Dissertation Abstracts
Traversing The City: The Making Of Indigenous Spatialities Within And Beyond Buenos Aires.
Author: Ana Vivaldi, vivalanadi@gmail.com
Department: Anthropology
University: University of British Columbia , Canada
Supervisor: Gaston Gordillo
Year of completion: In progress
Language of dissertation: English
Areas of Research: Racism, Nationalism and Ethnic Relations , Political Sociology , Regional and Urban Development
Abstract
n this dissertation, I examine the mobile and multi-sited spatiality produced by an indigenous group living in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina. In particular, I analyze the places that are created by Toba people through movements connecting and disconnecting multiple locations within the city and beyond it, particularly in the Gran Chaco region in the north of the country. My analysis begins by describing an indigenous barrio (neighborhood) that a group of Toba people created in Greater Buenos Aires in 1995. This dissertation subsequently examines the trajectories that took these people from different villages in the Chaco to other villages and urban barrios in and outside the Chaco, and, finally, to the villas (shantytowns) in Buenos Aires. In addition to these past movements, which I traced through people’s memories, I follow the relations and patterns of mobility that take people from the Barrio Toba to the city center and middle-class barrios, and the ways they connect these places with the Chaco. I conclude this dissertation by considering how all these places are brought together as part of complex networks and forms of interconnection that I analyze as subaltern assemblages.