Projections on the “desirable” inhabitant. Immigrant, settlers and native communities in areas of the “internal border”

Abstract

This article analyzes the various civilizing projects proposed by the Argentinean leaders in the search for the “desirable” inhabitants. It questions the success of a process of “ethnic replacement” that occurred in Argentina during the last quarter of the 19th century by focussing on the specific case of social displacements that took place in the Northern Patagonian region as an expression of the so-called “internal border”. It starts from the assumption that the constructed image of a “desert void”, both in geographical and human terms, leading to the invisibility of indigenous peoples, was promoted by the Argentine ruling class in a strategy designed to justify the incorporation, for settlement purposes, of new social actors with the alleged characteristics of “civilization and progress” in order to strengthen a society and a nation state that were in the process of construction. Thus, in accordance with the logic of the 19th century mentality, the tool of immigration was used as an ideal agent to introduce a missing “modernity” and to fill the population void produced by the ethnocide of indigenous communities. In that view the immigrants would become vanguard agents as “settlers and pioneers” with the aim of gaining for “civilization” territories expropriated from native communities.

Key words: Argentina, Northern Patagonia, settlers, immigrants, native communities, border.