Constructing Indigeneity in Argentina: At the Crossroads of Mountaineering, Tourism, and...

Constructing Indigeneity in Argentina: Atthe Crossroads of Mountaineering, Tourism,and Re-Ethnification

By

Joy LoganUniversity of Hawai ‘ i

R e s u m e n

El artıculo examina inicialmente aquellas nociones de lo indıgena que, atrincheradas en

el pasado, son utilizadas en proyectos del turismo de aventura, para despues analizar

como la re-etnificacion actual en los Andes de Mendoza, Argentina, las desaf ıa. Explora

el uso del patrimonio incaico y el descubrimiento de una momia en el Aconcagua para

caracterizar el montanismo como una actividad moderna y transformadora que refleja

las ideas tradicionales de raza, etnia y nacion. Esto se hace mas complejo al concederle a

Guaytamari, en el cercano valle de Uspallata, el estatus de comunidad indıgena. Con

una vision historica general de los Huarpes Milcayac, que supuestamente desapar-

ecieron de este enclave despues de la Conquista, y la contextualizacion de las practicas

de Guaytamari dentro del proceso de auto-identificacion de los pueblos originarios

argentinos, el estudio examina como esta comunidad representa lo indıgeno y como

cuestiones de autenticidad e hibridez complican los proyectos turısticos y la construc-

cion de un multi-culturalismo regional.

This article examines entrenched notions of the indigenous past that are used by

adventure tourism and how they are challenged by contemporary re-ethnification in

the Andes of Mendoza, Argentina. It explores the use of the region’s Incan heritage and

the discovery of a mummy on Aconcagua as a means of marking mountaineering as a

modern and transformative endeavor and reflective of traditional ideas about race,

ethnicity, and nation. This is problematized by the recognition of Guaytamari, in the

nearby Uspallata Valley, as an indigenous community. With a historical overview of the

Milcayac Huarpes, who supposedly disappeared from the zone after the conquest, and

the contextualization of the practices of Guatyamari within the process of self-iden-

tification being undertaken by Argentina’s native peoples, the study examines how

Guaytamari defines indigeneity and how concepts of authenticity and hybridity com-

plicate its touristic undertakings and the construction of a regional multi-culturalism.

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 405–431. ISSN 1935-4932, online ISSN

1935-4940. & 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1935-

4940.2009.01054.x

Constructing Indigeneity in Argentina 405

PALABRAS CLAVES: re-etnificacion, lo indıgena, turismo cultural, autenticidad,

mestizaje, ritual, peregrinaje.

KEYWORDS: re-ethnification, indigeneity, cultural tourism, authenticity, mestizaje,

ritual, pilgrimage.

IN CONTRASTING MOUNTAINEERING’S CONSTRUCTION of the indigenous in the alta mon-

tana of Mendoza, Argentina, with the current process of re-ethnification in the

area, this article argues that tourism functions as a significant mediator in shaping

the narratives of indigeneity in the zone.1 The touristic projects of both the prov-

ince and the mountaineering industry, especially on Mount Aconcagua, generate

an ethnically homogenous high mountain by exoticizing and privileging the re-

gion’s premodern and Inca past. This coherent and unified narrative conflicts with

and problematizes the hybrid, transculturated, and contemporary identity being

forged by the Huarpe community in the zone, which also relies on the tourist

market. The cleavage between these two narratives, brokered by tourism, serves to

illustrate the social tensions surrounding the interpretations of re-ethnification in

Argentina and the dissonance between the nation’s official recognition of ethnicity

and local collective understandings of the indigenous.

Mount Aconcagua, marker of Inca and Spanish routes of empire, of General

Jose de San Martın’s road to revolution and of Charles Darwin’s path for scientific

exploration, is most recognized across the globe today as a location for interna-

tional mountaineering and adventure tourism.2 As the highest peak in the western

hemisphere (6,962 meters) and part of the circuit of the Seven Summits,

Aconcagua, in the Andes of Mendoza, central Argentina, is a magnet that annu-

ally draws mountaineers and trekkers from over sixty countries to its slopes.3 As

part of an itinerary of international mountain adventure Aconcagua, together with

the nearby Uspallata Valley, has become one of the most important destinations for

Mendoza’s travel industry.

The boom in Mendoza’s mountaineering industry since the mid-1980s coin-

cides with a national ‘‘ethnic reemergence’’ (Gordillo and Hirsch 2003:5–6) that has

both informed and contested the representations of indigeneity in the Aconcagua

zone. The resurgence of local indigenous identities in the alta montana contends

with the privileging of the Inca heritage of the region by governmental tourist

projects and, especially, by mountaineering. The highlighting of the Inca ties to

Aconcagua, rather than some other mountaineering fact to sell adventure, bolsters

a long-standing discursive economy in which a premodern image of ‘‘the Andes’’ is

exported to satisfy North American and European expectations and desires of pre-

Columbian empires and exotic difference. The selling of Aconcagua in terms of

ethnic and temporal distance relies on a virtual re-indigenization of the high

4 0 6 J O U R N A L O F L A T I N A M E R I C A N A N D C A R I B B E A N A N T H R O P O L O G Y

mountain region, which for nearly four hundred years, has not been seen as home to

its original native peoples and communities. It markedly contrasts with the legal and

cultural movement of re-ethnification that emerged in the Uspallata Valley, near the

Aconcagua Provincial Park, in the mid-1990s, when the commune, or cooperative, of

Guaytamari gained official recognition as a Huarpe community and began developing

a heritage industry to chronicle and display both pre- and post-Inca occupation of the

area. Guaytamari’s presence in the zone and its touristic projects complicate the ways

in which the area’s indigenous past and present are read.

The uneasy co-existence of mountaineering rhetoric and practices, and Gu-

aytamari’s undertakings in the high mountain zone, speak to the underlying ten-

sions in contemporary Argentina’s self-identification, that is, its coming to terms

with a past founded on the myth of a white European homogeneity and a present

being forged by an ethnically diverse society (Gordillo and Hirsch 2003; Quijada

2004:425–300). Moreover, the dynamics of mountain tourism that contextualize

the process of re-indigenization in the Aconcagua zone serve to exemplify the ways

in which the business of tourism intervenes and mediates in the political, social,

and cultural negotiations of national and ethnic identity construction.

The Indigenous Mountain

The capital city of the province of Mendoza, located at the foot of Argentina’s

central Andes, was founded on a Huarpe settlement in 1561 by Pedro de Castillo,

envoy of the governor of Chile, Garcıa Hurtado de Mendoza. In locally authored

histories of Mendoza the province’s participation in the independence movement,

urban restructuring after the 1861 earthquake, European settlement, and wine

production have most generally been invoked to characterize Mendocino moder-

nity and regional identity (Ponte 1987; Campana et al. 2004). Both Mendoza’s

mountaineering history and its indigenous heritage have until recently remained

marginalized in this area, known as the ‘‘Tierra del sol y buen vino’’ (Land of sun

and good wine). Nevertheless, Mendoza’s mountaineering industry in the 21st

century attracts climbers from all over the world, while other tourist attractions in

Mendoza draw primarily from internal and South American markets, especially

Chile (Turplan 2000; Tapia 2006). Mendoza’s newfound emphasis on the Aconca-

gua industry and focus on international tourism reflects both national and regional

touristic movements that have especially intensified as a result of the country’s 21st

century economic crises and the devaluation of the Argentine peso that, until Jan-

uary 2002, had maintained parity with the dollar for a decade. Since that time

tourism’s potential to benefit from an unfavorable exchange rate has been a bright

light in an otherwise bleak economic forecast in Argentina (see Olarra et al. 2003;

Cafiero and Llorens 2005; Fiorucci and Marcus 2005; Epstein and Pion-Berlin

2008). For 2007 Argentina announced a 15 percent increase in international ar-


rivals via Buenos Aires’ Ezeiza airport and the National Secretary of Tourism, En-

rique Meyer, insists on the importance of tourism for Argentina, labeling it ‘‘the

best tool to generate genuine revenues and create the new jobs that the country is

imperiously demanding.’’4 In keeping with national trends of development Men-

doza saw a 50 percent increase in tourism from 1999 to 2006 (Tapia 2006). As for

Aconcagua mountaineering, there was a 20 percent increase in the 2002–2003 sea-

son after the devaluation of the peso, and growth has registered between 5 and 10

percent increase every season since.5 Mendoza now claims Aconcagua to be one of

its principal summer tourist attractions, with the surrounding high mountain zone

also registering in the top three.6

Contemporary mountaineering on Aconcagua has appropriated the indigenous

both as a selling point for mountaineers and as a comparative otherness against which

Mendocinos ratify their agency as modern national subjects. The equating of the

mountain to a premodern indigenous past that imbues it with an exotic, ‘‘other

wordly’’ spirituality encourages the understanding of mountaineering as an activity

that allows its practitioners to transcend the mundane and the ordinary of the world

below. At the same time, for Mendocinos, having indigenous difference located in the

pre-Conquest past permits them to confirm a racial and cultural homogeneity along

traditional lines of Argentine national identity construction.

As part of a tourist economy the indigenous on Aconcagua, a mountaineering

site, is not visibly or physically manifested through the presence of bodies, cere-

monies, practices, or language use. Rather, it is imagined and elicited through tex-

tual, linguistic, and topographical cues primed for tourist consumption. Barbara

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) argues that often, ‘‘[b]oth heritage and tourism deal

in the intangible, absent, inaccessible, fragmentary, and dislocated y what cannot

be seenFthe people and events and places of years ago’’ (187). The websites,

pamphlets, and posters produced by Mendocino mountaineering service agencies,

and by international groups and individuals, do just that. They narrate accounts of

the Inca presence on the mountain, as well as the etymologies of its name, to create a

dislocated and fragmented indigenous history that reconstructs Aconcagua’s in-

digeneity as virtual and intangible.

Most salient in mountaineering’s emphasis on the indigenous characteristics of

Aconcagua is indeed this discussion of its name, clearly an indigenous term, whose

origin and meaning are contested. Many Mendocino mountaineering agencies,

both online and in print, explain that the roots of ‘‘Aconcagua’’ presumably trace to

the Inca occupation of the area and are attributed to both the Aymara phrase,

‘‘Kon-Kawa,’’ translated as Centinela Blanco or Monte Nevado (White Sentinel or

Snow-Capped Peak), and the Quechua ‘‘Akon-Kahuak,’’ translated as Centinela de

Piedra (Stone Sentinel). The most commonly accepted and recognized translation

in mountaineering lore is the latter, which gives title, both in Spanish and in En-

glish, to a variety of websites and several books about Aconcagua mountaineering,


such as Aconcagua: The Stone Sentinel (Taplin 1992) and Aconcagua: El Centinela de

Piedra (Randis 1991).7

The construction of Aconcagua as indigenous is also visually and linguistically cued

by the mountaineering landscape of Aconcagua itself, which is overlaid with reminders

of the area’s Inca past. According to Mendocino archaeologists Juan Schobinger

(2001b) and Roberto Barcena (2001), Inca domination of the region, which marked

the southernmost boundary of the empire in Argentine territory, occurred during the

reign of Tupac Inca (1471–93) and was relatively brief, dating approximately from 1475

to 1532. The archaeological vestiges of Inca presence in the zone are primarily a series of

tambos, or way stations, that principally lie on a north–south axis, or veer toward the

west, along the Camino Incaico, or Inca Trail (Cienaga de Yalguaraz, Tambillos, Ran-

chillo, Tambillitos). Other signs of Inca occupation are remnants of pircas, or walled

enclosures or corrals, in the high mountain area, especially near the summit of Mount

Penitentes and at Confluencia on Aconcagua, and the Inca sanctuary on Aconcagua’s

west face (Barcena 2001:361–363; Schobinger 2001b:13–14). Mountaineering service

agencies have ensconced themselves in indigenous-named locations, using Los

Puquios and Puente del Inca as two of the three primary staging areas for all Aconcagua

routes.8 In addition, some Mendocino mountaineering agencies have chosen to invoke

the indigenous past by adorning themselves with names such as Aymara, Mallku, and

Inka Expediciones, all major agencies in the Aconcagua industry. The indigenous top-

onomies, together with the prominently located base camp settlements of Aymara,

Inka, and Mallku, contour the mountain with constant allusions to its pre-Columbian

connections. In this way signs of the indigenous are plotted onto the mountainside in a

symbolic reclaiming of its heritage that does not, however, articulate a revisionist or

indigenous narrative to counter the official history of colonization and European set-

tlement. Instead, it sets up Aconcagua within the semiotics of mountaineering as an

oppositional sign to the trappings of modernity and the materiality of everyday life.

According to Sherry B. Ortner (1999) the foundation for mountaineering and

its development throughout the 20th century has been a countermodern discourse

where ‘‘the point of climbing is to find something that one cannot find in modern

life, that indeed has been lost in modern life’’ (1999:36). The vindication of

Aconcagua’s pre-European indigenous past by the adventure tourism industry

plays into this critique of modernity when it evokes and revalues the mountain’s

‘‘lost’’ Inca character.

Recuperating the Lost

It was mountaineering itself that confirmed and reclaimed Aconcagua’s Inca her-

itage as ‘‘lost,’’ with the discovery in 1985 by local climbers on the peak’s west face

‘‘of something one cannot find in modern life’’ (Ortner 1999:36), an Inca mummy,

read, in mountaineering terms, as extraordinary difference, remarkable discovery,


and ennobling adventure.9 The world-wide coverage of the discovery of three Inca

mummies on Argentina’s Llullaillaco in 1999, the highest sacrificial sanctuary

found to date, which included an extensive article in National Geographic

(November 1999), has only served to heighten such an expectation of ‘‘wonder’’

with regards to mountaineering in the Andes. It is this kind of ‘‘sublime and tran-

scendental experience’’ that allows mountaineering, in Ortner’s equation, to op-

pose the vulgar materialism of modernity (Ortner 1999:38). In addition, it is the

discovery of the mummy that most closely ties Aconcagua to a reading of the in-

digenous that fortuitously underwrites the traditional myth of a white Argentina.

An Inca sacrifice over five hundred years ago on Aconcagua serves to reinforce

that commonly held Argentine adage that in modern-day Argentina ‘‘no hay in-

dios’’ (there are no Indians), only the vestiges of a long-absent civilization. There

has been the collective understanding, held for over a century, that Argentina’s

native peoples were all killed in the 19th-century ‘‘desert campaigns’’ to provide

freedom for ‘‘progress, territorial integration, and modernization’’ (Quijada

2004:426).10 The belief in this foundational fiction of the modern Argentine na-

tion served to facilitate the late 19th- and early 20th-century integration of new

European immigrants into a creole-based social order forged on race and European

models (Carrasco 2000; Gordillo and Hirsch 2003; Quijada 2004). As a conse-

quence, the space left by the supposed absence of indigenous populations from the

modern period until the present day allows for the evocation of the pre-colonial

Incas as a representation of South American authenticity and difference that does

not contradict or problematize the longstanding national model of a white and

European Argentina, but does play especially well to international adventure tour-

ism markets. In other words, this memory of a pre-Conquest indigeneity does not

contradict the traditional national vision of Argentine modernity based on the

‘‘civilization,’’ understood as extermination or acculturation, of Argentina’s ‘‘bar-

baric’’ indigenous elements and its self-representation as European (Gordillo and

Hirsch 2003; Pigna 2004).11 Although Argentina has not engaged in the kind of

state-sanctioned indigenismo that exalted a national indigenous identity, such as

occurred in twentieth-century Mexico, promotion of its Inca connections, even

from within the realm of adventure tourism, supports the same premise, that

indigenity, while marking unique difference, is derived from a remote, somewhat

romantic and mysterious past and is far-removed from the modern nation.

Ultimately, however, the privileging of this memory of the Incas is dependent

upon an erasure of Argentina’s native peoples who, despite the myth of their ex-

termination, account for nearly 1.5 percent of the population, numbering over

900,000 (Carrasco 2000:9; Gorostiaga 2003:18).12

The mountaineering stories of the mummy on Aconcagua inscribe indigeneity

based on this same kind of erasure. Their focus on the Inca roots of the region

ignores the native peoples of the zone, the Milcayac Huarpes, who were subjugated


by the Incas and enslaved by the Spanish.13 The descendents of those Huarpes who

avoided being sent in encomiendas to Chile during the early colonial period settled

in Lavalle, in the eastern deserts of the province, and eventually acculturated to

criollo dress, religion, lifestyle, and language.14 In other words, in collective mem-

ory, both the Huarpes and the Incas have been absent from the mountain zone for

centuries. However, it is the forgetting of the Huarpes, in favor of the memory of an

idealized and imperial indigenous tradition, that sets up the Inca to be the principal

historical sign of indigeneity in the Aconcagua zone and thus confirms Aconcagua’s

uniqueness from an Anglo-European world.

Sacrifice and Pilgrimage

Despite the fact that the Camino Incaico is nearby, and that ruins of an Inca tambo

lie just meters from the trail leading in and out of the Confluencia camp on the

heavily traveled normal route, it was the discovery of an Inca mummy on

Aconcagua, according to mountaineering websites, brochures, and common

mountain knowledge, that confirmed the Inca-ness of the peak and the area.15

Few climbers have any knowledge of the remnants of the Inca Empire in Mendoza

province, yet most Aconcagua mountaineers do know the story of the Inca mummy

and its sacrificial burial on the mountain. If they have not read about it beforehand

in mountaineering publicity and marketing texts, they do hear about it once they

are on the expedition. It is common practice for guides and other Plaza de Mulas

(base camp) officials and workers to point toward the west face of Aconcagua and

tell climbers the story of the discovery of the Inca mummy.

The mummy was found by a special Mendocino expedition, led by mountain

guide Gabriel Cabrera, to complete previously established routes in commemora-

tion of the 50th anniversary of the Club Andinista Mendoza (CAM). Cabrera led a

group composed of two sets of brothers, Fernando and Juan Carlos Pierobon and

Franco and Alberto Pizzolon, to extend the southwest ridge route inaugurated by

Francisco Ibanez, Fernando Grajales, and Frederic and Dorly Marmillod in 1953

(Cabrera 2001:20). The mummified remains of a male child, who had been ap-

proximately six years old (Cruz 2001:93), were found at an altitude of approxi-

mately 5,300 meters on January 11, 1985 by Alberto Pizzolon, who spotted what he

thought was a patch of grass. The grass turned out to be feathers emerging from the

earth and the top of a human skull partially covered by snow. The mountaineers

realized the archaeological importance of what they had found, took pictures, and

decided to contact specialists in Mendoza before returning to remove the mummy

(Schobinger 1995:3–4; Cabrera 2001:20).

The importance to the mountaineering industry of the discovery of the

mummy and the recognition of Aconcagua as a site of sacred ritual and sacrifice

may be better understood in light of how contemporary perceptions of ritual and


pilgrimage, especially as theorized by Victor Turner (1969, 1979), have been used to

characterize the mountaineer’s journey as a liminal and transformative act (van

Vuuren 2000; Beedie 2003; Houston 2006). The emotional pay-off from such an act

would be heightened by the relics of human sacrifice and the figurative transcen-

dence of time they evoke. ‘‘When you are privileged to see a mummy face-to-face,’’

according to archaeologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Marıa

Constanza Ceruti, describing her work at altitude, ‘‘it’s no longer just an archae-

ological find, it’s like meeting somebodyFa bridge to the past’’ (2006). It is this

possibility of stepping out of time and into the mythic realm of a sacred peak that

especially informs mountaineering’s interpretation of indigeneity on Aconcagua.

The mummy marks Aconcagua as a mysterious and inspirational place of discovery

and sacrifice, not just for the Incas, but also for the mountaineers themselves. As

such, marketing discourse might have us believe that it could serve to inspire and

justify the extraordinary physical and mental sacrifices climbers make on Aconca-

gua, where they might also dream that mystical things could be revealed, like an

Inca mummyFa conduit through which mountaineers could imagine personal

transcendence.

The selfsame notion of ritual and sacrifice that foments the transformative

mystique of mountaineering can also be read as a symbolic act of authentication

with regards to Mendoza’s jockeying for position within the development of the

Aconcagua industry. High-altitude archaeologist Ceruti (2001:386)argues that an

Inca pilgrimage to the mountains by a ceremonial group to offer sacrifice could

serve to sacralize the space and mark new borders of empire, consolidating and

legitimizing Inca appropriation of territory. In a similar manner the ceremonial

activities of the CAM, that ended up tracing the paths of the Inca ritual in their

attempt to honor the efforts of early Aconcagua mountaineers, mimics a pilgrim-

age along ‘‘sacred ancestral’’ routes that functioned as markers of the new frontiers

of Mendocino authority and territory on Aconcagua, and symbolically undermines

the hegemony that Anglo-European activity on the mountain had maintained since

its inception in 1883.

Mendoza Self and Other

‘‘The present case of the mummy denotes a prelogic mentality y It’s unbelievable

that anyone in the government has thought to organize a penitential procession to

return the remains to Aconcagua with the objective of conjuring the curse of the

ancestors so that it will snow in the summer and end the water recession’’ (Jorge

Enrique Oviedo 1997).

The archaeological find of the mummy as cultural commodity for the moun-

taineering industry, and as evidence of Mendocino accomplishments on Aconca-

gua, has held further significance for Mendocinos as well. Mendoza’s construction


of the mummy as a sacrificial artifact imbued with transformative powers reflects a

common use of the indigenous as a fetishized commodity that bestows special

knowledge, privilege, or status on its owner(s). The fetishized value of the mummy

within local Mendocino economies of tourism, science, academics, politics, and

folk traditions has served to position Mendocinos as leaders in the mountaineering

industry, as authorities in the interpretation of the mountain area, and as modern

citizens conforming to traditional racial assumptions about what it is to be Ar-

gentine.16 Mendocino socio-cultural valuations of the mummy were perhaps best

illustrated during the centenary celebration of mountaineering on Aconcagua. The

celebrations took place in January 1997 at Plaza de Mulas base camp, at 4,300

meters, where then-governor of Mendoza, Arturo Lafalla, an ardent andinista,

promised to pay a debt, ‘‘pagar una deuda,’’ to the mountain and return the

mummy to its burial place on Aconcagua (Ayassa 1997:9).

This pledge of restoration of the mummy was never fulfilled, as its pronounce-

ment brought about a huge polemic that exploded in the Mendoza press during the

last three months (January–March) of the 1997 climbing season. Discussion ranged

from whether this act might help bring about the end of a long-reigning drought in

the zone to concern that the governor’s promise was motivated purely by a plan to

increase tourism to Aconcagua (Oviedo 1997). The polemic played out primarily

on two fronts: who had the right to interpret the significance of the mummy, and

who could lay claim to its guardianship? Folklore, religion, law, science, politics,

capitalism, indigenist spirituality, history, and morality were all invoked in ques-

tioning the authority of the governor to make decisions concerning the location of

the mummy in Mendoza’s geophysical territory, as well as in its social imagination.

During these debates the province’s self-identification with a hegemonic un-

derstanding of national ethnic identity came to the fore. This was most clearly

articulated through an appeal to universal humanitarian rights by a few concerned

citizens who sought to counter the many and diverse fetishized and utilitarian in-

terpretations of the mummy that formed the basis of the polemic. Their letters

criticized arguments about the needs of science and the desires of newly formed

convictions that did not regard the mummy as the human remains of a six-year-old

child and a culture that deserved respect and dignity. While this counterargument

suggests a cultural sensibility to ethnic difference and indigenous beliefs (which

itself became a fulcrum in the debates), it also validated the construction of Mend-

ocino identity in collective memory, which defines itself against the absence of

indigeneity, in a construction common to the notion of Argentine nationhood in

general (Briones 2006:252–253). Diego Escolar (2007) has found that the assumed

disappearance of the original native peoples of the region, the Huarpes, has been

inscribed as the foundational event of Mendoza destiny (2007:227), which has

served to ground Mendocino hegemonic beliefs in its modernity, its whiteness, and

its European ancestry. This was especially articulated in the debates when one of the


letters suggested that readers consider how they would feel if one of ‘‘our ancestors,

a Spanish conquistador, was put on display in a museum’’ (Raıa 1997). While the

letter sets out to critique the objectification and commodification of the Inca

mummy, it does so by affirming the racial homogeneity of ‘‘our’’ Mendoza, de-

scended solely from its European ancestors. The absence of indigenous peoples in

the conceptualization of regional identity reiterates that indigeneity in Mendoza, as

well as in Argentina, has only been visible in the past. Consequently, the absence of

the indigenous, or its relegation to the Mendocino past, also facilitates the con-

struction of Mendoza as modern. Ultimately, despite the governor’s promise and

subsequent arguments for its relocation, the mummy has continued under the

jurisdiction of another aspect of Mendoza’s self-image as modernFits scientific

community.17

The Huarpes

‘‘The Huarpes in San Juan and Mendoza are a particularly noteworthy case in this

spectrum of re-emergent ethnic identities, for it involves a group that had been

considered extinct for centuries’’ (Gordillo and Hirsch 2003:20).

The examination of social, political, cultural, and touristic ethics in the

mummy debates illustrated Mendoza’s collective questioning of history, science,

culture, ethnicity, religion, and mountaineering. While the debates reflected the

strength of hegemonic discourses on race and national and regional identities, they

also revealed the multiplicity of perspectives and the contestatory social disposition

evolving throughout the 1990s in Argentina in a reassessment of its ethnically di-

verse heritage. This critical engagement of Argentine society with its own heter-

ogeneity has been particularly symbolized by the constitutional reform in 1994 that

recognized the pre-existence of Argentina’s originary peoples, and guaranteed their

rights to culture, territory, intercultural, and bilingual education, legal status, and

participation in the management of their natural resources.18 It was this reform,

specifically Article 75, Incise 17, that allowed for official recognition of what Ar-

gentine anthropologists are calling a ‘‘re-ethnification’’ of the central Andes of

Mendoza, which both differs from and parallels the indigenization process in the

mountaineering circuit on Aconcagua.

In 1996 a group of approximately six families claiming its rights as descendents

of Argentina’s native peoples became the first Huarpe community in Mendoza to

gain both national and provincial governmental recognition as an ethnic commu-

nity. Subsequently, the group was granted land in the Uspallata Valley, contiguous

to the Aconcagua zone, in which they had established the commune, or cooper-

ative, Guaytamari. In asserting their claim to the area the members of Guaytamari

also requested and were granted guardianship of nearby archaeological sites, one

being the colonial foundry known as Las Bovedas, which they have since converted


into a museum of the area. The other guardianships include two nearby sites of Inca

ruins (tambos) and an area of petroglyphsFTunduqueral. These three areas had

been previously studied, cleared, and organized with interpretive signage by ar-

chaeologists from the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Since 1996 Guaytamari has,

for a small entrance fee, opened the doors of the commune area itself to the public

as a site of traditional art and artisanry. The fees for entrance to Guaytamari’s sites

of guardianship and the tours that they offer of the area, together with the sale of

their ceramics and weavings, form the basis of Guaytamari’s economic livelihood.

The socio-political factors and the historical processes that conditioned the

‘‘emergence’’ of Huarpe communities during the 1990s in Cuyo (the region con-

sisting of the provinces of San Juan, San Luis, and Mendoza), are what Diego Es-

colar (2007) examines in his seminal work, Los dones etnicos de la nacion:

Identidades huarpe y modos de produccion de soberanıa en Argentina. In discussing

alternating historical moments of Huarpe visibilization and invisibilization, con-

temporary movements for indigenous rights, and changes between the Argentine

state and its citizenship as factors in the re-emergence of the Huarpes, Escolar

names Guaytamari as one of the militant Huarpe organizations that since the 1990s

have been developing an ethnic-based discourse as well as political strategies

(2007:185). Escolar, who focuses more specifically on activities in the province of

San Juan and the militancy of the San Juanino Comunidad Huarpe del Territorio

del Cuyum during this period, does not discuss Guaytamari further. However, his

generalized overview of Huarpe militancy in the 1990s, which invoked traditional

mobilization strategies of socio-political movements, and highlighted the use of the

media, public performances, school presentations, and judicial and legislative

actions (2007:187–188), accurately describes the actions of Guaytamari during this

period and on into the 21st century, and this will be explored below.

Escolar (2007:188) finds that the militancy of the Huarpe communities of Cuyo

first developed within urban-based groups that later assisted, advised, and in-

formed the rural communities concerning national regulations supporting indig-

enous rights and strategies for their own organization. In this respect Guaytamari is

an exception, in that as a rural-based, rather than urban, community, it was one of

the first to advocate this kind of militancy and cooperative support. However,

Guaytamari’s claims to both its rural identity and Huarpe ethnicity are anomalies

among the Huarpe communities of Mendoza. It is neither urban nor can it assert,

like the 11 other Huarpe communities of Guanacache, located in the northeastern

lowlands of Mendoza, a continuous and historical occupation of traditional lands.

Guaytamari’s presence in the mountain region offers other discursive and ma-

terial envisionings of the indigenous, beyond the legacy of the mummy found by

mountaineers. The visibility of Guaytamari in the mountain landscape counters

the erasure of the Huarpes by traditional heroic narratives of the mountain in

which the Incas, General Jose de San Martın, and mountaineering have taken the


forefront.19 However, the commune members’ self-definition is problematic, con-

tested, and sometimes accused of being as ‘‘virtual’’ as the Incaization of

Aconcagua. The legitimacy of the group of six families predominantly of Euro-

pean and mestizo ancestry to characterize itself as Huarpe, and its authority to

represent the indigenous history of the area, has been a point of contention for

academics (historians and archaeologists) and a generalized public who point to a

supposed silence of nearly four hundred years that has been accepted as the dis-

appearance of the Huarpes.

It is not just public opinion, but also Mendocino academic and intellectual

discourses that have traditionally held that there were no more Huarpes in the

region (Escolar 2006, 2007). My own findings from interviews with Mendocino

academics coincide with Escolar’s (2007) research in San Juan, which shows a sig-

nificant and often aggressive reluctance on the part of local academe to accept the

historical continuity of Huarpe identities. Despite the consensus on the extinction

of the Huarpes, Escolar (2006, 2007) has found references to their contempora-

neous existence in histories and texts throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. He

argues that their invisibility in the regional social imagination was due to the mar-

ginalizations and erasures created by the hegemonic discourses of history and na-

tion of the period and not to the actual disappearance of the Huarpes. In fact,

Escolar documents moments throughout the last 150 years in which local peoples

emerged in the public eye on the basis of their identification as Huarpe (Escolar

2006, 2007). Nevertheless, ‘‘the extinction of the Huarpes’’ is the most popular

reason given to explain the hesitancy of many to accept the people living in the

Guaytamari commune as an indigenous group. They have been denounced locally

as a cult seeking profit by assuming a false Huarpe identity (Fioquetta 1998), and

criticized by other indigenous communities who accuse the group of ‘‘making a

business out of being indigenous’’ in order to receive land and national and in-

ternational privileges and subsidies (Centro de Documentacion Mapuche 2001).

At the crux of the argument about Guaytamarians’ indigeneity is the fact that in

accordance with the 1994 constitution, rights to land control are specifically linked

to indigenous identity. A traditional connection to land and the re-establishing of

indigenous rights to communal territories have been especially significant in the re-

emergence of ethnic communities in Argentina since 1994 (Occhipinti 2003). This

issue is problematic for the Huarpes of Guaytamari, as their relationship to the land

and their right to guardianship of indigenous areas are principal points of con-

tention in discussions of their legal status as indigenous.

The Huarpes of Uspallata differ not only from other Huarpes, but also from

other indigenous communities of Argentina in terms of their historical and eco-

nomic connections to the land. Unlike in Salta, where the Kolla have reclaimed land

based on their long-standing practice of subsistence agriculture, or the Wichı, who

have done so on the strength of their traditional dependence as hunters and gath-


erers on the resources of their surrounding territory (Occhipinti 2003), in Uspallata

the Huarpes cannot make such claims. Nor can they profess a continuity of loca-

tion, as the eleven Huarpe communities of northeastern Mendoza do in tracing

their roots to ancestors who escaped being sent to serve the Spanish in Santiago and

Coquimbo in Chile, and settled instead in the harsh lowlands of Guanacache cen-

turies ago (Michielli 1983:135). In fact, Guaytamari’s claims to the mountain area

and to Huarpe heritage have been disputed by the archaeological community who

argue that there is little physical evidence to suggest that traditional Huarpe set-

tlements were ever located at these altitudes of the zone.

However, while the Huarpes of Guaytamari cannot assert continuity of settle-

ment or of land use, Catalina Teresa Michielli’s scrutiny of the earliest colonial

chronicles and the foundational documents of Mendoza offer evidence that when

the Spanish arrived there were indeed Huarpes present in the valley of Uspallata,

some of whom were ‘‘encomendados’’ across the mountains as early as 1562

(1983:68–70).20 In addition, Escolar (2007) has found that in oral histories the

Cordillera, in general, has traditionally been seen by the region’s native peoples as

an indigenous zone and the last historical refuge of escape, but its inhabitants have

often been subsumed into non-ethnic-marked categories of rural worker, muleteer,

or mountain ‘‘guide’’ (2007:113–117). Nevertheless, the lack of a continuous visibly

marked Huarpe presence on the mountain is still a thorny issue for other projects

who use and inhabit the mountain zone. The Guaytamari commune has not been

warmly embraced by members of the mountaineering community who have

tended to align themselves with the archaeologists and have been reticent about

recommending Guaytamari to their clients as a site for mountaineers’ pre- or post-

expedition visits.

In 2000, when I attended a Guaytamari-sponsored presentation to university-

level students about indigenous Mendoza, and I asked about the decision to form

Guaytamari, Claudia Herrera, vice-president of the cooperative, responded with

the same explanation that Francisco Candito, president, consistently reports to the

press. Although Herrera pointed to her own mestizo heritage she did not offer that

as the principle factor in the formation of Guaytamari, rather, she explained that

the group wanted to recuperate, preserve, follow, and disseminate ancestral tra-

ditions and that their decision to create Guaytamari as a commune, or cooperative,

was based on what they saw as the best approximation to the organizational tra-

ditions of the area’s native peoples.21

In defense of its rights to legal status and land, Guaytamari’s Herrera invokes in

public talks and educational presentations the Instituto Nacional de Asuntos

Indıgenas (National Institute of Indigenous Affairs, INAI’s) definition of ethnicity:

Anthropology understands ‘‘being indigenous’’ not as the result of a sum of deter-

mining cultural traits that have persisted through time, but rather as a specular


process of social recognition, product of the relationship between Ourselves and the

Other. This definition presupposes that ethnic identity is dynamic and that the

changes (e.g., abandoning determinant customs, modernization, etc.) far from

corrupting the identity of those persons who identify themselves as aboriginals can

lead to the revaluing of their cultural identity y ‘‘being indigenous’’ is not an in-

trinsic quality but is an identity that can only be defined in opposition to the non-

indigenous. (quoted in Bossi 2003)

Herrera emphasizes Guaytamari’s self-perception of difference from the non-

indigenous to openly and self-consciously address their own protagonism in the

process of re-ethnification. This is a process by which groups assume an indigenous

identity without having lived as such previously, but who reconnect with their roots

and take on traditional ways of life (Gorostiaga 2003:24). In Guaytamari’s educa-

tional programs, presentations, and videos spokespersons explain how they re-

construct Huarpe history and traditions and discuss the sources that they have

used, such as colonial chronicles and oral narratives. In this way the Guaytamari

members construct their own autoethnographic narrative, connecting a Huarpe

past with present representations of themselves and their present activities.

As a principal spokesperson of Guaytamari, Herrera, who in educational pre-

sentations about the Milcayac Huarpes describes them as a peaceful group who

incorporated and integrated the language, religion, culture, and practices of the

other, dominant, cultures with which they have had historical contact, engages the

rhetoric of transculturation by highlighting indigenous agency and the hybrid na-

ture of identity. Fernando Ortiz, who in 1940 first coined the term transculturation

in contrast to acculturation, to describe the evolution of Cuban society, defined it as

a process of loss and gain for both the dominant and subaltern cultures in contact

that resulted in a neo-culture, or new hybrid culture (Ortiz 1995). Taking place in

the contact zones, where marginalized groups do not just assimilate hegemonic

meanings and practices, but also exercise agency in selecting and inventing from a

dominant culture (Pratt 2008:7), the transcultural process accentuates mutability,

flexibility, and racial–cultural mestizaje. Herrera’s emphasizing of contemporary

Huarpe identity in this way allows re-ethnification to be sketched as the vindication

of a historical fluidity and cultural hybridity, which speaks to the continuity of

contemporary Huarpe subjectivity and negates its representation as a disconnected

and anachronistic invention.

However, transculturation as legitimization of indigenous identity is prob-

lematic on several levels. The kind of hybrid identity that transculturation pro-

duces, mestizaje, ‘‘a critical source of the ambiguities surrounding indigenous

identity’’ (Postero and Zamosc 2004:12), has historically been constructed as an

identity category in opposition to the indigenous (Garcıa and Lucero 2004), and in

Cuyo it has not traditionally been used for self-designation (Escolar 2007). Ac-


cording to Escolar (2007), mestizaje does not convey an ethnic and racial concept of

hybridity in Mendoza, but rather it has most recently served as an ‘‘ethnic passport’’

that allows either white or Indian identity to be articulated and thus avoids the

claims of inauthenticity that being seen as ‘‘mixed’’ attracts in local understandings

(2007:105). The Guaytamarians’ embracing of their ‘‘mixed’’ heritage, as well as

their indigeneity, paralleling similar processes in Latin America where mestizaje has

generated self-characterizations of indigenous identity (De la Cadena 2000; Warren

2001), demonstrates the indeterminancy of this construct as the group’s self-iden-

tification both invokes and unsettles the regional conceptualization of mestizo.22

One of the principal tensions underlying the Guaytamari Huarpes’ assertion of

their indigeneity based on a transculturated hybridity of overlapping identity cat-

egories lies in the problems of differentiating the indigenous from the non-indig-

enous. Beverley (1999) argues that focus on transculturation to comprehend Latin

American cultural identities has historically served to undermine the construction

of indigenous difference and authority that would ground and legitimize ideolog-

ical and political resistance in indigenous movements (1999:44–47). The ineffi-

ciency of transculturation to fix difference, combined with the lack of a regional

understanding of mestizaje as a hybrid construct, problematize the Guaytamarians’

self-designation as indigenous. The Guaytamarians’ emphasis on the evolving na-

ture of identity provides a point of attack for their opponents to talk of their ‘‘false’’

character, as such an unstable and fluid construction does not conform to the static

and archaic image of indigeneity that supposedly disappeared from the high

mountain centuries ago. Ironically, then, the very conceptual framework that might

best support the Guaytamarians’ claim to an indigenous identity, transculturation,

is also what serves to undermine them in the public eye.

Apart from highlighting the historical normalcy of transculturative processes

(e.g., in presentations to students Guaytamari representatives explain how before

the Spanish arrived the Huarpes had already incorporated components of Inca

religion and language into their beliefs), the Guaytamarians’ basis for claiming

indigenous cultural autonomy does not easily fit into traditionally held popular

beliefs, and also re-works social science notions about what it means to be indig-

enous. As a product of what Escolar (2007) calls ethnic emergence, the Guaytamari

cooperative is creating seemingly ‘‘new’’ ethnic-based connections to social activ-

ism, similar to those defining other indigenous movements in Argentina and across

Latin America that have primarily been forged on demands for territory, auton-

omy, political participation, reforms to state organization, and cultural recognition

and survival (Langer 2003; Postero and Zamosc 2004; Briones 2006). However, in

basing their authority to engage these issues from an indigenous subjectivity,

Guaytamari’s members cannot assert long-standing visibility or identification as

indigenous, which historical continuity in language, land use, social practices,

governance, or religion confirm.


Nevertheless, since the mid-1990s, the Guaytamarians have constructed their

newfound visibility as indigenous in both traditional and non-traditional ways. In

the commune itself, Guaytamari members perform their cultural identity through

practice and explanations of traditional artisanry and their maintenance of an

Andean fauna reserve. When tourists visit the cooperative commune members

explain that they use traditional techniques and materials in weaving and making

ceramics, although they clarify that they draw not only from Huarpe traditions, but

also from those of other Andean peoples.

In addition, as an ecological reserve and guardian of indigenous patrimonial

sites, Guaytamari is reinventing and re-imaging its cultural and spiritual relation-

ship to the land in ways that attempt to re-construct or create anew the kinds of

indigenous ecological knowledge and spiritual beliefs about the natural world that

serve to differentiate indigenous communities from other rural Argentines (Oc-

chipinti 2003:169). Escolar (2007:197) has found that highlighting an indigenous

worldview and recuperating or reinventing rituals and practices have especially

served as strategies of authentification among Huarpe groups (primarily urban-

based organizations), which reflects the Guaytamari Huarpes’ efforts. While Gu-

aytamaris’ claims to the commune area and the guardianship of nearby indigenous

ruins, which the province has officially recognized, legally serve to validate their

indigenous difference, it is also their endeavors to recreate indigenous ecological

and spiritual connections to the natural world in ways that differ from other

mountain communities that would ground their claim to an indigenous cultural

identity. It is especially this difference that the members of Guaytamari focus on in

their video, ‘‘El sueno del Millcayac’’ (Candito n.d.: presented to visitors of Las

Bovedas and in educational presentations), that highlights and personifies the Us-

pallata Valley. The video’s traditionally clad protagonists, in symbolic and ritual-

like performances that connect the present to the pre-Hispanic period, voice eco-

logical concerns in the re-constructed Milcayac language and in Spanish, about the

health and survival of the natural area.

However, it is particularly through community members’ self-identification as

indigenous in social, academic, and political spheres, that again leads back to INAI’s

interpretation of indigeneity as being self-identified in opposition to the non-in-

digenous, which serves to validate their cultural and ethnic difference. Herrera’s

explicit declarations of consciously sought opportunities to increase the visibility of

the Huarpes, and of the importance of representative indigenous organizations in

recognizing the Huarpes’ continued existence (Davison and Cuyul 2007:79–80),

contextualize and politicize her public activities and those of Guaytamari, in gen-

eral, as strategic acts of identity politics. The Guaytamari cooperative cites itself as a

co-founder of ONPIA, Organization of Indigenous Nations and Peoples of Ar-

gentina, an association formed by a group of Argentina’s originary peoples in 2003

to focus on indigenous political representation and rights, as well as to provide


outreach to indigenous communities, and cooperation with international organi-

zations (see ‘‘Nuevo Atropello a la Espiritualidad e Identidad de los Pueblos Or-

iginarios’’ 2006). Guaytamari’s Herrera has served as Secretary of Institutional

Relations for ONPIA and was notably involved in setting up the 2003 national series

of workshops for indigenous women that ONPIA sponsored.

In addition to their active participation at the national level, the Guaytamar-

ians’ endeavors as an ethnic community locally have included instructional pro-

grams about the region’s indigenous history presented to provincial schools, the

production of a video about Huarpe customs and beliefs, a weekly radio show, and

outreach to the eleven traditional Huarpe communities located in the northeastern

desert of Mendoza. Guaytamari has been committed to promoting the indigenous

affairs of the province and consistently participates in events as an indigenous

community. For example, in the 2008 celebration of ‘‘Dıa del Aborıgen (Aboriginal

Day), Guaytamari members took a leading role in Mendocino activities by offering

a presentation on the Capac Nan, or Camino Incaico, chairing a summit on con-

temporary indigenous movements, presenting educational materials about indig-

enous peoples to the Las Heras school district, and hosting a social event and

intercultural exchange at the commune.23

Guaytamari’s recognition as an indigenous community via its presence, com-

mitment, and involvement at the national and regional levels of indigenous orga-

nizations is a justification in practice of the INAI’s determination of indigenous as

‘‘recognized difference from the non-indigenous.’’ Guaytamari cannot rely on the

more commonly accepted ways of distinguishing this difference based on historical

visibilities. Instead, they depend especially on recognition of their legal status,

which then endorses current involvement and membership in indigenous projects

that, in turn, serves to justify and validate the ethnic identity of its members. These

strategies connect to what Escolar (2007:187) has found as a common thread in the

political efforts of Huarpe communities, using the possession of juridical recog-

nition as a principal factor of legitimization for public opinion, as well as for na-

tional, provincial, and transnational organizations.

Mountain Tourisms

There are major differences in the narratives of indigeneity that Guaytamari and the

mountaineering industry generate. In addition to the practices and discourses

employed by the inhabitants of Guaytamari, the commune itself, as an open mu-

seum, presents a hybrid indigenous character to its visitors who see on their tour

how traditional pan-Andean arts and ceramics are made and can observe a me-

nagerie of camelids from around the Andean region that are not specific to the

region of Cuyo. The hybrid nature of Guaytamari’s practices, discourses, and open

museum suggests the plurality and dynamism of the Andean region and the his-


torical blending of Inca and Huarpe cultures, in contrast to the fossilization of

indigenous identity read on Aconcagua.

This timeless landscape, however, is the one being mapped onto plans of the

recently created Ministry of Tourism and Culture to promote cultural tourism in

the area. As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998:52) reminds, heritage as a commercial

commodity involves the process of creating destinations from locations, most often

through the cultivating of difference. It is not surprising, then, that the primary

initiatives of this new ministry, in terms of cultural tourism in the mountain zone,

have been to expand the focus on the vestiges of Inca presence. One of its first

ventures in the Aconcagua area is a transnational collaboration motivated by Me-

rcosur24 to promote the Capac-Nam or Camino Incaico, described by the minis-

try’s director as ‘‘an indigenous cultural topic that is much valued by Europeans and

Asians’’ (Manoni 2004).25 The ministry is also supporting plans to ready and in-

terpret for tourism the ruins of the Inca way station near the trailhead in Aconcagua

Park. The direction of these initiatives has been further focused by the founding of

the Provincial Department of Historical and Cultural Heritage in 2003, which cited

as its primary functions the care of Mendocino identity and the integration of

cultural heritage into the tourist circuits (Manitta 2004). However, the only public

mention of indigenous heritage at that time by the department’s director, archae-

ologist Valeria Cortegoso, was the presence of human occupation of the area 12,000

years ago, which should be included in the concept of Mendocino heritage (Manitta

2004).

For the purposes of a coherent provincial tourism project there seems to be a

homogenizing of claims to legitimacy for representing the region’s ethnic heritage.

Emphasis on prehistoric and Inca pasts supports a consistent, unified, unprob-

lematic regional image of its indigenous history that absents native peoples from

the present and modernity. Instead of promoting a new awareness of the plurality of

Argentine culture, official discourse, as well as mountaineering narratives, all seem

to support an alta montana cultural tourism project, where indigenous origins

exoticize the zone and promote it as a destination for national and international

tourism. In other words, they create difference that will sell, and Inca difference

already has a well-established market.26

Guaytamari has not yet been mentioned in plans for a provincial cultural

tourism route (to accompany other official tourism circuits, such as the wine route,

or San Martın’s routes). Nonetheless, it does form part of the ‘‘un-official’’ alta

montana tourist-scape and is now included and designated as a Huarpe community

on many tourist agency circuits of the zone. Tourism remains especially important

for Guaytamari, as it is tourism revenue that helps to provide the resources to

continue its educational work in Mendoza’s schools, to strengthen its solidarity

with other Huarpe communities in Mendoza, and to participate in national and

international indigenous projects.


It is tourism, however, that is also presenting the biggest obstacle to

Guaytamari’s survival. It has received its most vociferous attacks on its ethnic au-

thenticity due to battles over touristic control of its areas of guardianship.

Local inhabitants of the Uspallata Valley have wailed, especially on the internet,

against paying a small entrance fee to sites that were previously free. Their

critiques are ones that have continuously plagued Guaytamari. Local opposition

cites the commune’s European and mestizo heritage as negating Guaytamari’s

claim as an indigenous community and accuse its members of political pandering

to receive government subsidies.27 Stemming from these disputes, the Las

Heras municipal council rescinded in 2006 its grant to Guaytamari of guardian-

ship of Tundequeral, the area of petroglyphs. In addition, Guaytamari’s other

areas of guardianship might be threatened by an official UNESCO recognition

of the Inca sites as part of the Capac Nan, if the provincial government were to

choose to remove those areas from Guaytamari’s control. Such a reaction is not

difficult to imagine, especially since Guaytamari members claim that the indige-

nous communities have not been consulted on this project (see ‘‘Nuevo Atropello a

la Espiritualidad e Identidad de los Pueblos Originarios’’ 2006). (In effect, the cli-

mate in the provincial government has become less supportive of indigenous rights

since the 2001 approval of statute 6,920 that granted title of 760, 000 hectares

of land to the Huarpe communities of Lavalle. In 2006 the provincial attorney

general sought to appeal the law on grounds of its being unconstitutional.

Commercial interests in the territory have been suggested as being at the root of

this appeal: Abeleira 2006). The revoking of Guaytamari’s guardianships would

not only be significant in terms of tourism for the community, it would also

undermine its legitimacy as indigenous, with governmentally sanctioned rights

to traditional lands.

In official plans for a cultural tourism circuit in the alta montana, the Gu-

aytamari commune continues to be ignored. It may be that despite governmental

recognition of its legal status Guaytamari’s openness about its self-construction

renders it less than ‘‘authentic’’ for official agencies. A series of December 2003 Los

Andes articles (Aguero 2003; Ramos 2003) about the direction of the new Ministry

of Tourism and Culture highlighted the importance of ‘‘singularity’’ and ‘‘authen-

ticity’’ for tourism in Mendoza, which would not support the pan-Andean outlook

of Guaytamari. In what seems to be a direct critique of Guaytamari’s hybridity, one

Los Andes reporter reminds that travelers to Mendoza want artisan products ‘‘that

are legitimately derived from the originary peoples of the region and not a pastiche

of styles and origins’’ (Ramos 2003).28 In contrast to official projects, public

tourism agencies have little problem with Guaytamari’s invention of itself,

as they continue to re-create it through touristic marketing by identifying Gu-

aytamari in a wide variety of ways, from Indian reservation to a ‘‘curiosity’’

(Taranto 2002).


The advent and importance of tourism to the mountain zone, specifically with

reference to Guaytamari, relates to one of the factors that Escolar (2007) theorizes as

supporting ethnic re-emergence in Argentina in the mid-1990sFthe destruction of

the traditional symbolic and material relationship between the Argentine State and

its citizenry.29 This ‘‘crisis of certainty,’’ seen as the abandonment by the State of its

role to supply work, maintain social stability and project a future, according to Es-

colar, was also a crisis of subjectivity that was eventually articulated through a kind of

‘‘subaltern historical revisionism’’ (2007:213–214). This crisis of the nation that cor-

responded to the neoliberal practices of the Menem period (1989–99), and the in-

tensification of globalization that reached its zenith in Argentina’s 2002–03 economic

collapse, saw, as a consequence, not only the emergence of ethnic movements, but

also a significant surge in tourism development in Argentina.

Tourism in the 21st century, now understood as a creator of employment in

Argentina in general, and an important growth industry for Mendoza, is also sig-

nificant in generating narratives of indigeneity in the high mountain area. With

increased tourism to the Aconcagua zone and the projected implementation of

officially sanctioned cultural tourism routes to highlight the area’s archaeological

sites by the Ministry of Tourism and Culture and the Provincial Department of

Cultural Heritage, questions remain about what Guaytamari’s role will be in the

alta montana, whether specific images of the indigenous as lost or Inca will be

further reified or who, ultimately, will be responsible for the representation of in-

digeneity in the mountain area.

Ultimately, indigenous identities are being contested in the alta montana, by

the routes of government tourism plans, through marketing practices of moun-

taineering and tour agencies, by the mythos of the Inca mummy, and by the very

presence of the Guaytamari cooperative. While mountaineering and official plans

complement each other with emphasis on the absence of the indigenous, only made

visible through the evocation of the Inca heritage of the region, Guaytamari’s ex-

istence complicates this vision. Guaytamari’s unstable touristic identity, its open-

ness about its reconstruction of Huarpe culture, the hybrid nature of its re-

ethnification, and its decidedly modern approach to indigenous activism make it

unattractive to official touristic projects that seek a coherent premodern ‘‘authen-

ticity.’’ Yet Guaytamari’s strategies and practices may just serve to hold a mirror up

to the re-constructive methodologies of public policies and render the province’s

invention of an indigenous past itself problematic. The tensions revealed in the

complex alta montana tourism circuit suggest that it might be easier for the prov-

ince to ‘‘authenticate’’ an invisible Inca past through science, signage, myth, and

market demands than to work through issues of historical social marginalizations,

the socio-political meanings of re-ethnification, and the disjuncture between

the national government’s definition of ethnicity and local collective beliefs and

practices.


Notes

1This article forms part of a much broader study concerning the development of mountaineering and

mountain tourism in Mendoza. It stems from my fieldwork in the central Andes of Argentina where I spent

time at Aconcagua base camp, Plaza de Mulas, during five trips between 2000 and 2006. In the high mountain

zone near Aconcagua, I also visited and researched museums, Inca ruins, roadside attractions, and the

Huarpe cooperative. In Mendoza during the off-seasons, I conducted interviews and carried out biblio-

graphical and archival research in libraries, museums, climbing organizations, the Tourism Department, the

Department of Renewable Natural Resources, the Guide School, and in local service-providing agencies. This

extensive bibliographical research includes many electronic archival documents, examination of newspapers,

and the Mandeveille Special Collections of the University of California, San Diego, Geisel Library, La Jolla,

CA. I would like to thank the University of Hawai’i Research Council and the University of Hawai’i Hu-

manities Council for partially funding the research for this project.2In 1817 Jose de San Martın, known as the Liberator in Argentina, led his Army of the Andes across

the Cordillera to continue the continent’s struggle for independence. In 1835 Darwin made a circuit

from Valparaiso, Chile, across the Andes into what he called the ‘‘republic’’ of Mendoza (2004:288). His

journey through Mendoza and return to Chile via the northern pass that skirts Aconcagua is recounted

in chapter 15, ‘‘Passage of the Cordillera,’’ in Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle.3The Seven Summits is a mountaineering route of the highest peak on each of the seven continents,

in which Aconcagua is second only to Everest.4See http://www.turismo.gov.ar/esp/menu.htm. The numbers from the national survey on arrivals

to Ezeiza do not tell the whole story of Argentina’s tourism growth, especially for Mendoza, whose

border with Chile easily allows land crossings and international flight arrivals via Santiago.5These numbers were taken from the Mendoza government’s official Aconcagua website that made

entrance figures available until 2006, http://www.aconcagua.mendoza.gov.ar. The following season

numbers are taken from Di Bari (2008).6Aconcagua, the Valle Grande region, and the alta montana are the top draws for summer tourism

(‘‘Mendoza recibio mas de 50 mil turistas durante los primeros dıas de enero’’ 2008). In addition to

income for Mendoza’s tourist industry, mountaineering in Aconcagua Provincial Park also generates

revenue to support Mendoza’s 12 other regional parks and nature reserves, which makes it a key player in

Mendoza’s conservation efforts.7Some websites also offer a third translation, from the Mapuche, that means ‘‘from the other side,’’

which would correspond to the meaning of the Aconcagua River in Chile.8‘‘Pukios’’ is from the Quechua, meaning ‘‘vertiente de agua pura y cristalina’’ (spring of pure

and crystalline water) (Masa 1978:107). Rudy Parra, director of one of Mendoza’s most important

mountaineering service agencies, maintains his staging facilities (mules, porters, etc.) at Los Pukios. The

Aymara agency houses its facilities at Puente del Inca, where it also manages the Hosterıa Puente del

Inca.9Although theories of Inca presence on Aconcagua had been suggested by military climbers to

Mendocino archaeologists as early as 1972, the general scientific conclusion at that time was that the

mountain had been an area forgotten by the Incas (Schobinger 2001a:358–359).10I am referring to the campanas al desierto: the Pampa–Patagonia expedition led by Julio Roca in

1879, and to subsequent military interventions there through 1885, as well as the 1884 expedition to the

Chaco by Benjamın Victorica.11This, of course, is an allusion to the national model imagined by Domingo F. Sarmiento’s Fac-

undo. Civilizacion y barbarie, first published in 1845.12Of the 950,000 Argentines who self-identify as indigenous, approximately 500,000 live in urban

areas (Gorostiaga 2003:18).


http://www.turismo.gov.ar/esp/menu.htm



13The Huarpes originally inhabited the region of Cuyo. The Milcayac had settlements in today’s

Mendoza: the Allentiac in the north, in the San Juan area, and the Puntanos in the east, San Luis.14The encomienda was, in essence, recompense to Spanish conquistadors for service to the crown.

The conquistador, or encomendero, was granted a number of native peoples who were required to give

him tribute or labor in return for protection and instruction in Catholicism. While Spain construed this

system as a way to safeguard indigenous land rights and to institutionalize proselytization, in practice it

was basically a form of slavery.15When Mendoza-based mountaineering agencies and websites mention the indigenous history of

the area it is to stress the Inca ties to Aconcagua and draw attention to the mummy. See, for example, the

websites of Aconcagua Expeditions and Aconcagua Trek.16I will explain these assertions later in the text, based on archival research in the Mendoza Sec-

retariat de Turismo and the Diario Los Andes in Mendoza, as well as on research into the academic

publications of archaeologist Juan Schobinger (1995, 2001c). Most specifically, the following essays and

letters illustrate this point: to the editor of Los Andes by J. Schobinger (January 14, 1997; February 25,

1997); C. D. Pincolini (January 25, 1997); R. Raıa (January 22, 1997); J. E. Oviedo (January 16, 1997;

January 21, 1997); A. R. Masud to Uno (January 21, 1997), and the articles by E. Ayassa (1997), and

Schobinger (1995 and 2001c) (see footnote 17).17The mummy remains in its freezer in CRICYT, Regional Center of Scientific and Technological

Investigation, in the Reproduction and Lactation Laboratory (maintained at�101 Celsius and 60 per-

cent humidity (Los Andes: May 3, 1999). Scientists had the last official say on the matter in the 450-page

anthology, El sanctuario incaıco del cerro Aconcagua (Schobinger 2001c), which reads as a deconstruc-

tion of indigenous and folkloric mythologies associated with the mummy while it grounds itself in the

mythos of mountaineering.18Claudia Briones (2006) argues that the 1994 constitutional reform was less an indication of real

transformation in Argentina’s political economy of diversity and more an adjustment to changing in-

ternational systems of capital exchange (2006:50)Fhence the qualification here of the reform as ‘‘sym-

bolizing’’ a process of Argentine social reassessment. For a discussion of indigenous rights movements in

Argentina see Escolar (2007), Briones (2006), Morita Carrasco (2000) and The Journal of Latin American

Anthropology 8 (3) (2003)Fan issue focusing on the indigenous communities of Argentina.19San Martın is routinely referenced by local andinistas when discussing the origins of mountain-

eering in Mendoza. See, for example, Orlando Mario Punzi (n.d.) (mid–20th century), San Martın: el

Primer Montanes de America (San Martın, America’s First Mountaineer).20Michielli cites the founding documents of Mendoza and San Juan and quotes priest Hernando de

Cueva in the ‘‘Informacion de Meritos de Pedro de Castillo’’ (Coleccion de Documentos ineditos) as

evidence of the presence of the Huarpes at these altitudes. She also theorizes that the route of transport

and communication that the Mendoza River traces to the principal range of the Mendocino Andes,

would make the valley of Uspallata a much-transited and natural area of communication (1983:69).

Michielli concludes that the territory of the Huarpes should be seen as having extended to the ‘‘cordillera

nevada,’’ commonly known as the principal or frontal range of the Andes, and not just to the precor-

dillera (low range), as has been commonly theorized (1983:69–70).21Candito explains that ‘‘our community has this form of life as a concrete alternative of subsistence

y we have conformed to the cooperative because it is the organizational form closest to that of the

originary peoples’’ (‘‘La Quebrada del Sauce’’ 2007).22Jonathan W. Warren (2004) sees a trend of ‘‘Indianizing’’ in Latin America since the 1990s, in

which individuals who previously did not self-identify as indigenous are now doing so (2004:225–226).23See ‘‘19 de Abril Dıa del Aborıgen’’ http://www.infopatrocinios.com/noticia/abril-aborigen-n7240.html24Mercosur, founded in 1991, is a South American association of nations that promotes trade in the

region.


25The provincial government is working towards the declaration of the transnational zones of the

Camino del Inka and the surrounding areas of national historical significance, both pre- and post-Inca

occupation, to be declared UNESCO World Heritage sites.26Marketing the past is what Nick Stanley finds a common problematic in the developing of cultural

displays in the Pacific Rim, that is, a need to affirm continuity with a precolonial past that subsequently

opposes the need to demonstrate modernity (1998:86).27An example of these attacks: ‘‘Stop lying to make the people believe that you are descendents of

the Huarpes, being that you are Italians and Spanish, and through political alliances you pretend to be

what you are never going to BE in order to get subsidies for your personal and familial benefit.’’ Posted

January 17, 2007 http://argentina.indymedia.org/news/2006/09/443184.php28The Mercado Artesanal de Mendoza, supported by Mendoza’s Subsecretariat of Social Develop-

ment, serves as a regulating body for indigenous arts by certifying that natural materials and instruments

originating from the zone have been used. Its efforts to recuperate, value and authenticate local crafts

also includes promoting originality, improving the quality of the products, and developing new objects

of ‘‘urban consumption’’ (Pastor et al. 2006). Authentification, then, is also contingent on skewing

production to better serve the consumer and touristic market.29Neoliberal reforms and the reduction of the state in Latin America during the 1990s have been

seen as allowing room for the emergence of indigenous movements, as well as for the international

support offered to them by NGOs (Langer 2003:xiv; Gonzales 2003:xvi; Postero and Zamosc 2004:2).

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