GASTÓN GORDILLO

University of British Columbia

The crucible of citizenship:

ID-paper fetishism in the Argentinean Chaco

A B S T R A C T uring my fieldwork among them, Toba people of the western

D
In this article, I examine how indigenous people of
the Argentinean Chaco have internalized their past
alienation from citizenship rights through the
fetishization of those objects long denied to them:
identity (ID) papers. In the early 20th century,
shortly after the Argentinean state’s military
conquest of the region, government agents excluded
these groups from hegemonic notions of nationality
and citizenship because of their alleged savagery but
simultaneously expected them to show written
proofs of their reliability. In the following decades,
this contradictory experience made many indigenous
people view ID documents and other written records
as objects with a force of their own, with the
capacity to deflect state violence and shape major
aspects of a group’s collective history. Drawing on
the concept of “state fetishism,” I analyze the
peculiarities of ID-paper fetishism in the Chaco by
focusing on the historical and current experiences of
the western Toba and the Wichı́. In particular, I
explore how Toba and Wichı́ views of ID papers
include ideological forms of reification of social
practice but also critical interpretations that capture
the power dynamics involved in state
documentation. [citizenship, fetishism, the state,
identity papers, indigenous people, Toba, Wichı́, Gran
Chaco, Argentina]
Argentinean Chaco would often display mundane symbols of
state power in unexpected ways. While I was having a casual con-
versation with someone I knew well, for instance, that person
would suddenly tell me that he wished to show me something.
He would leave and a moment later return with a carefully wrapped nylon
bag containing his most valued possessions: old photos, certificates of var-
ious sorts, and, most important, his identity (ID) papers: his documentos.1
He would then hand the documentos over to me as proof of something
that was clearly important to him yet initially elusive to me. For years, as
I returned to the Toba villages throughout the 1990s, I did not know ex-
actly how to react to the reverence with which people showed me their ID
papers. I would examine the papers and, a few seconds later, return them
with a nod, a smile, or an uncomfortable comment confirming their value
and importance. What intrigued me was that people would show me their
documentos without me ever asking for them and, further, that they simply
wanted me to see they had them. That was all. They never tried to use them
to negotiate demands or ask for favors. Once I had seen the papers, they
seemed satisfied and were ready to move on to other topics of conversation.
Colleagues working among other indigenous groups of the Chaco told
me similar accounts about people’s interest in displaying their documentos
for no apparent reason other than to show that they had them. When, in
2000 and 2003, I conducted brief fieldwork among the Wichı́, the Toba’s
neighbors to the west, I noticed a very similar attitude. Through my daily
interactions with Toba and Wichı́, I began to learn that this practice is a
telling expression of the type of subjectivity produced by these people’s
contradictory immersion within the Argentinean nation-state. And, as was
soon apparent, this practice implied a preoccupation with the materiality
of the ID papers that was strongly informed by their memory of having
been deprived of documentos for decades. This attitude, even though not
uncommon among young people, was particularly clear among the men
and women who had been most directly affected by past experiences of

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undocumentation and who at the time of my fieldwork were
over 40 years of age. In this article, I examine how that past
estrangement from citizenship rights and their physical sig-
nifier, ID papers, has made many Toba and Wichı́ adults
value documentos to the point of seeing them as objects
whose potency emanates from their materiality rather than
from social relations and conventions. In doing so, I hope
to show how people create a peculiar form of fetishization
that, nevertheless, on some occasions, includes interpre-
tations that capture the power dynamics involved in state
documentation.
As many authors have observed, state formations have
for centuries relied on written documents as central “tech-
nologies of power,” whether in the form of legal titles, letters,
laws, censuses, surveys, or forms of personal identification
(Caplan and Torpey 2001; Clanchy 1979; Cohn 1990; Cohn
and Dirks 1988; Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Noiriel 2001; Scott
1998; Torpey 2000; Wogan 2004). James Scott (1998:71), in
particular, has analyzed how individual forms of identifica-
tion are based on mechanisms of legibility and visibilization
that maximize the reach of state surveillance. The controlling
aspects of bureaucratic documentation were particularly
graphic in cases such as Nazi Germany and Rwanda under
the Hutu Power government, in which the distribution of
cards according to “racial” or “ethnic” criteria facilitated the
implementation of large-scale genocides (Longman 2001;
Mamdani 2001). Yet, although identity documentation
undeniably creates visible and, hence, more manageable
subjects, this process also has potentially empowering
aspects based on the generalization of social and political
rights. As Jane Caplan and John Torpey (2001:6) note, iden-
tification and recognition are prerequisites for many claims
against state agencies. This means that the tension between
empowerment and control is central to understanding the
type of identities created by the generalization of ID papers
(see Caplan and Torpey 2001; Noiriel 2001). This tension,
in turn, relates to a central paradox of modern citizen-
ship: that the state endows its citizens with rights so that
those citizens are protected from the state (Hall and Held
1989).
In these pages, I draw on this tension between control
and empowerment to explore the relationship between state
documentation and subjectivity; and I do so negatively: that
is, by examining the experience of people who for a long
time were noncitizens and felt deeply marginalized by their
lack of ID papers. This estrangement, I argue, can be exam-
ined through the conceptual lens of what several authors
have called “state fetishism” (Abrams 1988; Coronil 1996;
Taussig 1992, 1997). This perspective implies moving away
from the Weberian paradigm of the state as the pinnacle of
bureaucratic rationality and exploring, rather, “state forms
culturally and cultural forms as state-regulated” (Corrigan
and Sayer 1985:3), in particular, the ways in which magic,
reification, and power are implicated in the constitution
The crucible of citizenship  American Ethnologist
of reality under conditions of domination (Benjamin 1978;
Buck-Morss 1989; Taussig 1992; see also Amariglio and
Callari 1993; Pietz 1993). Philip Abrams, for instance, has
analyzed how the state is conceived of as “a separate and
autonomous entity that is really there and is really power-
ful” (1988:63, 68). This idea of the state as a distinct “thing,”
Abrams argues, is a fiction that is at the basis of the very
real power of the myriad social relations, practices, and dis-
courses that are referred to as “the state.” In this article, I am
interested in how this fetishization shapes yet another type
of reification, that of the products of state power: in this case,
ID papers.
In his famous opening chapter of Capital, Karl Marx
(1977:164–165) analyzed commodity fetishism as the reifi-
cation of the commodity as an entity with a power and value
of its own, severed from the labor and the social relations
of production that created it. This fetishism, Marx argued,
is ultimately grounded in the alienation of workers from the
products of their labor, which are appropriated by the bour-
geoisie and, hence, physically and ideologically separated
from direct producers. In these pages, I argue that Toba
and Wichı́ views of ID documents imply a similar type of
fetishization, one that depends not on commodity produc-
tion but on the power of the state. This requires exploring not
just the similarities but also the differences between com-
modity and ID-paper fetishisms.
A first, notable difference is that Marx analyzed com-
modity fetishism as a widespread ideological formation that
is central to bourgeois forms of domination and legitimiza-
tion and engulfs members of different social classes. ID-
card fetishization, in contrast, is not necessarily widespread.
Social actors who have not been subject to deep forms
of marginalization often use state documents as symbols
of citizenship without necessarily fetishizing them. In the
Chaco, however, many indigenous people view ID papers
not simply as symbols but as something else: as potent ob-
jects that in and of themselves can shape the outcome of
social processes. Analyzing why this is the case takes me
to another significant contrast between ID-card and com-
modity fetishism. ID papers are in principle neither com-
modities (i.e., objects with use value and an exchange value)
nor the product of indigenous labor, and, hence, the es-
trangement associated with them does not result from alien-
ated labor but from a distinct separation, that between citi-
zens and noncitizens. Toba and Wichı́ views of documents,
in short, are to a great extent the result of these people’s
past, profound alienation from state-granted citizenship
rights.
A final, equally important difference is worth noting.
Whereas in commodity fetishism the link between the com-
modity and its producer tends to be erased, the fetishization
of ID papers depends, at least to a certain degree, on keep-
ing a connection between these objects and the state. In
short, whereas commodity fetishism creates the appearance
163
American Ethnologist  Volume 33 Number 2 May 2006
of potent, free-floating objects detached from labor, ID-
paper fetishism creates the appearance of potent objects
ultimately anchored in state production. Why, then, is the
concept of “fetishism” still relevant to account for this pro-
cess? First, because, as I aim to show, in the Chaco this con-
nection is grounded in the idea of “the state” as a powerful
entity rather than in the social relations and actors behind
its configuration. Second, because this connection between
the state and ID documents is still marked by perceptions of
a subsequent separation. The power of ID papers, in other
words, is conceived of as a quality that, even though orig-
inally granted by the state, has been incorporated by the
substance of the object, in which it acquires a dynamic and
force of its own, relatively detached from its original condi-
tions of production. This, William Pietz (1993:147) has ob-
served, is the primary quality of the fetish: the absorption of
value created by social relations into the materiality of the
object.
In this article, I examine this fetishization of ID docu-
ments by drawing on historical research and my fieldwork
among the Toba and the Wichı́ who live in the northwest part
of the province of Formosa, near the marshlands formed by
the Pilcomayo River. Despite cultural differences that I do
not aim to examine here, both groups have shared a similar
historical experience of violence by the army, land encroach-
ment by criollo settlers, wage labor on sugar plantations, An-
glican missionization, and prolonged marginalization from
political rights. Their current forms of livelihood are also
similar. Living for the most part in small villages scattered
in a forested landscape, most people rely on fishing, gather-
ing wild fruits and honey, hunting, horticulture, and seasonal
wage labor. In some villages, several people also hold public-
sector jobs and have pensions (see Gordillo 2004; Mendoza
2002).2 Because of these commonalities, I analyze the his-
torical and social threads weaving through the experience of
both groups.
In the first section, I examine the hegemonic practices
that, at the turn of the 20th century, constituted Argentinean
citizenship and, for several decades, deemed indigenous
groups external to it. Then I analyze how indigenous peo-
ple’s first interactions with written forms of documentation
in the Chaco were closely tied to state violence, focusing
especially on their use of written texts as attempts to pro-
tect themselves from the army. This experience, I show next,
shaped current Toba and Wichı́ views of the power of ID
papers to deflect violence. Drawing on memories of expe-
riences of wage labor at sugar plantations, in the following
segment I analyze how, for many people, their lack of state
documentation became not only the emblem but also the
cause of their poverty and political marginalization. The fi-
nal section focuses on the social and cultural reconfigura-
tions linked to the granting of ID documents to the Toba
and Wichı́ in the late 1960s, which gradually immersed state
documents in commodified relations of political patron-
164
age and fostered the production of new, nationally based
identities.
“Rebellious Argentineans”: Savagery and
citizenship
Numerous authors have stressed that the seemingly egal-
itarian ideology of citizenship is based on manifold ex-
clusionary practices: that is, that, by incorporating some
groups, citizenship has historically disenfranchised others
(women, minorities, and the working class) and that the
scope and eventual expansion of its membership is only the
outcome of long struggles by subaltern groups (Corrigan and
Sayer 1985; Flores 1997; Hall and Held 1989; Rosaldo 1997;
Wallerstein 2003). Likewise, as in Europe and North America,
the hegemonic “ideal Argentinean citizen” of the late 19th
century was white, male, literate, and owned property.3 Back
then, the forging of new conceptions of citizenship and the
drawing of new lines of inclusion and exclusion were part
of a twofold movement: the assault on the last indigenous
strongholds in Argentinean territory and the rise of Euro-
pean immigration. In the 1870s and 1880s, military cam-
paigns to the Pampas and Patagonia (in the center and south
of the country) and the Gran Chaco (in the north) incorpo-
rated these regions within expanding capitalist frontiers and
defeated previously autonomous indigenous groups. The
parallel influx of millions of European immigrants rapidly
changed the nation’s urban and rural landscapes and fos-
tered official discourses about a new, modern Argentina
leaving its prior backwardness and barbarism behind.
This process triggered intense debates as to the status of
actors originally deemed external to the nation: foreigners
and indios (Indians). The perceived threat posed by the anar-
chist and socialist ideologies brought by European workers,
for instance, made congress pass laws such as the 1902 Ley de
Residencia (Residency Law) that differentiated “unwanted
elements” subject to deportation from those worthy of be-
coming citizens (see Lenton 1999:12–13). Despite these re-
strictions, most immigrants arriving on Argentinean shores
possessed a Europeanness that made them potentially ac-
ceptable citizens. The status of indigenous people was en-
tirely different. The 1853 constitution had clearly placed
them outside of the nation. One of the stated attributions
of congress, for instance, was “to negotiate treaties” with in-
digenous groups and promote their “conversion to Catholi-
cism.” Yet a few decades later, the violent expansion of state
sovereignty onto indigenous territories placed these popula-
tions in a contradictory position. As Diana Lenton (1999:20)
has observed, these people had been born in territories lo-
cated within the national borders, fulfilling the principle of
ius soli (right of the land); yet their attributed savagery made
them incompatible with the hegemonic model of citizen-
ship. In the 1880s, this ambiguity emerged in parliamen-
tary debates. Without reaching an agreement, members of

Figure 1. Argentinean Chaco and groups mentioned in the article.
congress debated whether indios should be considered “sec-
ond class citizens,” “underage citizens,” “nationals but not
citizens,” or “rebellious Argentineans” (Lenton 1999:21).
This legal ambiguity lingered for decades. As in Brazil
(see Ramos 1998), indigenous people were first given the
status of menores (minors) because of the widespread per-
ception that they were childlike creatures unable to compre-
hend legal codes and, therefore, in need of state protection.4
In the 1910s, the federal government placed them under the
tutelage of an ad hoc commission (Comisión Honoraria de
The crucible of citizenship  American Ethnologist
Reducciones de Indios) with the aim of facilitating their con-
version to “work habits,” but this commission had a direct
influence only on state-run settlements in the eastern Chaco
such as Napalpı́ and Bartolomé de las Casas (Arengo 1996).
In the rest of the eastern Chaco, massive land expropriations
were immersing indigenous people within a capitalist politi-
cal economy without a façade of state paternalism, and many
people were forced to rely on wage labor or to become small-
scale farmers. In the western Chaco, the semiarid landscape
did not attract direct capitalist investment and most tracts
165
American Ethnologist  Volume 33 Number 2 May 2006
of land remained government property. Hence, the western
Toba and the Wichı́ retained relative control over parts of
their territories and access to the Pilcomayo River but began
to be recruited as seasonal wage laborers by sugar planta-
tions located several hundred kilometers to the west, at the
foot of the Andes (see Figure 1). In short, that the citizenship
status of these groups remained unresolved did not hinder
their immersion within the expanding capitalist frontiers of
the Argentinean nation-state.
In some areas of the Chaco, and despite this apparent
incorporation, occasional expressions of armed resistance
contributed to reproducing the official view that indigenous
groups were still uncivilized and placed outside the national
body politic. In the area of the Pilcomayo River, this situation
continued to fuel indiscriminate forms of state violence that
persisted throughout the 1920s and 1930s, primarily against
the Pilagá but also the Wichı́ and the western Toba. Those
experiences would profoundly shape indigenous views of
the power of written texts, in particular, state-produced ID
cards.
“That’s why they killed us”: State violence and
the power of written documents
In the early 20th century, the beginning of colonization by
criollo settlers in the Chaco interior and the gradual advance
of state institutions imposed constraints on the mobility of
indigenous groups. Local authorities and the military viewed
“Indians on the move” with suspicion and often demanded
that they produce a written document that would testify
to their buen comportamiento (good behavior). In con-
trast to Andean indigenous groups that had interacted with
bureaucratic documents for centuries following their early
subjugation to Spanish rule (Abercrombie 1998; Mignolo
1992; Rappaport 1994; Wogan 2004), until the early 1900s
the Chaco groups had dealt with written texts only occa-
sionally. The encroachment by the army changed this and
forced these groups to begin relying on “certificates of good
behavior” to navigate a violent political landscape. The po-
tency with which they would imbue these texts was closely
related to their view of the written word as an emblem of the
power of the actors that had conquered the region. Through-
out most of the 20th century, at least until the 1970s, most
western Toba and Wichı́ were illiterate and depended on
other actors to decipher the content of documents, and this
increased the estrangement many felt toward them. Yet, as I
shall discuss, the fetishization of these objects was not sim-
ply the product of illiteracy or ignorance of how they “really
worked”; rather, it drew heavily on the use military officers
made of these documents to measure the reliability of “Indi-
ans” and, hence, to base their decision to unleash violence.
Initially, most documents circulating on the Chaco fron-
tiers were handwritten by state officials. These notes were
called “pasaportes” (passports), a term common at the time
166
in Europe to refer to the “internal passes” used to regulate
the movement of particular subjects (see Torpey 2000:165).
In August 1899, for instance, a cacique (headman) of the east-
ern Toba named Caballero met with the governor of Formosa
and received from him a handwritten “passport” that read:
“On this day, cacique Caballero returns to the interior of the
territory. It is recommended that all transit authorities treat
him with all the due considerations that un cacique amigo
[a friendly cacique] who is respectful of the laws and au-
thorities of the nation is entitled to. It is recommended that
the same treatment is given to the Indians who accompany
him” (Wright 2003:146). These documents were remarkable
for various reasons. First, they were highly individualized.
As Caplan and Torpey (2001:8) have observed, despite being
records of “uniqueness,” ID documents are elements in a
classifying series that reduces individuality. The “passports”
produced on the Chaco frontiers, however, were not units in a
homogenous series; they were ad hoc products that strongly
individualized both the author and the recipient. The one
received by cacique Caballero was granted not by an anony-
mous state bureaucrat but by an influential public figure.
And this individuality was, indeed, crucial for its validity vis-
à-vis military and police authorities. A further component
of these “passports” was that their holders, being illiterate,
could not read their content and depended on officials to
read it out loud to them. More importantly, the meaning of
these pieces of paper became clear to their holders especially
through the outcomes they effected: that, when handed over
to local authorities, they had the remarkable capacity to de-
ter violence and ease movement restrictions. This added to
the power that some indigenous groups would project onto
them, as I subsequently show.
These “passports” were significant for a third reason.
They were handwritten by citizens and foreign nationals who
had a certain clout in the area but were not directly asso-
ciated with state agencies: landowners, merchants, explor-
ers, and missionaries. In other words, the relative weakness
of state institutions in the Chaco interior at the turn of the
20th century highlighted the power of nonindigenous local
actors to create private forms of documentation that were,
nevertheless, legitimate in the eyes of government agents.
This practice was remarkable because it countered a cen-
tral principle of modern bureaucratic documentation: that
state agencies monopolize the control over legitimate means
of movement (Torpey 2000). Despite their private nature,
these certificates were effective in halting army officers who
were ready to unleash havoc on indigenous groups. In Jan-
uary 1899, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Bouchard was leading
a military campaign against Pilagá villages on the Pilcomayo.
As Pablo Wright (2003:146) has noted, the troops were about
to attack a hamlet when a cacique rushed toward Bouchard
waiving “un papel,” a piece of paper. It was “a certificate of
good conduct” written by a well-known merchant. Bouchard
read the certificate, gave it back to the cacique, and made

his troops withdraw. A handwritten piece of paper that the
Pilagá were carrying with them but could not read halted
what otherwise could have been a massacre.
Owing to the protection granted by these certificates,
indigenous leaders were very keen to obtain them from any
influential white person. In 1903, a well-off cattle rancher
named Domingo Astrada led an expedition on horseback
down the Pilcomayo River and encountered several groups
that had recently been attacked by the army. Astrada wrote
in his diary after meeting with a group of Wichı́ headmen:
“They ask me for a papelito [a little piece of paper], a papelito
that says they are nice and friends of the Christians. I give
it to them, one to each cacique” (1906:109). These requests
illustrate that Wichı́ leaders were aware that “little pieces of
paper” that included a handwritten text by a white explorer
could have a notable effect on the military. Yet the power of
these documents was beyond their control and forced them
to remain dependent on men who dominated the craft of
writing, in this case, a wealthy civilian explorer.
When indigenous groups could not obtain these ad hoc
“certificates of good conduct,” they often tried to obtain any
piece of paper that could be read as their equivalent. They
soon learned that records documenting their engagement
in wage labor had a similar effect. Unlike the certificates ex-
amined above, these papers symbolized a new class status
and, therefore, a willingness to comply with a new balance
of power that was based on the subordination of their la-
bor. This is why military officers viewed work certificates as
a measurement of reliability and goodwill. By the early 20th
century, most groups of the Pilcomayo were migrating to
work on the ingenios (sugar plantations) located farther to
the west, near the Andes. On returning to the Chaco, many of
them kept notes or receipts related to their labor experience
and were anxious to show them to explorers and military
officers. On July 2, 1903, two weeks after beginning his expe-
dition to the Pilcomayo, Astrada wrote in his diary,
A group of 50 painted and armed Indians appeared on
the road and marched toward us. An old Indian with
lively eyes moved forward and showing a piece of paper
in his hand asked for the patrón [boss]. I took it and read
it: it was a certificate from an ingenio in Jujuy, granted to
the cacique Colorado and his people and where it says
that these Indians have worked there the previous year
showing good behavior. [1906:105]
The following year, the Formosa governor Lucas Luna
Olmos (1905:35, 46, 49) explored the lower course of the Pil-
comayo and was also struck by the regularity and insistence
with which Toba and Pilagá groups showed him their labor
certificates. In all cases, people produced these papers with-
out him ever asking for them. Luna Olmos (1905:46) wrote
that those certificates were so highly valued that men kept
them carefully wrapped inside bamboo cylinders, a practice
also observed among Wichı́ groups on the Bermejo River (del
The crucible of citizenship  American Ethnologist
Nieto 1969:65). These actions underscore that these indige-
nous men were acutely aware that military officers, officials,
and explorers valued wage labor as a civilizing experience
and that they respected the power of the plantation owners.
The display of labor certificates was also a way for these men
to state that, by virtue of their new class status, they were now
part of the same social system the military claimed to defend.
In contrast to what would happen decades later, at the be-
ginning of the 20th century indigenous people did not seem
to have used these texts to assert membership in a nationally
defined, “Argentinean,” community. The meanings of these
certificates were grounded in more pragmatic attempts by
Toba, Wichı́, and Pilagá to deflect perceptions about a threat-
ening savagery and to reposition themselves as trustworthy
vis-à-vis state officials and the military. Yet, even if free of
national markers, in displaying those texts these people at-
tempted to claim belonging, as well-behaved workers, in a
political community that went beyond their ethnicized sub-
ject position as “Indians.”
These accounts are important because they shed light
on the role of violence in the configuration of the fictions
and realities of these documents’ power. It was because of
the violence that was being unleashed on indigenous groups
that these notes’ power became so unequivocally real. This
was violence mediated by a written message that had the
capacity to prove what indios obviously could not: their
“innocence.” These examples show that Toba, Wichı́, and
Pilagá saw these certificates as talismans of sorts that helped
them navigate an unpredictable, violent political landscape.
Another point is worth noting. These objects also desta-
bilized the view of “the state” as a homogenous and all-
encompassing entity, for they drew their power from pri-
vate actors not directly involved with state institutions. In
a context in which state power was still not consolidated
in the region, these myriad notes and receipts temporar-
ily countered the fetishization of state documents that was
to become prevalent in the following decades. There was,
nonetheless, a catch to this process. Those who legitimized
these notes’ power were still the armed agents of the state,
and those who had the authority to pen the texts were actors
deemed respectable according to state-sanctioned notions
of belonging in a civilized moral community. By the same
token, indigenous people could not produce those notes
themselves, even if they had known the craft of writing, be-
cause despite their role as seasonal laborers, they were still
considered alien to that community.
For these reasons, indigenous peoples’ strategies in de-
ploying these private texts faced the challenge of counter-
ing hegemonic practices that ground citizenship in rights
granted by “the state.” Further, the improvised attempts by
indigenous groups to certify in writing their trustworthi-
ness and goodwill revealed not just their agency but also
the fragility of their status. This was apparent in the many
cases in which waving a “piece of paper” in front of soldiers
167
American Ethnologist  Volume 33 Number 2 May 2006
was not enough to halt violence. In 1935, British missionar-
ies founded an Anglican station among the Pilagá, partially
as an attempt to protect them from indiscriminate attacks
by the army. Two years later, one of the missionaries, Alfred
Tebboth, met with the captain from a nearby fort and
reached an agreement on the terms of Pilagá mobility.
Tebboth wrote,
The captain said he would allow them to hunt in this
area provided they had a note from me saying that they
were mission Indians and not some of the wilder vari-
ety. The Indians were very pleased at this. . . . When they
left they carried a note from me saying that they were
nine mission Indians of good behaviour and that any
complaints should be notified to me. This “passport”
would have been one of the most guarded possessions.
[Makower 1989:111–112]
These men departed on their hunting trip carrying
Tebboth’s note but, shortly after, were captured by an army
patrol. The soldiers disarmed them and executed seven of
them on the spot. The officer in charge claimed that he
never saw the note and that he had thought the hunters were
“savage Indians.” The two Pilagá who managed to escape,
however, argued that the officer did see the “passport”
but tossed it aside (South American Missionary Society
1937:48). As this example shows, the ad hoc nature of
these sorts of documents—that they were not units in a
series standardized by the state—posed clear limits to their
dissuasive power. In this case, violence pierced through the
certificates’ seeming potency and brought to light the crude
fact that these Pilagá men were noncitizens and, hence,
more vulnerable to indiscriminate violence. This massacre
also shows that the force of written documents does not
emanate from their material qualities as “things” but from
the social relations involved in their production. In this
case, the civilizing authority of the foreign national (a British
missionary) who penned the note was not strong enough to
deter the execution of “wild Indians.” And this shows that,
despite the circulation of multiple forms of privately created
notes, the documents that ultimately mattered in the eyes of
soldiers and officers were those created by state agencies.5
Decades later, the legacy of these histories weighed
heavily on the collective memory of the Toba and Wichı́
living on the Pilcomayo. People had largely forgotten the
details of the incidents analyzed above, yet most of them
stressed the close link, passed on to them by their grand-
parents, between violence and the absence of written doc-
uments with which to stop it. As in any form of memory
production, people interpreted those clashes by projecting
onto the past their current experience of documentation, in
which the production of ID cards is monopolized by state
agencies. Consequently, during my fieldwork, many Toba
and Wichı́ remembered state violence not only as the army’s
attempt to crush an armed resistance but also as the product
168
of their grandparents’ status as undocumented aborı́genes
(indigenous people). First, many Toba and Wichı́ argue that,
without documentos, their ancestors were unable to com-
plain to state officials and that this situation often made them
vulnerable to attacks. In June 2000, I was at a Wichı́ village
talking with Luis, a man in his sixties. He remembered an
incident that had taken place decades earlier, in which a
criollo murdered a Wichı́ man. “We wanted to denounce the
criollo to the police,” he told me. “But in those days we didn’t
have documentos. We wanted to denounce him but noth-
ing happened. Absolutely nothing. That’s why the criollos
killed us at ease, because we couldn’t denounce them, be-
cause we didn’t have documentos.” Luis interpreted the im-
punity of that murder primarily as the product of an absent
object: documents. And he subsumed an unequal power re-
lation involving policemen, criollos, and aborı́genes within
the nonpresence of that object.
More important, some people remember their lack of
documents as an ontological condition that, in the eyes
of state agents and settlers, deserved violent punishment.
In other words, violence is remembered as the penalty
inflicted on those who fail to produce written proof of their
reliability. Angelino, a Wichı́ man from the same village as
Luis, told me while remembering the fighting against the
army and the settlers, “We didn’t have documentos, that’s
why they killed us. They have a law that says that those
who don’t have documentos are worth nothing; that they’re
like animals, like rabbits. That’s why the criollos killed us.
They killed us.” Angelino felt that, back then, the aborı́genes
were denied the most elementary human right, the right to
live, because they were undocumented. Further, the lack of
documentos reduced them to a subhuman condition that
made their murder legal (“They have a law that says . . . ”).
Even though, at least formally, human rights are above
citizenship rights and from a legal standpoint the murder of
a noncitizen is as punishable as the murder of a citizen, for
indigenous people it was the reverse: Citizenship rights were
above human rights, and state documentation provided an
effective protection from murder. The incidents of violence
examined earlier illustrate that this perception was not
unfounded. On the one hand, Angelino accurately captured
the negative dialectic defining modern citizenship: that it
gains its meaning through the denial of social and political
rights to noncitizens (a denial that, in this case, as on other
neocolonial frontiers, legitimated the death of “savage
Indians”). On the other hand, by invoking of power of
documents to determine this course of events, Angelino
was grounding violence in the constitutive force of things.
These perceptions are informed by the collective mem-
ory of the violence that once swept through the region and
also by the memory of the more recent effects that being
undocumented had on men like Luis and Angelino in their
youth. A distinctive feature of the Toba and Wichı́ experi-
ence of ID papers is that, whereas in the 1940s and 1950s the

hegemonic parameters of citizenship were being redrawn
in the rest of Argentina, these people’s undocumented sta-
tus and political marginalization lingered for a few more
decades. This experience was particularly apparent at the
sugar plantations where men, women, and children went to
work every year until the late 1960s. My analysis now shifts
to those places and to the counterpoint between that lo-
calized experience and the broader political changes then
transforming the country.
“We worked as if we were underage”
In the late 1930s, the federal government took the first timid
steps toward providing indigenous people with documen-
tation, but these plans were not fully implemented.6 The
conservative regimes then ruling the country, which had
close ties with the landed aristocracy that owned the inge-
nios, imposed significant restrictions on the political and
social rights of large segments of the population. In the early
1940s, these conditions triggered growing unrest and new
forms of popular mobilization that contributed to the emer-
gence of the Peronist movement. The first two presidencies
of Juan Domingo Perón (1946–55) expanded notions of na-
tionality by incorporating previously marginalized sectors
within public imaginaries. The Peronist government cele-
brated the descamisados (shirtless; a metaphor for the work-
ing class) and the cabecitas negras (little black heads, or mes-
tizo populations of rural areas who migrated in large num-
bers to Buenos Aires). Both groups became new symbols of
a nation that was, at last, coming to terms with its silenced
majorities. As part of this process, and responding to grow-
ing political pressure by indigenous groups, in 1947 Perón’s
government finally granted aborı́genes official recognition
as citizens and began documentation campaigns in sev-
eral parts of the country. Shortly after, women gained vot-
ing rights. In just a few years, the dominant parameters of
Argentinean citizenship had been significantly expanded.
Most Toba and Wichı́, however, remember the first dis-
tribution of documents of the late 1940s as a relatively distant
process that did not involve them. The very few people who
received ID papers in those days remember their distribu-
tion as the outcome of Perón’s personal indignation at the
status of aborı́genes, as if they needed to emphasize that
after decades of neglect, the president of the nation him-
self (and not just a faceless government agency) decided to
take action. In 1995, Mateo, a Toba man in his seventies, told
me about that event: “When Perón came to the ingenio and
learned that the people didn’t have documentos, he said,
‘You’re Argentinean! How come you don’t have documen-
tos?’ ” According to this account, the aborı́genes’ externality
vis-à-vis the nation suddenly became a disturbing bureau-
cratic anomaly that required correction. Despite Perón’s al-
leged surprise and insistence that they were “Argentinean”
like anyone else, not much changed for most Toba and Wichı́.
The crucible of citizenship  American Ethnologist
In the western Chaco, the documentation of the late 1940s
had a limited reach, and the majority of the aborı́genes re-
mained without ID papers for at least two more decades.
Even though, from a legal standpoint, they had been de-
clared citizens, what mattered to most Toba and Wichı́ was
that they were still deprived of the material objects that rep-
resented this status.
In fact, it was at the sugar plantations that people felt
particularly alienated from ID papers, as they regularly in-
teracted with workers who did have documents. This es-
trangement was accentuated by their interaction with new
systems of documentation, tied this time to labor disci-
pline. As I have analyzed elsewhere (Gordillo 2004), at the
plantations the aborı́genes of the Chaco became part of
an ethnicized labor hierarchy that located them at the bot-
tom of a heterogeneous labor force. Toba, Wichı́, Chorote,
Nivaclé, and Pilagá men and women were employed to weed,
clear patches of forest, plant cane, and chop firewood, and
they lived in straw and cane-leaf huts they built in impro-
vised camps. The seasonal cane cutters (peasants from the
Argentinean highlands and Bolivia) and the permanent field
and factory workers (Guaranı́ and criollos), in contrast, were
relatively better-paid, skilled workers who were provided
with housing.
This labor experience immersed the Chaco groups in a
documentation system that reinforced, once again, the im-
portance of written papers. Yet the latter were not part of the
optics of state power but of the plantation’s capitalist social
relations, which produced records through which work was
classified, measured, and paid. This required, first, that each
indigenous worker be named in Spanish. Scott (1998:64–71)
has examined the creation of last names as the historical
result of state attempts to make subjects legible for tax pur-
poses or conscription. Yet, in the western Chaco, making
indigenous people legible was initially tied not to state prac-
tices but to a capitalist system of labor discipline. The selec-
tion of names was often the result of the whims of plantation
employees, who either named workers after Argentinean his-
torical figures (e.g., Larrea, Saavedra, Moreno, or Estrada)
or did so following more pragmatic, depersonalizing cri-
teria, such as the person’s location in the queue (Primero,
Segundo, or Tercero; i.e., First, Second, or Third).7 In cases
such as these, naming was yet another way of reifying indige-
nous people as malleable objects subject to manipulation,
whose new identity resulted from the mimetic imposition of
the national history on them or from their reduction to quan-
tifiable markers. On other occasions, indigenous workers
maneuvered vis-à-vis these constraints and created Span-
ish phonetic versions of their indigenous names or chose to
be named after their criollo neighbors in the Chaco. Yet, in
all cases, they ended up with two personal names: an indige-
nous name and a first and last name in Spanish.8
On the basis of this system of legibility, the administra-
tion opened a planilla (file) for each worker. At the end of
169
American Ethnologist  Volume 33 Number 2 May 2006
each workday, foremen made sure the worker had completed
the task of the day, made a mark in the planilla, and gave him
or her a ration in cash. At the end of the harvest, people were
paid according to what was written in their files, and this ex-
perience made the importance of the planillas all the more
apparent. Because indigenous workers were illiterate and in-
numerate, they did not exactly know how much money they
were owed and this situation made them particularly vul-
nerable to abuses. In 1914, an inspector of the Argentinean
Department of Labor wrote about the final payment at one
of the largest sugar plantations: “The employee who pays
can write any type of sum, $12 or $96. The Indian will always
pick up the receipt, with any type of amount written in it,
because he does not know how to distinguish the numbers”
(Unsain 1914:71). This did not prevent people from having
the impression they were making great gains, for they usually
returned to the Chaco with horses and donkeys and loaded
with clothes, utensils, and riding gear (Gordillo 2002, 2004).
People’s estrangement from these receipts and also their fas-
cination with the commodities they granted contributed to
the power projected onto these papers, which many Toba
and Wichı́ brought back to the Chaco and (especially in the
early 20th century) showed to military officers and explorers
as “certificates of good behavior.”
Despite the significance of these texts, interaction with
documented workers who were above them in the labor hi-
erarchy made many Toba and Wichı́ aware that they lacked
the most important of all certificates: the ID papers granted
by the federal government. Because of this contrast, in the
cane fields the fetishization of ID documents became partic-
ularly widespread and intense. Among the Toba, memories
of the plantations often hinge on how their lack of papers
affected them negatively in multiple ways. “We worked as
if we were underage,” commented Mariano, a man in his
fifties, in a conversation he and I had in 1997. By summariz-
ing how many Toba felt as undocumented workers, he also
captured the status of nonadults that had been imposed on
them earlier in the century.
In contrast to this view of themselves, many Toba re-
member the cane cutters as bold, knowledgeable workers
who regularly challenged the administration through the
union; they often add that the aborı́genes did not join strikes
because “we didn’t have documentos.” Many Toba, in this
regard, remember the lack of documentos as an ontological
condition that confirmed their inferior social status and de-
prived them not just of the right to join the union but also
of the right to protest; in short, they had the impression that
their lack of documentation crippled their capacity to resist
exploitation. In July 1996, Tomás, a Toba man in his fifties,
was remembering the ingenio and told me, “We didn’t have
a delegate, we didn’t have a lawyer, we didn’t have a union.
When the union protested, we the aborı́genes had nothing to
do with it. The union was bold, of course, because they had
documentos. We had nothing to do with it. We were poor; we
170
kept on working. We kept on working.” I asked him why they
did not join the union-led protest, and he replied, matter-of-
factly, “Because we didn’t have documentos. The cane cut-
ters did.” In Tomás’s eyes, unionized workers challenged the
administration, first and foremost, because they had docu-
mentos, as if collective struggles were not the outcome of
particular fields of force, political experiences, and relations
of domination but the result of a formalized arrangement
dictated by potent things: ID papers.
When the Toba remember the cane cutters as workers
who had documents, many specifically refer to the Bolivians.
Paradoxically, the latter, as foreign nationals, initially lacked
Argentinean papers. But many Toba saw them as “rich” work-
ers who, given their respectable position as cane cutters and
their activism, must have had documentos. In other words,
because many Toba presupposed that ID papers had the
power to dictate the status of a social group, they assumed
that those bold, well-paid workers could not but have them.
Some people also considered that having those papers de-
termined not only one’s activism but also one’s wealth. In
the 1990s, Bolivian families that had worked at the ingenio
opened several stores in the town of Ingeniero Juárez, 60 kilo-
meters south of the Toba villages. They were very successful,
and in a few years dominated the local retail clothing busi-
ness. Mariano told me about those retailers, drawing on his
memory of the sugar plantations: “The Bolivians had docu-
mentos, so they became rich. Now they’re selling clothes in
Juárez. . . . If back then we had documentos, we would have
many things. Since we didn’t have documentos, we have few
things.” For Mariano, having proper documentation was the
main force behind the Bolivians’ wealth; by the same token,
he saw the Toba’s prolonged alienation from ID papers as
the main factor explaining their current poverty.9 This con-
trast was particularly apparent to him because at one point
both groups (Bolivians and Toba) worked in the same place
sharing a similar class status. Implicit here is a view of state
documents as objects comparable to a currency that grants
material wealth to its holders, a point to which I return when
analyzing the current use of ID papers in relations of political
patronage.
Drawing on similar perceptions, some Toba and Wichı́
remember the poor sanitary and living conditions of their
work camps as the product of their undocumented status. I
asked Luis, a Wichı́ man cited earlier, why many people fell
ill at the ingenio. “Because we didn’t have documentos,” he
replied. “Without documentos, you can do nothing. That’s
the custom of this law. We didn’t have documentos. They
treated us like dogs. . . . You know that according to the law
those who have no documentos can’t denounce anything.
And then we couldn’t denounce them. We didn’t have doc-
umentos.” Once again, Luis read the lack of ID papers as a
paralyzing experience (“you can do nothing”) sanctified by
law. And this alienation not only excluded aborı́genes from
health services but also hindered their capacity to complain.

By repeating the phrase “we didn’t have documentos” sev-
eral times, he made clear that he regarded this alienation
from a powerful object, the ID papers, as the defining factor
in these experiences.
The use of the past tense in these references to docu-
ments (“we didn’t have them”) also highlights that Luis saw
these experiences as part of the past. In the next section, I
turn to the distribution of ID papers in northwest Formosa
in the late 1960s and its impact on local political practices
and forms of subjectivity.
Living with ID papers: Political patronage
and nationality
The moment that most Toba and Wichı́ in this region had
long awaited finally arrived in 1968. By then, several leaders
had been putting pressure on the Anglican missionaries to
demand that officials distribute ID papers. One of the mis-
sionaries who began lobbying the government noted peo-
ple’s high expectations about putting an end to their un-
documented status. He also wrote that, on asking a Wichı́
man what he desired most in life, the man replied, without
hesitation, “My documento” (Leake 1968:10). The media-
tion of the Anglican Church eventually paid off. In June of
1968, the government organized a massive documentation
campaign through which scores of officials visited outlying
villages, recording individual identities, taking photos, and
distributing ID papers.
The men and women who received their papers then
remember that moment as an exhilarating event that
broke with decades of political estrangement. These doc-
uments marked an Argentinean citizenship free of cultural
distinctions, for they did not specify the holders’ ethnicity
but simply their name, date of birth, and gender; each also
included a paramount visual symbol of modern individual-
ity: the holder’s photo. These new signs of identity implied
that people had to comply with new patterns of legibility. In
1999, a Toba man in his sixties named Benigno remembered,
“When they made the documentos we didn’t know our dates
of birth. They wrote a date in a book. They just calculated the
year of birth. For me, they calculated ‘1936.’ ” This man made
clear that documents required the production and invention
of quantitative markers of personal identity originally alien
to them, such as birth dates.
ID papers also constructed new identities based on the
Spanish names fashioned at the ingenios. Those names, used
originally only in work files, became people’s visible, public
names in relation to the state. Most Toba and Wichı́ agree that
people were more than eager to adapt to these requirements,
which allowed them to affirm a previously denied identity
as Argentinean. Further, for many people this nationality
became almost synonymous with personhood. Among the
Mapuche, the largest indigenous group in Patagonia, many
currently remember that the ID papers “made us people”
The crucible of citizenship  American Ethnologist
(Briones 1993:81). Likewise, indigenous people in the Chaco
often feel that documentation upgraded their status to that
of legal personhood, putting an end to a condition that had
made them as vulnerable as animals and that, in fact, many
people viewed as a major force in the violence once un-
leashed on them.
Paradoxically, the Toba and Wichı́ of northwest Formosa
were finally granted their ID documents by a military dicta-
torship that had taken power in the country two years ear-
lier and was curbing the political rights of all citizens. This
documentation campaign was tied to modernizing narra-
tives that claimed that marginalized rural populations had
to be incorporated into the nation; but it was also part of
an attempt to expand the apparatus of state legibility and
surveillance into sensitive border areas. Not surprisingly, one
of the first consequences of documentation was the enlist-
ment of some young indigenous men in the servicio militar
(military service). Until mandatory military service was abol-
ished in Argentina in 1994, however, only a very low percent-
age of Toba and Wichı́ from this region were ever enlisted.
This is probably why most people currently remember mil-
itary service as a relatively minor nuisance that was offset
by the new type of collective recognition gained through
documentation. Some Toba argue, with a degree of bitter-
ness, that they could have received their papers earlier had
some Anglican missionaries not opposed documentation
on the grounds that men would be forced to serve in the
military.
This distribution of ID papers under a repressive regime
meant that, in fact, for several years it was not part of a
process of political empowerment. In 1973, democracy was
briefly restored and many Toba and Wichı́ voted in national
elections for the first time (in most cases only vaguely aware
of the factions luring their votes), but in 1976 a new and
more repressive dictatorship took power. In remembering
those days, however, most Toba and Wichı́ do not make ref-
erence to the military regime’s restrictions. In this region,
overtly violent forms of repression were relatively rare, and
people agree that, back then, they “didn’t know” much about
politics anyway. What mattered, most agree, was that they al-
ready had documents. This was not without practical signifi-
cance. First, the routine checkpoints imposed by the military
or the police regularly involved the demand for ID papers. As
earlier in the century, being able to produce written proof of
documentation could affect the type of engagement one had
with armed agents of the state. Second, men and women be-
gan using their papers to apply for forms of state assistance,
such as pensions, or to receive health care at the regional hos-
pital. Even though the migrations to the sugar plantations
came to an end because of the mechanization of production,
people began working on cotton and bean farms and carry-
ing their ID documents with them. This certainly did not
hinder exploitation, but it allowed them to register their per-
sonal identity in the farms’ system of payment and, on some
171
American Ethnologist  Volume 33 Number 2 May 2006
occasions, gave them a visibility with which to contest
abuses by filing complaints with the local police.
Documents acquired new political meanings with the
return of a democratically elected government in Argentina
at the end of 1983, when party politics immersed Toba and
Wichı́ villages within new fields of negotiation and conflict.
Because voters must present their Documento Nacional de
Identidad (DNI; National Identity Card) prior to voting, the
card became a crucial marker of political agency. Whereas in
previous years having ID papers meant people had joined a
broader national community, in the second half of the 1980s
it signaled their transformation into actors with a certain
political clout, especially in a region where the majority of
the population (and, hence, of the electorate) is indigenous.
This process was also notable because it turned docu-
mentos into semicommodified tokens of political patronage,
a phenomenon that added further potency to their materi-
ality and also shaped the interpretations and memories pre-
sented above. At the time of elections, it is not unusual to
see local candidates (indigenous and nonindigenous alike)
touring villages and collecting the DNIs of their political
clients in exchange for favors or merchandise (usually food).
On election day, these candidates and their assistants give
the DNIs back to their supporters near the voting sites, to-
gether with envelopes containing the “right” ballots to be
deposited in the box. Many Toba and Wichı́ are critical of
these practices and point to their exploitative nature. But
those who temporarily give up their documentation usually
argue that they simply attempt to manipulate the competi-
tion among candidates to their advantage by “selling” their
vote to the highest bidder. These practices are not unrelated
to the view, examined earlier, that having documents can de-
termine one’s wealth. This case, nonetheless, also shows that
what is commodified is the state authority embedded in the
DNI, primarily the right to vote, rather than the papers them-
selves. The personal identity inscribed in the documento is
not transferable and, therefore (unlike what happens with
ordinary commodities), its holder ultimately retains posses-
sion over it. This commoditization of votes turns the DNI
into a particularly valuable token, especially in a context of
widespread poverty, for people can use it over and over to ob-
tain some material benefits without losing possession of it (at
the cost, certainly, of reproducing their dependence on rela-
tions of patronage and empowering local politicians).10 To-
gether with the influence of the memories examined earlier,
these factors make state documents among the most valu-
able objects any individual can possess. This explains why
people take great care in protecting them from dust, rain, or
insects by keeping them in plastic bags inside their homes.11
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the imag-
inaries analyzed in these pages are particularly widespread
among adults who are over 40 years of age. New generations
of Toba and Wichı́ that did not personally experience what
their parents and grandparents went through are gradually
172
taking ID papers for granted as part of everyday political
landscapes. Hence, among young people, documents are
beginning to lose the aura that older people still attach to
them, in the sense that their potency is less readily invoked
to explain major aspects of a collective history. Most youths,
nonetheless, know about “the time when people didn’t have
documents.” They are aware that obtaining the citizenship
symbolized by the ID papers was for the aborı́genes a painful,
prolonged crucible that constrained their lives in multiple
ways; consequently, they do not take their nationality lightly.
In contrast to other indigenous groups in Argentina (such as
the Mapuche or the Guaranı́ in Jujuy) in which some lead-
ers articulate lukewarm connections to a nationally defined
identity, most Toba and Wichı́—young and old—often claim
a firm identity as Argentineans. They certainly know that
their citizenship has not hindered forms of inequality and in-
justice and that they are as “poor” as they are aboriginal; but
this ethnicized class identity is blended with a strong sense of
national belonging that challenges Euro-Argentinean narra-
tives about the whiteness of the nation.12 More importantly,
it is an identity that many Toba and Wichı́ feel they had to
wrest from the actors that had deemed aborı́genes unfit for
it. Because of this, their national allegiance often adopts an
assertive, defensive tone that is indicative of its past fragility.
For many people, this historical tension between what was
denied to them and what they have gained is condensed in
the substance of their ID documents.
Conclusion
The histories, practices, and memories examined in this ar-
ticle take me full circle to the anecdote presented in the
opening paragraphs. Many Toba and Wichı́ are eager to show
their ID papers to visitors because those documents were for
a long time unreachable markers of national membership,
their absence symbolizing the marginalization of indigenous
groups from the body of the nation. Unlike what happened
in the early 20th century, this keenness to display documents
is not aimed at deflecting threats of violence; yet it indicates
that memories of violence and oppression still make many
people feel that they have to prove their citizenship, as if their
aboriginality made them potentially suspect of not being
fully Argentinean. Even though most Toba and Wichı́ have
possessed ID documents for several decades and younger
generations grew up in a context in which they can obtain
them at birth, their collective memory is still shaped by past
experiences of estrangement from the national community.
This alienation created views of documents that are marked
by one of the distinctive features of fetishism: the projection
of the power created by historical relations onto the reified
substance of objects. Michael Taussig has argued that the
salient property of the fetish is “to register the representation
rather than the being represented, the mode of signification
at the expense of the thing being signified” (1997:94). In

the Chaco, the fetishization of ID papers condenses this
twofold process. Many people turn their documento into
a representation of citizenship that, even though deriving
its power from “the state,” gains a force of its own. And
the mode of signification (the ID paper) acquires its po-
tency at the expense of what is being signified, the web
of relations and rights constitutive of national forms of
membership.
My analysis of the fetishization of ID papers should not
be read as an attempt to downplay the very real effects that
being undocumented has had on the Toba and Wichı́ or, for
that matter, that it currently has on millions of people world-
wide. Being able to produce a state-sanctioned proof of iden-
tity does affect whether one can cross international borders,
access social benefits, or pass through a police checkpoint on
the street. Yet the naturalization of those objects often makes
one forget that passports, green cards, or driver’s licenses
are worthless without the social relations that produce them
and give meaning to them as symbols of something else. The
power that people invest in those documents lies there, in
those relations and conventions, rather than in their physi-
cal materiality. Certainly, many people worldwide are aware
of these conventions. As I argued at the beginning of this
article, fetishism is not the natural, inevitable outcome of
state documentation. What has made many Toba and Wichı́
adults see ID papers not only as symbols but also as fetishized
objects were the violent, exploitative conditions in which
these people were incorporated into the nation-state and,
simultaneously, denied membership in it. It was this partic-
ularly profound estrangement that made many people view
ID documents, the ultimate emblem of what they were being
alienated from, as objects that had the power to dictate ma-
jor events in their history. This experience, in turn, was also
molded by views of “the state” as the thinglike entity that
originally projected its potency onto the papers. The reifi-
cation of ID documents, in short, is not disconnected from
state fetishism and is partially shaped by it.
In critical social theory, the concept of fetishism is
closely tied to notions of ideological mystification: that is,
it implies that reification obscures the historical nature of
the products of social action and blurs recognition that “the
physical materiality of things has nothing to do with their
value” (Pietz 1993:147). These ideological aspects are cer-
tainly at play in Toba and Wichı́ views of ID papers, especially
when these people downplay the agency of social actors (in-
cluding their own) in explaining violence, poverty, or politi-
cal struggles. Yet this does not necessarily make these views
expressions of a “false consciousness” that fails to grasp the
“real” workings of state documentation. These perceptions
contain elements of a critical awareness of the intricate con-
nection between documentation and domination. In the
early 20th century, the circulation of myriad private notes, in
fact, temporarily destabilized the reification of the state as
the unified source of that power. Indigenous people quickly
The crucible of citizenship  American Ethnologist
learned about the conventions used to measure their relia-
bility through written texts and manipulated the latter ac-
cordingly, even if under adverse conditions and even if what
ultimately made those papers effective was their recogni-
tion by the military—and, hence, by armed state agents—as
legitimate. More recently, many Toba and Wichı́ have also
shown a critical awareness of the power embedded in mod-
ern forms of bureaucracy. As Peter Wogan has argued in the
case of Ecuador, the attribution of potency to written texts by
indigenous people shows that, in fact, they “do understand
the way writing works: they understand that documentation
is intimately connected with power; [and] not just . . . with
power, but with exploitative power” (2004:38). The same can
be said about the Chaco case, in which the preoccupation
with the materiality of ID papers ultimately signals that peo-
ple did learn that state agencies evaluated national mem-
bership through them.
In this article, I have situated part of my argument within
discussions on state legibility. Yet to contend that individual
documentation made the Toba and Wichı́ more legible and,
hence, more subject to state domination would be to make
an obvious but ultimately misleading point. These people
know all too well that they were targets of violence and la-
bor overexploitation especially when they were not legible as
citizens. And they learned that documents that made them
look reliable and visible often provided them with the lit-
tle protection they could get from those forces. Through-
out much of the 20th century, indigenous people regarded
the most important of those papers, state-issued ID docu-
ments, as elusive objects that state agents kept away from
them. For that reason, by unwrapping those plastic bags
and showing their documentos to visitors, many Toba and
Wichı́ make a statement about the way in which past ab-
sences have been materialized in the present. In a brief ges-
ture, they conjure up the ghosts of the past and say, “We are
Argentinean.”
Notes
Acknowledgments. I presented earlier versions of this article at
the 102nd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Asso-
ciation in Chicago, November 2003; at the conference “Mestizaje in
the Americas” at Casa de Velázquez in Madrid in December 2003;
and in the Anthropology and Sociology Graduate Student Confer-
ence at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in March 2004.
I am grateful to Maya Parson and Guillaume Boccara for inviting
me (respectively) to Chicago and Madrid and to Matthew Gutmann
and Enrique Mayer for their comments as discussants. I am also
greatly indebted to the three anonymous reviewers for American
Ethnologist and to my UBC colleagues Carole Blackburn, Vinay
Kamat, Andrew Martindale, Pat Moore, Anand Pandian, John Tor-
pey, and Felice Wyndham for their careful, challenging observations
during the final but very significant round of revisions. I gathered
the ethnographic material included in this article on different trips
to the Chaco between the mid-1990s and 2003, mostly among the
western Toba. My fieldwork among the Wichı́ took place in a nearby
173
American Ethnologist  Volume 33 Number 2 May 2006
village in June 2000 and June 2003. Fieldwork was funded in the
late 1990s by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Re-
search and in 2003 by a Hampton Social Science Large Grant from
the University of British Columbia.
1. Most of these displays (at least in front of me) involved Toba
men, primarily because it was men who hosted my visits in their
homes. During my fieldwork, nonetheless, I noticed that this pre-
occupation with the materiality of ID papers also characterized
women.
2. These similarities set these groups apart from Toba and Wichı́
in other areas of the Argentinean Chaco, who were either fully prole-
tarianized (as some eastern Toba and some Wichı́ in Salta) or became
small farmers (as many eastern Toba). On these other groups, see
Miller 1979, Carrasco and Briones 1996, and Wright 2003, among
others. In the remainder of the article (except when mentioned oth-
erwise), all references about the “Toba” and “Wichı́” are to people
living in northwest Formosa.
3. For a long time, the government restricted political rights to
people living in provincias (provinces), the regions first settled by
the Spanish. In the territorios nacionales (national territories)—
which comprised areas recently incorporated within the reach of
state sovereignty, such as Chaco and Formosa—males did not have
the right to vote. In Formosa, this situation changed when the terri-
tory became a province in 1955.
4. Several state officials had put forward unsuccessful attempts
to create a Patronato Nacional de Indios, a national institute for
the “tutelage of Indians” inspired by patronatos (orphanages; Beck
1994:87).
5. Whether the presence of a state-produced document in the
hands of the Pilagá hunters would have changed the outcome of
this encounter is impossible to know. Yet one can relatively safely
conclude that, in the eyes of those soldiers, the handwritten note
from the missionary did not carry much weight because of its private
nature.
6. In 1937, President Agustı́n Justo announced the creation of the
offices of the Registro Civil (Civilian Registry) in Napalpı́ and Bar-
tolomé de las Casas “in order to give a civil status to the indı́genas
[indigenes] and lead them into the legal practices of civilized life”
(Lenton 1999:23). In 1940, the government created the Consejo
Agrario Nacional (Agrarian National Council) with the aim of setting
up a national registry of indigenous people. These policies, however,
did not materialize.
7. Currently, these last names are especially common among the
Guaranı́ (formerly known as “Chiriguano”) who currently live near
the plantations in Jujuy and Salta.
8. For decades, most indigenous people used each name in differ-
ent settings: the indigenous name in interactions with people from
their own ethnic group and the Spanish name in dealings with fore-
men, officials, settlers, and members of other indigenous groups.
Among new generations, the tendency to use the Spanish name as
the main name is growing, even in interactions with relatives and
neighbors.
9. Certainly, not all blame their poverty on their past undocu-
mented status. As I have analyzed elsewhere (Gordillo 2002, 2004),
local explanations of poverty and wealth are diverse and contradic-
tory and also include self-deprecating references to the aborı́genes’
“ignorance” and allusions to the relations of domination historically
imposed on them by “the rich.”
10. A further, albeit different aspect in the commoditization of
ID papers is that, except when government agencies organize doc-
umentation campaigns free of charge, people have to pay for the
documents’ photos, and this hinders their capacity to readily ob-
tain documentation for their children. On countless occasions dur-
ing my fieldwork, people asked me whether my camera took the
174
type of pictures (four by four cm) required for the DNI and were dis-
appointed to hear that it did not. These commodified dimensions
point, on the one hand, to the constraints that keep some people
from accessing ID papers (i.e., the cost of photos), and on the other
hand, to aspects of that commoditization that may temporarily, if
frailly, empower them (i.e., using their papers to obtain favors or
goods from political candidates).
11. The preoccupation with documentation has also shaped Toba
and Wichı́ views of documents that are not state related but associ-
ated with religious institutions. In addition to showing me their ID
papers, some people also displayed ID cards or certificates issued
by the Anglican Church or the Iglesia Evangélica Unida (Evangeli-
cal United Church, a Pentecostal indigenous church), again, for no
other apparent reason than making me see they had them. Elmer
Miller (1979:147–148) noted that, in the eastern Chaco, one of the
main concerns of Toba Pentecostal leaders in the 1950s was to ob-
tain the fichero, the document through which the government au-
thorized non-Catholic religious organizations to hold their public
meetings. The preoccupation with legal documents and, in general,
with the power of the written word has also shaped views of the
healing power of religious texts. Among the western Toba, at the
services of the Iglesia Unida and at some Anglican healing sessions,
some men heal patients by rubbing the open text of the Bible over
the afflicted body part. These practices do not involve the use of ID
papers, an indication that the power of the latter is not associated
with healing potency.
12. The ongoing low-intensity conflict between the Argentinean
and Paraguayan governments involving the irregular flow of the
Pilcomayo River, for instance, often makes ordinary Toba and
Wichı́ adopt an anti-Paraguayan rhetoric based on nationalist sen-
timents about the river being “stolen from Argentina” (Gordillo and
Leguizamón 2002).
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