Trafficked into Oblivion

Abstract This article recovers the lived experiences of trafficked Indigenous women in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, Argentina. From 1878 through 1885, the Argentine Army carried out a series of campaigns in the Pampas and Patagonia, imprisoning and displacing thousands of formerly autonomous Indigenous people. Hundreds of prisoners, mostly women and children, were sent to Buenos Aires and placed under the jurisdiction of a women’s charity organization called the Sociedad de Beneficencia (SdB). In conjunction with Argentina’s Ministry of War, the SdB sent Indigenous women to live in the homes of wealthy Buenos Aires families as unfree domestic laborers. The SdB employed a racialized and gendered discourse of moral uplift to justify coercive treatment and sanitize ongoing frontier violence. This article reveals that some Indigenous women, unable to access protection under the law, attempted to shape their circumstances by publicly calling attention to mistreatment and neglect. These resistant actions forced Argentina’s political elites to question the meaning of Argentine citizenship and national belonging. Ultimately, this article provides insights into the complex relationship among gender, race, and social class in the construction of settler colonial nation-states, highlighting the possibilities for Indigenous resistance under settler colonialism.