Las "tretas del débil" en las cartas ranqueles: Estrategias discursivas para combatir el extrañamiento

Abstract: During the 1870s, the Ranqueles leaders exchanged numerous letters with the missionaries in charge of the reducciones in the southern border of Córdoba, Argentina. In the 1980s, historian Marcela Tamagnini recovered many of these letters from a conventual archive in the city of Río Cuarto, Argentina, including testimonials of the interethnic relations between indigenous people and the socalled Christians. Tamagnini compiled and published this material under the title Cartas de frontera in 1994. Focusing on the self-representation articulated by indigenous leaders, this article proposes a reading of the letters as documents of war. Driven by their wish to mediate between their people and the State and facing the push of the Argentine-state to evict them and take over their lands, the Ranqueles leaders assumed, through writing, numerous strategical roles, including political-affective tactics. Indigenous addressers resignified western tropes and motives in their letters, using them as artillery, like "weapons of the weak" (J. Ludmer, J. Scott), to project themselves as non-obsolete and useful subjectivities, to appeal to the empathy of the recipients, to secure the continuity of the peace treaties, and, thus, to prolong their sovereign existence in the land they had inhabited for centuries.