A Haunted Frontier

Absence can exert a positive causal influence.

—Slavoj Zizek, Organs without Bodies

The area at the foot of the Andes around Metán is currently known in the province of Salta as la frontera (the frontier). As a Jesuit missionary put it in 1746, this region was called the frontier because it was "infested by Indians toward the east" (cited in Furlong 1939, 21). In South America, the Spanish turned the mountains, high plateaus, and valleys of the Andes into state territory, yet, like the Incas prior to them, they faced clear limits in seeking to control the tropical lowlands extending east. Along the western edge of the Chaco, officials and missionaries experienced this territorial dissolution as an "infestation" created by uncontrollable swarms of Indians that voided the spatial reach of imperial power. The Argentine army may have brought this frontier to an end in the late 1800s when it submitted the interior of the Chaco to state control, but the legacy of that past voiding of space by Indians at the foot of the Andes has far from dissipated; it lingers in the present, for starters, in the resilience of the region's name.

Despite its social diversity, the region that stretches between Metán and Joaquín V. González shares a structure of feeling constituted by an often subtle yet recurring haunting. Strictly speaking, a haunting is distinct from memory, for it is not reducible to narratives articulated linguistically; it is, rather, an affect created by an absence that exerts a hard-to-articulate, nondiscursive, yet positive pressure on the body, thereby turning such absence into a physical presence that is felt and that thereby affects. Most places are haunted by absences in one way or another and with different levels of intensity, as the power of the absence of the World Trade Center in New York City reveals. The haunting that defines la frontera is that this is a region without Indians that nevertheless is not indifferent to their absence, and that has not fully broken away from this absence because of a twofold, ongoing presence: the material debris of the places that once defined the frontier and the "indigenous blood" of its population.

Robert Ginsberg (2004) argues that ruins should be examined as expressions of positivity, fullness, resilience, and life, rather than as sites of rupture, absence, loss, and negativity. Seeking to criticize the mainstream view of ruins as dead objects, he demonstrates that ruins have an active presence that shapes the configuration of the present. Yet positivity and negativity, contra what Ginsberg indicates, are not the poles of a dichotomy, but different moments in the deployment of relations of force. The positive afterlife of ruins, in this regard, is inseparable from the absences that pervade them. This is why, as Ginsberg admits in a line that articulates the productive force of negativity, "perhaps the most pervasive incongruity in the ruin is the strange absence that occurs amid presence, for what is not there may cast an uncanny reflection on what is there" (2004, 60). In southeast Salta, the strange absence that hovers around the presence of nodes of rubble in the region is that many of them—the city of Esteco, the church, the tower, the forts—were once built to combat a political force that no longer exists: los indios, the Indians of the Chaco, the reason that the region is still called the frontier. And as Slavoj Zizek put it, "absence can exert a positive causal influence" (2004, 31). This chapter introduces the main protagonists of this book, the rural poor of southeast Salta, through an examination of how this absence shapes their subjectivity and their bodily disposition to be affected by some nodes of rubble in distinct ways.

The Indians Within

Most of the people I interacted with in rural areas self-identify as criollos, a term that has a long, multifaceted history in Latin America. Initially used to refer to people of Iberian background born in the Americas, criollo subsequently acquired contrasting meanings in different parts of the continent. Whereas in Mexico it came to symbolize elite status and whiteness, elsewhere on the continent criollo signified cultural and racial mixture (mestizaje) and "someone who was local in birth and allegiance" (Stewart 2007, 8). The latter meaning prevailed in Argentina, where criollo has been used to refer to people and habits characteristic of the nation and, in particular, to subaltern rural populations of mestizo background (Chamosa 2008).

Argentina has historically stood out in Latin America for its efforts to present itself as a white, Europeanized nation. This means that even the existence of widespread mestizaje has been officially downplayed and silenced. In Salta, the fact that criollo evokes indigenous ancestry has meant that the regional elites have long tried to minimize, and therefore exorcise, the Indian ghost that haunts criollo bodies. This gesture was embodied by criollismo. Created at the turn of the twentieth century by conservative authors and officials, this was an intellectual and political movement that longed for a nation anchored in "the land" and "the traditions" best represented by the gauchos, "the most original and authentic product of our land" (Leguizamón 1935, 12). But criollismo was also a project of whitening that celebrated the gauchos of "the Salta frontier" as mestizos whose indigenous background was dismissed as "minuscule," an expression that "the invading race prevailed over the invaded race" (Dávalos 1928, 17–18; see Chamosa 2008, 102). The emphasis that their Hispanic heritage had "prevailed" also meant that criollos were presented in dualistic opposition to the Indians of the Chaco. In Salta, this conjuring away of the Indian ghost lurking within criollo bodies has long informed official ceremonies, commemorations, and school curricula.

Ordinary criollo people partly subvert this elite gesture by regularly evoking the ongoing presence of Indians within their own criollo bodies. In Las Lajitas, for instance, I asked an eighty-two-year-old criollo man, Jesús, whether there were any indigenous people living in town. "I have indigenous blood," he responded casually, implying that he counted himself as partly indigenous. His son Antonio was with us and added, "Almost all of us criollos from around here are mestizos." I encountered many such statements throughout the region, where my questions about indigenous people prompted criollos to respond that they themselves...