Urban Indigenous Assemblages:Qom Mobilities and the Remaking of White Buenos Aires

Over the past two decades, Latin American politicians and activists have reckoned with their nations’ histories of racism, forced displacement of native peoples, and inequality by embracing Indigenous communities. In Argentina—a nation long fixated on presenting itself as “white” and “European”—this shift has been dramatic. After decades of erasure and racism toward Indigenous peoples, Argentinian politicians are now presenting Indigenous groups as central to the country’s culturally plural and multi‑racial identity. In Urban Indigenous Assemblages, Vivaldi considers how Argentina’s urban Indigenous population fits into this recent political and social movement. To do this, she focuses on how the Qom Indigenous people—whose traditional territories are in the north of Argentina—have moved to Buenos Aires, made homes in shantytowns alongside other migrants, and remade urban space by building Indigenous lives in the city. Starting from a Qom barrio in Greater Buenos Aires, Vivaldi traces how Qom peoples’ travels to rural communities and movement across the city create complex networks and produce an urban life always in connection to other places. She argues that urban racialized indigeneities represent sites of contradictory relations visible and invisible to state actors and hyper‑visible to development agencies, as the Qom are expected to prove their authenticity and remove themselves from important relationships with nonwhite neighbors to access rights and recognition. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork, the book’s five chapters analyze the historical process that created the barrio: the constant remaking of this Indigenous space in interaction with state institutions and NGOs, the links between the barrio and the northern Argentina through travels “far out” to rural communities in the Chaco, and the expansion of “Indigenous territories” beyond bounded location.