The clientelization of ethnicity: party hegemony and indigenous political subjectivities

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I presented an earlier version of this article in the 8th Argentinean Congress of Social Anthropology, held in Villa Giardino, Córdoba, in May 2004. I am grateful to Mariana Gómez and Ana Vivaldi for their careful, critical reading of an earlier draft, and to Lorena Cardin for reminding me that the paper at the Córdoba conference deserved to be published. Shaylih Muehlmann read and commented the final version and inspired some of the ideas discussed in this article in more ways than I can acknowledge in writing. Notes 1 One of the archetypical representatives of the twentieth century Latin American populism, Perón was president of Argentina in 1946–55 and 1973–74, when he died while in office. 2 Additionally, many aborígenes remember that it was in the first two governments of Juan Domingo Perón (1946–55) that they were finally recognized as citizens with full-rights and were granted the ID papers that symbolized such status. Yet in many parts of Formosa it was only in the late 1960s that the government implemented massive documentation campaigns in indigenous villages (Gordillo 2006a Gordillo, Gastón. 2006a. The Crucible of Citizenship: ID-paper Fetishism in the Argentinean Chaco. American Ethnologist, 33(2): 162–76. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2006b). 3 http://www.formosa.gov.ar/elecciones2007/resultados/index.php 4 The so-called ‘lemas law’ that exists in Formosa allows each party (‘lema’) to present several candidates in each election, which then compete among themselves for elective positions such as mayors, city councilors (concejales), and provincial legislators, even if they all formally belong in the same party. 5 The exceptions were brief moments in the late 1980s, when a prominent Toba leader was for a few years a member of the UCR, and in 1996, when in order to protest massive layoffs at the municipality many Toba men and women quit the PJ and joined the UCR. Shortly after, however, most of these people realigned themselves with the PJ, given the little weight of the UCR in the province (see Gordillo 2002 Gordillo, Gastón. 2002. Locations of Hegemony: The Making of Places in the Toba's Struggle for La Comuna, 1989–1999. American Anthropologist, 104(1): 262–77. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 6 In spite of this, patron-client relations are not restricted to electoral moments. These relations have a long-term continuity and also emerge in everyday practices through which ‘punteros’ grant their followers a wide spectrum of ‘favours’ (for instance, giving them a lift on their pick-up trucks, or taking them to the regional hospital) that are later on activated to demand political loyalty at the time of elections (see Gordillo 2002 Gordillo, Gastón. 2002. Locations of Hegemony: The Making of Places in the Toba's Struggle for La Comuna, 1989–1999. American Anthropologist, 104(1): 262–77. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], Iñigo Carrera 2001 Iñigo Carrera, Valeria. 2001. ‘Yo Soy Mercadería’: Producción de relaciones clientelares en un asentamiento de población indígena en la ciudad de Formosa. Tesis de Licenciatura en Ciencias Antropológicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires. [Google Scholar]).