A country without Indians. The Pampa's and Patagonia's image in the geography of the emergent Argentinian state

Abstract

The government of the Argentine Confederation (1852-1861) and the first government from the unified Argentina, that of Bartolomé Mitre (1862-1868), they intended to change the external image of the Argentina to attract investments and immigrants. From then on, “it should be spoken of a cultural desert and of the natural wealth... It seems that the logic of the propaganda made that definite knowledge could not be disclosed: those that demonstrated that the cultural hole, in fact, it was occupied by customs and bad habits that interfered with the notion of an available nature for all the men of good will”.1 The propagandistic purpose was completed so much by the National Museum of the Confederation directed by Alfred Du Graty and its publication The Argentine Confederation, like for a work of longer range, the Description of Martin De Moussy, and this author’s popularizer action in Europe. We intend to analyze the geographical speech on the Pampas and the Patagonia –the “Southern Indian Territories”, in the De Moussy’s Description- guided by this hypothesis: if d’Orbigny had established the existence of “savages” “scientifically”, and Sarmiento had reached the corresponding political conclusions in lathe of the necessity of to subject them or to exterminate them, De Moussy it is exponent of the “official forgetfulness” from the Indian towns to popularization level and in the materials dedicated to give to know the country to the immigrant potentials and investors of the exterior. Its contribution to the ideal construction of the State consisted on the representation of a country without Indians, in the sense that gave Sarmiento to the idea of the deserted fecundable that waited the man’s hand (white, immigrant, agricultural, preferably Anglo-Saxon worker) to give everything of oneself.