century. Long-
distance cattle commerce had been the center of the valley economy in the colo-
nial period. Local farms produced fodder for the passing herds that used the
valley as a highway between Northern Chile and Bolivia. Some cattle were also
raised for export in the valley itself. But economic changes affecting the entire
northwest, especially the decline of mining in Bolivia, civil and international
wars, and the development of railroads, slowly eroded this source of income. For
those without land, the economy of the valley offered reduced means of subsis-
tence. Commercial farms in Tafí and Cafayate controlled by lowland patrician
families were better irrigated and connected with the lowland markets, and they
specialized in the production of grains and cattle for Salta and Tucumán. The
50. Eusebia Martin, Apellidos indígenas documentados en los archivos provinciales del norte
argentino (Buenos Aires: Univ. de Buenos Aires, 1963).
51. Samuel A. Lafone Quevedo, Tesoro de catamarqueñismos: Nombres de lugares y apellidos
indios con etimologías y eslabones aislados de la lengua cacana, 3rd ed. (Tucumán: Univ. Nacional
de Tucumán, 1927), xxv.
Michel Torino family from Salta even managed to develop profitable vineyards
and a winery in Cafayate; their wine eventually became an established national
brand. Most lugareños worked the lands of absentee large-scale landowners.
The rest of the local producers, either comuneros or lugareños, struggled to
find a replacement for the cattle commerce.52
Faraway economic developments also influenced the economic reorienta-
tion of the valley. The demographic and economic growth of the pampas and
Buenos Aires prompted the reorientation of the lethargic northwestern econ-
omy from ranching to sugar production. The political alliance between the
patrician families of Tucumán, Salta, and Jujuy and the national elites in Buenos
Aires guaranteed full protection for the regional sugar industry. As a result,
between 1880 and 1900, more than thirty top-of-the-line sugar mills rose up
in the northwestern lowlands, generating more than a hundred thousand jobs
and providing for 60 percent of the regional economic output.53 Such economic
dynamism rapidly transformed the rural economy in the lowlands from ranch-
ing and subsistence agriculture into a brazen form of agrarian capitalism.
The development of the sugar industry dramatically disrupted the course
of life in the valley, where the sugarcane planters found an ideal seasonal labor
pool. Each year, by mid-May, many of the 20,000 Calchaquíes boarded their
doors and windows and migrated en masse toward the lowlands of Tucumán
and Salta for la zafra, the cane harvest, only to return at the end of August.
The harvesters’ working conditions were universally described as highly
exploitative.54 Entire families, including children and the elderly, toiled during
52. Hugo Ferrullo and Gustavo Mendez, “El desarrollo rural en la comunidad de
Quilmes (Valle Calchaquí),” Desarrollo Rural 1 (1990); Estela B. de Santamarina, Notas a la
antropogeografía del Valle de Tafí (Tucumán: Univ. Nacional de Tucumán, 1945). Archeologist
Juan B. Ambrosetti attributes the stagnation of the Calchaquí valley to the decline of cattle
exports to Bolivia. This downturn may have motivated the abandonment of fodder fields.
Juan B. Ambrosetti, “La hacienda de Molinos, Valles Calchaquíes, provincia de Salta,”
Estudios Historia, Ciencias, Letras 3, no. 4 (1903): 158 – 80.
53. Donna J. Guy, Argentine Sugar Politics: Tucumán and the Generation of Eighty
(Tempe: Arizona State Univ. Press, 1980), xi, 34 – 35; Patricia Juárez Dappe, “The Sugar
Boom in Tucumán: Economy and Society in Northwestern Argentina, 1876 – 1916” (Ph.D.
diss., Univ. of California at Los Angeles, 2001); Roberto Pucci, “Azúcar y proteccionismo en
la Argentina,” in Estudios sobre la historia de la industria azucarera argentina, ed. Daniel Campi
(Tucumán: Univ. Nacional de Tucumán, 1991), 61 – 96.
54. La Vanguardia (Buenos Aires), 20 Sept. 1902, p. 2; La Vanguardia, 11 Dec. 1897,
p. 1; La Vanguardia, 2 Oct. 1897, p. 4; see also Juan Bialet Massé, El estado de las clases obreras
argentinas a comienzos del siglo (Córdoba, Argentina: Univ. Nacional de Córdoba, 1968),
105; Donna J. Guy, “The Rural Working Class in Nineteenth Century Argentina: Forced
Plantation Labor in Tucumán,” Latin American Research Review 13, no. 1 (1978): 135 – 45.
extended workdays under the whip of the overseers, having no place to spend
the night but in makeshift huts thatched with cane leaves. The minuscule wages
were often encumbered with debt to either the company store or the grocers
in the valley, who acted as hiring agents for the planters. In truth, it was those
debts that coerced peasants into the harvest every year. The decline of cattle
traffic to Bolivia and Chile seriously thwarted the valley’s already limited cash
flow and put the families at the mercy of richer landowners and grocers, who
advanced credit in exchange for labor. This system of debt peonage exacerbated
social stratification in the valley.
The arrival of capitalism in the northwest brought other changes. In the
1920s, Juan Alfonso Carrizo somberly commented on the “bad habits” that sea-
sonal workers brought back to the valley on their return from the lowlands.
Among those bad habits, Carrizo included drinking, gambling, swearing, fancy
shoes, and, worst of all, tango. Apparently, the workers bought gramophones
and tango records from the merchants that surrounded the sugar mills, which
according to Carrizo, introduced the pernicious vocabulary and attitudes of
Buenos Aires into the local society.55 Other, less moralistic sources partially
confirm some of Carrizo’s observations. Not just tango but characteristically
lowland criollo musical styles and dances such as chacarera, gato, and zamba
became prevalent in the valleys.56 This horizontal cultural exchange between
Calchaquíes and criollos from the lowlands is a good example of what Peter
Wade calls “mestizaje as lived experience.”57
Carrizo may have exaggerated the pace of change, but he was right to
assess the cultural implications of capitalist penetration in this remote corner of
Argentina. The changes he points out were the last in a series of transitions the
valley experienced at the end of the colonial period. The political discourse of
citizenship, recruitment into the national army, erosion of economic indepen-
dence, and loss of indigenous language all contributed to the elimination of the
colonial construction of race based on categorical distinctions among Spanish,
mestizos, and Indians. The ambiguous label of criollo, already used to refer to
Argentines in many other parts of the country, became the term that was con-
sidered to best fit the Calchaquí people at the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury. In addition to the different historical factors enumerated here, this transi-
tion was reinforced by the views of the external actors, such as anthropologists,
55. Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Tucumán, 1:248.

56. Tunes collected by Isabel Aretz in Tucumán, 27 Jul. to 1 Dec 1941, Archivo del
Instituto Nacional de Musicología Carlos Vega, Libro de Viajes, 91.
57. Wade, “Rethinking Mestizaje,” 44.
teachers, and folklorists, who exerted an important influence in defining the

ethnicity of the Calchaquí people.
Indians or Criollos? The Anthropologists’ View
As the Calchaquí valley became more integrated into the Argentine economy
and the people assimilated with the broader criollo culture, specialists of all
sorts used their power to define the ethnic constitution of the country in terms
that better suited elite interests. The early archaeologists and anthropologists
who visited the valley, indoctrinated in biological definitions of race, tended to
define the Calchaquí people not just as indigenous but as the living remains of
ancient civilizations, themselves on their way to extinction. Echoing an agenda
common to the development of folkloric and archaeological fields elsewhere, the
collection and classification of local cultural artifacts went hand in hand with
the desire for extinction of that local culture.
This attitude is clearly discernible in the writings of Juan Bautista Ambro-
setti, an archaeologist and folklorist from the University of Buenos Aires who
performed intensive fieldwork in the valley between 1895 and 1906. Ambrosetti
was born in Entre Ríos to an immigrant Italian family and moved to Buenos
Aires to study natural sciences. Appointed a professor of natural history at the
University of Buenos Aires, Ambrosetti performed a series of groundbreak-
ing research trips to the most distant parts of the country with the support of
the Institute of Geographic Studies.58 Early in his career, the Calchaquí valley
caught his attention. His field trips were archaeological expeditions and folk-
loric surveys rolled into one. He was primarily interested in pre-Columbian
ceramics and secondarily in contemporary folk culture.59 His descriptions of the
valley, however, did not benefit its inhabitants.
For Ambrosetti, the indigenous condition of the valley culture helped him
shed light on his archaeological findings. As Ambrosetti explained: “The cer-
emonies of present-day Calchaquíes show such an indigenous character that I
do not hesitate to see them as similar to the ones performed in pre-Columbian
times.”60 For instance, he described small sculptures found in graves as “fetishes”
58. Juan B. Ambrosetti, Viaje de un maturrango y otros relatos folklóricos (Buenos Aires:
Ediciones Centurión, 1963).
59. Juan B. Ambrosetti, “Por el valle Calchaquí,” Anales de la Sociedad Científica
Argentina 44 (1897): 87 – 120.
60. Juan B. Ambrosetti, Notas de arqueología calchaquí (Buenos Aires: Imp. la Buenos
Aires, 1899), 72.
because he observed that the modern population of the valley using figurines
during special rituals. Although Ambrosetti did not practice any anthropomet-
ric measurement of the valley dwellers, for him culture and race were associated
terms; therefore, if contemporary Calchaquí people performed the same prac-
tices as pre-Columbian valley dwellers, then they must be the same people.
Adán Quiroga, another folklorist who toured the valley, shared the view
that the valley dwellers were indigenous. As in the case of Charles Nisard, stud-
ied by Michel de Certeau, Adán Quiroga was both a law enforcement officer and
a folklorist.61 Trained as a lawyer, Quiroga moved from Catamarca to Tucumán
in 1886 with a job as legal advisor to the police department. Eventually he
obtained an appointment as a judge of the criminal court. Quiroga moved back
to Catamarca to be elected mayor of that provincial capital. In 1904, he reached
the top security office in the country as subsecretary of the interior during the
tenure of Minister Joaquín V. González, also a vocational folklorist and admirer
of Calchaquí antiquities. During breaks from work as a government official,
Quiroga toured the Calchaquí valley performing archaeological and folkloric
research. Although Quiroga never taught at a university, his vocational work
was highly regarded in academic circles and eventually published by scholarly
editorial houses.62
Adán Quiroga did not hesitate to use the adjective “indigenous” when refer-
ring to anything related to the valley. His informants were “el indio Peralta,” or
“la india María de Machigasta”; similarly, the towns of Amaicha and Colalao
were “pueblos indígenas.” The entire organization of his main work, Folklore
Calchaquí, reinforces the idea that the valley’s people were totally and unmistak-
ably indigenous.63 Like Ambrosetti, Quiroga seemed to be interested in local
folklore as a way of shedding light on the motifs of pre-Columbian artifacts.
He assumed that the valley people’s myths and deities of 1895 were the same as
those represented in vases and carved figures from the pre-Columbian period.
Ambrosetti and Quiroga did not problematize the issue of whether the val-
ley people were indigenous or not — they took it for granted that they were.
With the evidence they gathered on rituals, myths, and language, it was impos-
sible for them to think otherwise. For them, indigenous meant ancient and ata-
vistic, a culture that, like the surrounding archaeological sites, had remained
61. Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, “The Beauty of the Dead:
Nisard,” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, ed. Michel de Certeau (Minneapolis: Univ. of
Minnesota Press, 1997), 119 – 36.
62. “Calchaquí del Dr. Adán Quiroga,” El Orden (Tucumán), 28 May 1896, p. 1.
63. Adán Quiroga, Folklore calchaquí (Buenos Aires: Univ. de Buenos Aires, 1929).
untouched for centuries. Their interest in these local cultures was colored by a
clear dislike of modernity combined with a fatalistic vision of the extinction of
whoever dared resist its force. The description of the Calchaquíes as indigenous
people in the process of extinction resonated with the discourse of the Buenos
Aires – based social science establishment led by sociologist José Ingenieros.64
The rapid extinction to which the Calchaquí people were doomed would
come as a result of the several deficiencies that the very design of the census
of 1914 tried to put in evidence. This design attempted to show the degree
of civilization the country had reached during the previous thirty years. For
instance, in addition to the standard demographic data, the census includes
detailed information of economic activity and lists civic associations, theaters,
and museums as tokens of cultural progress. The census also presents housing
and health data, which clearly reveal that the people of the northwest were more
poorly educated, fed, and housed and suffered a higher incidence of chronic
diseases and physical and psychological disabilities than people in other regions.
This evidence may have led the social scientists to conclude — and hope — that
the healthier European population would eventually displace the illness-ridden
Calchaquíes and other nonwhite northwesterners.
But reality proved the Argentine positivists wrong. The impoverished
populations of the northwest were not decreasing but growing, and it was clear
that they were going to be around for much longer than the Buenos Aires social
scientists would have liked. Therefore, other national authorities whose duty it
was to deal with the deficiencies pointed out by the census, namely the lamen
table state of public education in the valleys, resolved to intervene and force
the cultural creolization of this population. The public education authorities
approved curricular programs aimed to unite the national culture around the
white Argentina paradigm and assigned to rural teachers the task of produc-
ing this transformation in their school districts. A group of rural teachers was
charged with putting these plans into effect in the Calchaquí valley and, para-
doxically, with recording the local folk traditions before their education plans
managed to eliminate them.
The Calchaquí Valley in the National Folkloric Survey of 1921
The National Folkloric Survey ordered by the National Board of Education in

1921 provides an important written source through which historians can explore
how rural teachers interacted with the local society in the Calchaquí valley.
64. José Ingenieros, Sociología argentina (Madrid: D. Jorro, 1913), 457.

The survey created a new opportunity for the accumulation of knowledge on

rural lore and it represented another step toward the definition of the criollo.
As in the case of the first folklorists, the board pursued several goals, such as
appealing to nationalist feelings, creating an archive of popular culture, and
hastening the penetration of modernity into the surviving local cultures.65 The
National Board of Education assigned each rural teacher in the country the task
of collecting folklore materials in their districts.66 The survey offers an unusual
window into the Calchaquí people from the point of view of the local teachers
and, indirectly, into what local communities thought about their culture and
ethnicity. From their reports, it is evident that the rural teachers did not define
the Calchaquí people as indigenous but as criollos of indigenous ancestry. This
definition, I argue, was the direct result of the process of de-Indianization, in
which the teachers were not neutral observers but central actors, if not the most
critical ones.
Although the quality of the teachers’ reports is uneven and they are gener-
ally influenced by the questionnaire designed by board member Juan P. Ramos,
the unpublished survey offers a wealth of information on specific localities and
descriptions of local life. Foremost, it gives us a complex picture of how rural
teachers interacted with their host societies. To regulate the data collection
process, the board distributed printed sheets with a model survey accompa-
nied by a brochure that gave instructions on specific procedures. The brochure
instructed teachers to pay attention to “superstitious ceremonies,” fables, myths,
sayings, and ballads of “Indians and gauchos.”67 After receiving the instructions
in May of 1921, rural teachers across the country worked on the assignment for
four months. The results were collected by local school districts and sent to the
National Board in October of that year.
Despite their lack of training as folklorists, the teachers in the Calchaquí
valley were able to report a vast array of aspects of local daily life and culture.
Their personal knowledge of the communities gave them an advantage over
urban researchers. Both Ambrosetti and Quiroga complained that it was very
65. Angel Gallardo, “Proyecto de renovación de votos profesionales,” El Monitor de la

Educación Común, no. 580 (1921): 55 – 56; Consejo Nacional de Educación Argentina, Folklore
Argentino (Buenos Aires: Consejo Nacional de Educación, 1921); “Concurso de folklore
argentino,” El Monitor de la Educación Común, no. 581 (1921): 111 – 12.
66. Juan P. Ramos, “Instrucciones a los maestros para el mejor cumplimiento de la
resolución adoptada por el Honorable Consejo sobre folklore argentino,” El Monitor de la
Educación Común, no. 580 (1921): 3 – 26; Julio Picarel, “Orientación cultural nacionalista,”
El Monitor de la Educación Común, no. 581 (1921): 221 – 22.
67. Ramos, “Instrucciones a los maestros,” 3 – 26.
hard to obtain information from the Calchaquí people and that the rustic herd-
ers looked at them with mistrust. Teachers enjoyed the advantage of residing
permanently in the area, and they shared the same rough living conditions as
their neighbors. Yet they were also outsiders and could observe the rural com-
munities from the vantage point of modern educated citizens and local repre-
sentatives of the national government.
Adrián Canelada and Ramón and Miguel Cano were among those teachers.
Born and educated in Spain, Canelada immigrated to Argentina after return-
ing from the War of 1898 in Cuba. After living a few months in Tucumán city,
Canelada obtained a job as a teacher at one of the newly formed national schools
in the Calchaquí valley. His destination was Calimonte, a lonely rural school
halfway between Amaicha and Colalao. He served the school for forty years
and moved to Amaicha after retirement.68 The Board of Education ranked his
among the six best individual reports in the national folklore survey.69 Brothers
Ramón and Miguel Cano, two other teachers who contributed extensively to
the folkloric survey, were born in the valley, although they were also outsiders
of a sort. Their family had arrived from Salta city after their father bought a
forage farm in Colalao in the early 1890s. Both brothers studied in the normal
school of Tucumán and returned to the valley to teach at the national school
of Amaicha. They studied music and became interested in the local musical
culture. They were among the few teachers who could supply musical notations
of folk songs for the survey archive. Twenty years later, they were still living in
Amaicha and had become local officials, and they served as both informants and
guides to the ethnomusicologists who toured the area.70
As a result of their intimate knowledge of their localities, teachers such
as Canelada and the Cano brothers were able to identify many aspects of local
culture that the first folklorists failed to perceive and report. The survey, for
instance, revealed how ingrained were beliefs in sorcery, witchcraft, and faith
healing among the Calchaquí people. The teachers in the Calchaquí valley
named different local individuals who were reputed to be witches and sorcer-
ers, reported incidents of sorcery and faith healing to which they were direct
68. Adrián Canelada, Mis nostalgias en el Valle Calchaquí (Tucumán: Univ. Nacional de
Tucumán, 1994).
69. “Distribución de Premios entre maestros que colaboraron en la recopilación de
materials folklóricos,” El Monitor de Educación Común 64, no. 873 (1945): 77 – 88.
70. Isabel Aretz, Música tradicional argentina: Tucumán, historia y folklore (Tucumán:
Univ. Nacional de Tucumán, 1946); Colalao del Valle, Población Urbana, 15 May 1895,
AGN, Libretos del Segundo Censo Nacional, leg. 1359; Guía comercial de Tucumán
(Tucumán: Mercurio, 1931).
witnesses, and provided extended lists of herbal medicines and folk medical
procedures, revealing the scant penetration of modern medical services. The
teachers’ detailed accounts suggested that they were well informed about local
folk medicine, probably because they may have used those services themselves
on occasion. On a different level, the teachers’ reports were candid and many
times expressed the internal differences in their communities, often referring
to class divisions or personal feuds, dynamics that professional folklorists were
not able to see during their short stays in the valley.
Knowing that they had been sent as envoys of progress and aware that they
had to live up to the standards they purportedly represented, teachers distanced
themselves from the culture they described in their reports. All of them referred
to the locals with a distant “estas gentes” (these people) and then went on to enu-
merate their odd and primitive ways. Canelada described the Calchaquí people
as “of a permanently serious countenance, as ones who may be concealing a
mystery,” and also as possessors of an “atavistic indolence” that prevented them
from making any effort to do anything that was not prescribed by custom.71
Rather than using the label “indigenous,” the teachers preferred to use ethni-
cally neutral terms such as “gente del lugar” (local people), “vallistos” (people of
the valley), or “habitantes de la zona” (inhabitants of the area), or, more generally,
“criollos.” At the same time, the teachers recognized that the Calchaquí people
were descendents of indigenous people, even though they did not use that term
to identify them.72
Defining local religion in the valleys was an important part of defining the
people’s ethnicity. For the early folklorists such as Ambrosetti and Quiroga, the
peculiar religion of the Calchaquí people revealed the indigenous ascription of
the valley dwellers. Ambrosetti defined the valley’s religion as a “promiscuity
of beliefs” in which Catholic saints were subordinated to the “fetishist” ancient
Calchaquí religion.73 Adán Quiroga attempted to organize those mythologies
coherently around a series of myths that he identified as “Incaic,” minimizing
the Catholic intervention. From the reports of the National Folkloric Survey of
1921, it appears that the people of the valley shared some of the basic tenets of
the colonial Andean religion, but their religion was still, in the eyes of the teach-
ers, no more than a local variation of popular Catholicism.
71. Report of teacher Adrián Canelada, School no. 217, Calimonte, 1921 Encuesta
Nacional del Magisterio (hereafter cited as ENM), box Tucumán, leg. 54, pp. 115 – 18.
The archive of this folkloric survey is hosted by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología in
Buenos Aires.
72. Report of teacher Adrían Canelada, 124.
73. Ambrosetti, Notas de arqueología calchaquí, 69 n. 1.
Calchaquí people practiced a few rituals of clear Andean lineage during the
early part of the twentieth century. In Amaicha, Colalao, and Quilmes, shep-
herds conducted the annual ceremony of señaladas or cattle branding, a ritual
that early folklorists have used as an example of the exceptional character of the
local culture.74 The señalada was simply the annual branding of the animals,
a procedure required and regulated by law across the country. In the valley,
however, it acquired special local characteristics. After the branding of cattle
was finished, the master of ceremonies ordered that a hole be dug in one of
the corners of the corral. There the party offered pieces of the animals’ ears to
the Pachamama, “Mother Earth” in the pan-Andean cosmology. The master
of ceremonies bundled the offering in the herd owner’s son’s poncho together
with coca leaves; the blood of one or more animals sacrificed at that moment;
a generous provision of chicha (maize beer), aloja (a fermented beverage from a
local fruit), or cane liquor; and the smoked cigarettes of those present. After
that, people walked around the corral driving the flock while singing prayers to
Llastay, protector of livestock, and to Pachamama, pleading for the growth of
the flock and for the good fortune of the herd owner.75
Although the teachers recognized these rituals as peculiar to the region and
at odds with the prevailing criteria of rationality and modernity, they did not see
them as indigenous rituals. Rather, they understood them as local superstitions,
and even though teachers saw the rituals as “atavistic,” they also perceived the
existence of processes of change.76 Teacher Lola Nieto reproduced a conver-
sation with one of the village elders, who complained that the local Catholic
priests were “making people lose their faith” by battling against popular rit-
uals.77 Similarly, while describing the devotion to “Santa Bárbara,” Canelada
contended that many such local traditions had became the subject of derision by
youth “because of the advancement they believe they possess,” and that people
who still believed tended to conceal it, afraid of the scorn of the youth.78
74. Ambrosetti, Notas de arqueología calchaquí, 71.

75. Report of teacher Adrían Canelada, 72 – 74; report of teacher Rosario R. de Nieto,
School no. 5, Amaicha del Valle, 1921, ENM, box Tucumán, leg. 230, pp. 6 – 7; report of
teacher Damián Pereyra, School no. 62, El Molle, 1921, ENM, box Tucumán, leg. 250,
pp. 9 – 11; report of teacher Francisca de Garmendia, School no. 10, Amaicha del Valle, 1921,
ENM, box Tucumán, leg. 134, p. 7.
76. Report of teacher Ramón Cano, School no. 10, Amaicha del Valle, 1921, ENM,
box Tucumán, leg. 57, p. 3.
77. Report of teacher Lola Nieto, School no. 5, Quilmes, 1921, ENM, box Tucumán,
leg. 229, p. 1.
78. Report of teacher Canelada, 13.
The teachers also reported a series of cultural practices, which perhaps

because of their pervasiveness they failed to see as products of cultural assimila-
tion. Canelada includes among tales of enchanted mountains and ghostly appa-
ritions that he heard from local storytellers a story about a famous boxer who
was the center of attention of the specialized press and obtained the prize of
Muscular Force World Champion.79 The story, filled with references to urban
life and European countries, gives evidence of the oral transmission of novelties
learned through contact with the outside world. Teachers also describe a series
of folk dances and musical genres that are characteristic of the lowlands. These
dances were so well established as a form of popular entertainment that the
teachers could not perceive their foreignness. In addition to folk dances, teacher
Ramón Cano transcribes lyrics of milongas, criollo songs from Buenos Aires that
had become popular in the early 1900s; one of those milongas was authored by
legendary tango singer Carlos Gardel.80
Overall, the several hundred pages of teachers’ reports on the Calchaquí
rural culture convey the impression that they were describing a non-Western
local culture in the process of change; however, they restrained themselves from
calling this culture indigenous. Their task, as spelled out in scores of National
Board of Education bulletins and publications, was to instill a homogenous sense
of nationality and to uplift the children of rural dwellers to the minimum stan-
dards of instruction demanded by the central government. It might have been
in the best professional interest of the teachers to portray the Calchaquí people
as backward in order to highlight the efforts of the newly founded public schools
to reverse that condition. Teacher Rosario R. de Nieto, of Amaicha, asserted
that the people in her school district “preserve primitive traditions and beliefs,”
although she never called the people themselves indigenous.81 The complete
absence of the term indigenous among the hundreds of pages of teacher folkloric
reports is a clear suggestion that the term was no longer in use among the local
communities. The teachers presented a very complex portrait of the rural com-
munities where they lived, but at the same time they proved that the Calchaquí
people were effectively becoming criollos and therefore creolizing a number of
practices and beliefs that in the past were part of their indigenous heritage.
79. Ibid., 181 – 84.

80. Report of teacher Ramón Cano, 16 – 24.
81. Report of teacher Rosario Nieto, 3.
The “White Industry” of the Northwest and the Folklorization

of the Calchaquí People
More than a hundred years after independence, the Calchaquí people seemed
to be immersed in the process of assimilation into the Argentine mainstream.
This assimilation resulted from actual practices of the Calchaquíes, but also
from external pressure of state agents. In the 1930s, the pressure came from
folklorists who reached the Calchaquí valley in search of the Argentine folk.
What followed was a process of folklorization that reinforced the ongoing cre-
olization. Here, folklorization refers to state and/or elite policies devised to styl-
ize a range of lower-class cultural practices into a canon of artifacts able to be
performed, reproduced, or exhibited. The ultimate goal of folklorization poli-
cies is to bolster cultural nationalism by emphasizing local, regional, or national
differences in a context of transnational cultural exchanges.82 A common effect
of folklorization is the isolation of cultural artifacts from the meaning that the
practitioners originally assigned to them and the social context in which they
were produced.83 Folklorists “collected” elements of Calchaquí culture, such as
music and songs, as well as carnival traditions, and put them in a singular place
of expectation within the Argentine folkloric canon.
The folklorization of the Calchaquíes is intrinsically associated with the
politics and culture of the sugar industry of the northwest. Due to a combina-
tion of economic factors aggravated by the depression of the 1930s, this industry
depended heavily on national government subsidies and tariff protection to stay
afloat.84 Not surprisingly, sugar industrialists found that their economic goals
could be better achieved by taking part in electoral politics. Even more relevant
to this study is that a powerful group of sugar industrialists took their politics
to the cultural arena and became directly involved in a massive project of folk-
lore research and education. In the middle of this project, the ethnicity of the
Calchaquí people again became an issue of speculation, this time by defining
them as “whites.”
Ernesto E. Padilla, sugar mill owner, industry leader, and Conservative
governor of Tucumán between 1912 and 1916, was the first politician to under-
stand the political usages of the rural culture of his province. During his tenure
at the provincial executive branch, he developed several projects to preserve the
82. David Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American
Region (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1983); Regina Bendix, In Search of
Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
83. Whisnant, All That Is Native, 6.
84. Guy, Argentine Sugar Politics, 91 – 97, 113 – 17.
archaeological sites in the valleys as well as current practices such as the pro-
duction of local handmade textiles. Later he moved to Buenos Aires, where he
represented the province of Tucumán in the National Congress, which did not
seem to present an obstacle to his continued advocacy of the sugar industry. He
was also very much involved in the public education system and cultural institu-
tions, being appointed minister of education in 1930 and later chair of the Board
of Education of Buenos Aires. Between 1920 and 1940, Padilla led a power-
ful clan of sugar industrialists and conservative politicians from the northwest,
which had direct control over the Ministry of Education, the National Board of
Education, and the University of Tucumán. This structure facilitated Padilla’s
plan to create a corpus of national folklore that emphasized the northwest, the
Calchaquí valley in particular, as the center of authentic Argentine culture.
The story of the cultural intervention of the sugar industry in the Calchaquí
valley plays out as a perfect metaphor of the white Argentina myth. In Con-
gress, Deputy Padilla and fellow Tucumán representative Juan Simón Padrós
fought to obtain a legal recognition of the sugar industry as a “white industry.”
This unusual label had nothing to do with the color of the product but with
the ethnicity of the workers who toiled in fields and mills. Padilla and Padrós
invoked the example of Australia, which in 1914 included the sugar industry
under the “White Australia Act,” banning Aboriginal and Melanesian workers
and receiving in compensation protective tariffs against cheap Javanese sugar.85
Argentines wanted similar protection against Cuban and Brazilian sugar,
which, according to the industrialists’ twisted explanation, competed favorably
with Tucumán sugar because of the exploitation of “inferior races.”86 Tucumán
industrialists claimed to be forced to hire only white criollo workers, “whose
higher living standards could not be compared to the colored workers of Java,
Hawaii, etc.”87 The industrialists took pride in providing jobs for the large cri-
ollo population of the northwest but demanded a protective tariff in recognition
of their patriotic commitment. The industrialists obtained the legal protection
85. Emilio Schleh, La industria azucarera (Buenos Aires: Ferrari Hermanos, 1935), 58;
“La cuestión azucarera,” La Industria Azucarera 169 (1917): 20; Kay Saunders, Workers in
Bondage: The Origins and Bases of Unfree Labour in Queensland, 1824 – 1916 (St. Lucía: Univ. of
Queensland Press, 1982).
86. República Argentina, Cámara de Diputados, “Investigación parlamentaria sobre la
actuación del diputado nacional ingeniero Juan Simón Padrós,” in Compilación legal sobre el
azúcar, ed. Emilio Schleh (Buenos Aires: Centro Azucarero Nacional, 1943).
87. “Los salarios de los trabajadores rurales en Luisiana y en Tucumán,” La Industria
Azucarera 235 (1922): 183.
they desired in 1928, when the federal government created a special regime for
the industry based on the principles of “white industry.”88
Industrialists had to brace against mounting criticism from the Left,
which mocked the argument of the businessmen, noting that Tucumán workers
received very few of the purported benefits created by the special protection.
Furthermore, the metropolitan leftist press consistently defined the sugar work-
ers as either indigenous or dark-skinned criollos.89 To counter those attacks,
the industrialists supplied the sympathetic press with articles showing off the
supposed benefits workers enjoyed in the sugar mills and claiming that workers
were white criollos (perhaps counting on the deficient early twentieth-century
graphic technology).90 To reinforce their argument from a cultural point of
view, the sugar industrialists recruited a group of sympathetic folklorists who,
for their own academic motives, were interested in demonstrating that the rural
culture of the northwest was purely Spanish and Catholic rather than indig-
enous and pagan.
Prominent in this group were ballad collector Juan Alfonso Carrizo, his
assistant Bruno Jacovella, and ethnomusicologist Isabel Aretz. This group
toured the entire northwest between 1928 and 1943, amassing an enormous
quantity of ethnographic data, which they published in several volumes lavishly
financed by the Sugar Industry Association.91 Carrizo’s and Aretz’s contribu-
tion to Argentine folklore was too vast and complex to call it simply a prop for
the sugar industry’s obscure designs. But it calls attention to the researchers’
insistence, most evident in Carrizo’s case, on denying any non-Western influ-
ence in the makeup of the northwestern rural culture. Carrizo, himself a north-
westerner of mixed ancestry, goes as far as to assert that the vast majority of
the criollo population in Tucumán was purely descended from colonial Spanish
settlers.92 He even specifies that in the Calchaquí valley a few people were mes-
tizos, but otherwise Carrizo tends to identify Calchaquíes as criollos, defined as
88. Laudo dictado por el presidente de la Nación en el conflicto cañero-industrial de

Tucumán (Buenos Aires: Centro Azucarero Argentino, 1928), 6.
89. La Vanguardia, 25 June 1904; Tierra Libre, July 1928, p. 3; Tierra Libre, Feb. 1928,
p. 4.
90. El Orden, 29 Jan. 1927, p. 4.
91. Aretz, Música tradicional argentina; Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Tucumán; Juan
Alfonso Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Salta (Buenos Aires: A. Baiocco y cía., 1933); Juan
Alfonso Carrizo, “Trovas de la independencia recogidas en Salta y Jujuy,” La Prensa, 25 May
1933; Juan Alfonso Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Jujuy (Tucumán: M. Violetto, 1934); Juan
Alfonso Carrizo, Cancionero popular de La Rioja (Buenos Aires: A. Baiocco y cía., 1942).
92. Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Tucumán, 1:11.
descendents of colonial Spanish settlers. Carrizo, who had studied the colonial
documents of the Spanish conquest of the valley in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, claimed that the indigenous population had been annihilated
or dispersed and replaced by pure-blooded Spaniards, an interpretation that nei-
ther the documents nor common sense allows.
Indeed, Carrizo sufficiently proves that a large number of Calchaquí bal-
lads, sayings, and riddles were nothing but local versions of European Span-
ish folklore. Different versions of such Spanish lore existed across the Spanish
Americas, from Texas to Chile, as Carrizo’s erudite footnotes inform us, but
that did not make all the Spanish speakers of the western hemisphere white.
Carrizo preferred to ignore this contradiction in his argument and, building on
then-current diffusionism, concluded that if Calchaquí people sang seventeenth-
century Spanish ballads it was because they were descendents of Spanish con-
quistadors. His protectors in the sugar industry were elated with Carrizo’s
theory and findings. One of them, Alberto Rouges, owner of the Santa Rosa
sugar mill, wrote a flattering preface for Carrizo’s folklore collection, praising
it as the discovery of the Spanish roots of Argentine culture buried under the
avalanche of cosmopolitanism that had swept the country since 1880. In fact, as
the private letters exchanged among Rouges, Carrizo, and Padilla suggest, it was
Rouges himself who suggested this hypothesis to Carrizo and directed him for
the greater part of his fieldwork.
This way of representing Calchaquí culture directly affected the works of
Augusto Raúl Cortazar, the most respected Argentine folklorist at that time.
In 1944, Cortazar obtained a folklore grant from the Culture Commission, a
federal agency, to study the folklore of the Calchaquí valley with the help of
Carrizo, who was a member of the committee that awarded the grant.93 Cortazar
had earlier published a book on the “cultural influences in Argentine folklore.”
In this volume, Cortazar seemed to agree with the Latin American ideology
of mestizaje, which defines Latin American culture as a mixture of indigenous
and Iberian elements (he does not mention the African part). However, when he
narrows down this definition to the Argentine case, he finds that “looking at the
cases of indigenous survival in our time, if we confronted them with the total-
ity of our present civilization, we will realize their minuscule contribution and
exceptional character. . . . Considering only the popular sector . . . I believe that
93. Argentine Republic, Comisión Nacional de Cultura: Su labor en 1944 (Buenos Aires:
Comisión Nacional de Cultura, 1945), 25 – 26.
evidence shows that the physiognomy, the lifestyle [tono de vida], the political,
economic, and legal organization is generally European.”94
When Cortazar published the results of his fieldwork in the Calchaquí val-
ley in a monograph on the Calchaquí carnival, he introduced the book with a
long (and rather interesting) analysis of the Mediterranean origins of the pre-
Lent carnival to which, later in the book, he attributed carnival rituals in the
valleys.95 Thus, Cortazar followed Carrizo’s emphasis on the European roots of
Calchaquí culture.
Carrizo’s characterization of northwestern folklore as Spanish, and there-
fore white, became an axiom for the two following decades, mostly because
Carrizo and his assistant Jacovella controlled the Institute of Tradition, later
called the Institute of Folklore, which was the source of federal funding for
folklore research. But the wishful denial of the indigenous roots of the Cal-
chaquí valley thrived in a soil fertilized with the myth of white Argentina — the
same myth that sugar industrialists cleverly used to obtain protection for their
industry.
It was not only academic folklorists who discovered this region. Popular
folk musicians, who gained access to commercial radio after a decree by the mil-
itary government in 1943, adopted musical styles from the northwestern valleys,
especially the guitar and drum – based zamba, and adapted them to the tastes of
wider audiences. Among a series of musicians and poets from Salta and Tucumán
stands Hector Chavero, better known by his stage name Atahualpa Yupanqui,
who reached wide recognition with his highly stylized folk rhythms and socially
minded lyrics that celebrated the life of the rural criollos and evoked the arid
but astonishing landscape of the Andean valleys. Many of his songs, especially
“El arriero” (“The Cattle Driver”) and “Lunita tucumana” (“Tucumán’s Little
Moon”) became staples in public school music lessons, introducing generations
of Argentines to the northwestern folklore and inscribing in the collective iden-
tity not just the name of the remote valley but respect and admiration for its
people. In a way, the creolized and folklorized Calchaquí people traded the loss
(however undesired) of an autonomous ethnic identity for a place in the sym-
bolic core of the nation.
94. Augusto Raúl Cortazar, Confluencias culturales en el folklore argentino (Buenos Aires:
Amorrortu, 1944), 61 – 63.
95. Augusto Raúl Cortazar, El carnaval en el folklore calchaquí, con una breve exposición
sobre la teoría y la práctica del método folklórico integral (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1949).
Conclusion
In his 2002 ethnography of the Calchaquí town of Amaicha, Alejandro Isla enu-
merates eight alternative ways residents describe themselves and their neighbors,
including the terms comuneros, lugareños, aborígenes, gauchos, criollos, Calchaquíes,
Tucumanos, and Argentinos.96 These overlapping categories reflect not just the
flexibility of self-identification but also the historical process of creolization in
the Calchaquí valley. From being a stronghold of indigenous resistance against
the Spanish, the valley was slowly but effectively integrated into the colonial
economy and, later, into the nation-state. Integration into the nation-state, ini-
tiated at the time of the War of Independence and buttressed by the interven-
tion of the public schools, brought about important changes in the way the state
classified the Calchaquí people.
In this article I have analyzed the process of creolization of the Calchaquí
communities, taking into account the political, legal, and economic changes
that framed the transition from indigenous to criollo as well as the academic
discourses that assimilated the valley’s peoples and cultures into the national
imaginary. Following the examples of work on Colombia, Nicaragua, and Peru
by authors such as Peter Wade, Charles Hale, Jeffrey Gould, Nancy Appel-
baum, and Marisol de la Cadena, I have sought to demonstrate that Argentina
also participated in the same general trend of simplifying the ethnic diversity
in the country by assimilating smaller groups into a national totality. The main
difference is that while in other Latin American countries the mainstream was
defined as mestizo, in Argentina it was defined as white. These policies of assim-
ilation are most clearly seen in the Calchaquí valley.
In this region of the country, the political and legal processes of creoliza-
tion started immediately after the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1810.
Lawsuits brought to the civil courts of Tucumán show how indigenous people
used the language of equal citizenship introduced by the patriots to lighten
their burden of personal services traditionally due to the white settlers and to
secure their lands against the encroachment of large estates. During the War
of Independence, the incorporation of the Calchaquí people into the patriots’
army represented another step in the assimilation of the valley into the fledgling
national community. Nevertheless, what may have made a greater impact in this
process of creolization was the transformation of the Calchaquí peasants into a
semiproletarian labor pool for the sugar industry. The annual migrations to the
sugar plantations located in the lowlands of Tucumán, and to a lesser extent,
of Salta, had the consequence of immersing the Calchaquí people in the cash
96. Isla, Los usos políticos de la identidad, 74.

economy. In the lowlands, entire Calchaquí families became exposed not just to
the criollo culture of the lowlands but also to the nascent commercial popular
culture imported from Buenos Aires. Equally determinant in the process of
creolization was the creation of national schools in 1907, which imposed the
national language as well as the official ideology of Argentine nationality.
At the turn of the century, as economic and cultural changes were distanc-
ing the Calchaquí people from their indigenous past, a series of experts offered
their views on Calchaquí ethnicity. A first group of anthropologists, based on
their observations of cultural practices, defined the Calchaquíes as indigenous.
Later, the teachers who reported to the National Board of Education described
many of the same indigenous rituals noted by the anthropologists but defined
the Calchaquíes as criollos. And finally, in the 1930s and 1940s, folklorists led
by Carrizo not only defined the Calchaquíes as criollos but, emphasizing the
Spanish ancestry of their culture, catapulted Calchaquí local culture to the spe-
cial position of authentic Argentine folklore. In compliance with the myth of
white Argentina to which Carrizo adhered, that authentic folk could be defined
only as European. This scholarly discourse added force to the sugar industry’s
efforts to define its workers as white and thus obtain special fiscal treatment
from the federal government. The combination of legal, political, and economic
pressures, together with an academic discourse that fostered assimilation but at
the same time extolled the virtues of traditional culture, explains how the Cal-
chaquíes lost their indigenous status in a little more than a century.
It should be noted that, despite the steps taken to assimilate the Calchaquí
people into the Argentine mainstream, the issue of how they identified them-
selves remained unresolved. Calchaquíes preserved several of the practices and
beliefs that would allow them to identify as Andean indigenous people. For
instance, the cult of Pachamama, still practiced today, and some specific forms
of magic and faith healing connect them with the larger Andean world. They
also acknowledged that the pre-Columbian ruins were built by their ancestors
and resisted the desecration of burial sites by archaeologists. Furthermore, the
community of Amaicha retained its communal landholding. However, neither
the preservation of communal land nor of traditions and beliefs guaranteed the
survival of indigenous identity. Isla reported that some Calchaquíes would be
offended if they were called “indios.” At present, this trend has reversed, and the
growing emphasis on multiculturalism is encouraging many Calchaquí people
to reassert themselves as indigenous.97
97. I observed this tendency to reclaim indigenous identity among local intellectuals in
my interviews with members of Cooperativa Amauta in Los Sazos, Tucumán, in 2002.
Defining an ethnic group is a matter of power, often of competing pow-

ers. The borders and contents of an ethnic group are shaped by the interplay
between the members of the group and forces such as the state, academia, and
economic elites. Government officials, folklorists, teachers, and missionaries,
among others, have usually decided the ethnicity of the country’s minorities
without soliciting their opinion. Folklorists, in particular, took the lead in rede-
fining the Calchaquí people. Since the task of constructing a folkloric canon
was undertaken when the foundational myth of white Argentina was still hege-
monic, there was little chance that the Calchaquí people, identified by the folk-
lorists as one of the most authentic Argentine folk societies, could have been
defined as anything but criollo.

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Indigenous or Criollo: The Myth of White

Argentina in Tucumán’s Calchaquí Valley

Hispanic American Historical Review 88:1

linguistic, and economic changes as well as part of an elite effort to represent

3. Mónica Quijada, “Indígenas: Violencia, tierras y ciudadanía,” in Homogeneidad

Northwestern Argentina. Map by the author.

8. Mónica Quijada and Carmen Bernard, “Introducción,” in Homogeneidad y nación, 9.

ture in transition, in which local societies retained aspects of their traditional

Assimilation Ideologies and the “White Country” Myth

During the nation formation period, 1880 – 1910, Latin American modernizing

ing invitation to racial democracy. That, however, is a misleading perception.

11. Carol Smith, “Myths, Intellectuals, and Race/Class/Gender Distinctions in the

out, Argentines preferred to think of themselves as an entirely white nation.13

13. Quijada, “Indígenas: Violencia, tierras y ciudadanía,” 28.

inces of the northwest, where criollos were an overwhelming majority. While

colonial indigenous communities to rapidly assimilate into the nation. While

Indigenous Roots and Creolization in the Calchaquí Valley

The history of the Calchaquí valley can be summarized as a progressive loss of

23. Verónica Williams and María B. Cremonte, “Mitmaqkuna o circulación de bienes?

landholding over Calchaquí communities. Even though the Spanish governor

also inspired a new language of citizenship and equality, which undermined

55. Carrizo, Cancionero popular de Tucumán, 1:248.

teachers, and folklorists, who exerted an important influence in defining the

Indians or Criollos? The Anthropologists’ View

The Calchaquí Valley in the National Folkloric Survey of 1921

The National Folkloric Survey ordered by the National Board of Education in

64. José Ingenieros, Sociología argentina (Madrid: D. Jorro, 1913), 457.

The survey created a new opportunity for the accumulation of knowledge on

65. Angel Gallardo, “Proyecto de renovación de votos profesionales,” El Monitor de la

74. Ambrosetti, Notas de arqueología calchaquí, 71.

The teachers also reported a series of cultural practices, which perhaps

79. Ibid., 181 – 84.

The “White Industry” of the Northwest and the Folklorization

88. Laudo dictado por el presidente de la Nación en el conflicto cañero-industrial de

96. Isla, Los usos políticos de la identidad, 74.

Defining an ethnic group is a matter of power, often of competing pow-

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