| Summary: | “Long Life to the Argentine Indians!” How can we understand this salutation from a military officer to a group of Rankülche Indian horseriders while “visiting” their territory as a diplomatic agent during March 1870? Was there an ideological code already shared that made it possible to conflate “Indian” and “Argentine” and translate them into “Ranquel”? ¿What were the stakes in this salute by Col. Lucio V. Mansilla? In this study the argument is made that categories such as “Argentine Indian” are part of discursive strategies which construct the Ranquel as ethnic aliens of the nation thus becoming hegemonic mechanisms of ethnization. The problem of ethnization of the Ranquel Indians is anaylized in two-steps. Framing the situation of 1870 as an historical effect, structures of long duration are reconstructed from the perspective of nation-state building at the frontier, describing the patterns of economic, political and cultural interdependence of Indians and Hispanic-creoles from mid-16th to late 19th centuries in the vast territory of Pampa-Araucanía. Secondly, I analize the discursive strategies of ethnization developed during the 1870 treaty negotiations between the military-missionary expeditioners and the Ranquel, higlighting their textual, intertextual and interdiscursive aspects as well as identifying the similarities and differences among the discursives styles of the military, the missionary and the “montonero” refugees in Indian territory. Likewise, it is hoped to accomplish the general purpose of this study which is to describe and explain the hegemonic logics of ethnization of the Ranquel Indians as a triple effect of historical process, social situation and discursive strategy.
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