Longing for Elsewhere: Guaraní Reterritorializations

Abstract

In September 2003, dozens of Guaraní families from the town of Hipólito Yrigoyen in northwest Argentina decided to take back La Loma, the forested hill that stands at the edge of town and from where they had been expelled decades earlier by the San Martín del Tabacal sugar plantation. On the verge of a cliff from where they could see the town and behind it the sugarcane fields, men, women, and children began clearing a space near their old cemetery in order to plant and begin building homes. In their makeshift camp, people raised an Argentinean flag and erected signs that read "Our Land" and "Argentinean Land." The participants in the takeover whom I talked to a few months later remembered that their return to La Loma generated an enormous collective enthusiasm and the hope of living "like before," working the land, raising animals, and free from the urban poverty and overcrowding of Hipólito Yrigoyen. However, six days later, when over a hundred people had gathered in the dark around a bonfire, police officers stormed the place shouting, "Move out!" Some officers accused them of being "undocumented Bolivians"; others asked where the Argentinean flag was, offended the flag was there. Twenty men and two women were arrested, handcuffed, and forced to walk single file down the hill, in an atmosphere of screams and scuffles that included shots in the air and the beating of a young man. A person from the community

The becoming of ancestral land: Place and property in Mapuche land claims

“…In Latin America, reterritorialization processes are part of a broader attempt by indigenous groups to reestablish the link between themselves and their territory that was disrupted by colonial encroachment (Gordillo ). Such processes consist of a number of different strategies, among which countermapping plays a central role (Chapin et al ; Peluso ; Wainwright and Bryan ).…”

“…Deleuze and Guattari's notion of reterritorialization has been profoundly influential in the geographical analysis of statecraft (Patton ) . For example, Gastón Gordillo () has proposed that, rather than referring exclusively to state power, reterritorialization can be constructive in framing indigenous processes of territorial codification as practices of resistance. Indigenous reterritorializations can thus produce “spaces through the horizontal spread of flat, connective, but relatively independent lines of spatial expansion” (Gordillo :859).…”

“…For example, Gastón Gordillo () has proposed that, rather than referring exclusively to state power, reterritorialization can be constructive in framing indigenous processes of territorial codification as practices of resistance. Indigenous reterritorializations can thus produce “spaces through the horizontal spread of flat, connective, but relatively independent lines of spatial expansion” (Gordillo :859). In this article, I have also drawn on Deleuzian notions of reterritorialization and the state, as they provide me with a conceptual framework to delineate divergences between indigenous transactions and state translations of the ancestral territory.…”

Monocropping Cultures into Ruin: The Loss of Food Varieties and Cultural Diversity

“…Rosset [90] and others [91,92] have observed that African nations (at least Mali, Senegal, Sudan, The Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda) are have succumbed to land-grabs from India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and even South Africa who will use the land for rice cultivation-certainly not to address African malnutrition. This process of alienation of land is an age-old one reaching back to the colonial period, where imperial powers dismantled or undermined the subsistence base of indigenous peoples, with examples stretching from the extirpation of the bison (Plains Tribes of North America) to the elimination of amaranth (Inca) [24], deforestation in many areas like that of the Guarani (Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina) [93,94], and many others [47].…”

“…In traditional societies, this means reclaiming the land, the sea, the streams, and other spaces. Indigenous resistance groups are reclaiming some land bases, like the Guarani have now done to a limited degree [94], and are working to protect their agricultural heritage, such as through native seed banks and exchanges, language programs for youth, and the practice of ceremonies. A great transnational peasant movement [101,102] has grown alongside a transnational indigenous movement [103,104].…”