GORDILLO GASTON University of British Columbia

The crucible of citizenship:

ID-paper fetishism in the Argentinean Chaco

A B S T R A C T
In this article, I examine how indigenous people of the Argentinean Chaco have internalized their past alienation from citizenship rights through the fetishization of those objects long denied to them: identity (ID) papers. In the early 20th century, shortly after the Argentinean states military conquest of the region, government agents excluded these groups from hegemonic notions of nationality and citizenship because of their alleged savagery but simultaneously expected them to show written proofs of their reliability. In the following decades, this contradictory experience made many indigenous people view ID documents and other written records as objects with a force of their own, with the capacity to deect state violence and shape major aspects of a groups collective history. Drawing on the concept of state fetishism, I analyze the peculiarities of ID-paper fetishism in the Chaco by focusing on the historical and current experiences of the western Toba and the Wich . In particular, I explore how Toba and Wich views of ID papers include ideological forms of reication of social practice but also critical interpretations that capture the power dynamics involved in state documentation. [citizenship, fetishism, the state, identity papers, indigenous people, Toba, Wich , Gran Chaco, Argentina]

uring my eldwork among them, Toba people of the western Argentinean Chaco would often display mundane symbols of state power in unexpected ways. While I was having a casual conversation with someone I knew well, for instance, that person would suddenly tell me that he wished to show me something. He would leave and a moment later return with a carefully wrapped nylon bag containing his most valued possessions: old photos, certicates of various sorts, and, most important, his identity (ID) papers: his documentos.1 He would then hand the documentos over to me as proof of something that was clearly important to him yet initially elusive to me. For years, as I returned to the Toba villages throughout the 1990s, I did not know exactly how to react to the reverence with which people showed me their ID papers. I would examine the papers and, a few seconds later, return them with a nod, a smile, or an uncomfortable comment conrming their value and importance. What intrigued me was that people would show me their documentos without me ever asking for them and, further, that they simply wanted me to see they had them. That was all. They never tried to use them to negotiate demands or ask for favors. Once I had seen the papers, they seemed satised and were ready to move on to other topics of conversation. Colleagues working among other indigenous groups of the Chaco told me similar accounts about peoples interest in displaying their documentos for no apparent reason other than to show that they had them. When, in 2000 and 2003, I conducted brief eldwork among the Wich , the Tobas neighbors to the west, I noticed a very similar attitude. Through my daily interactions with Toba and Wich , I began to learn that this practice is a telling expression of the type of subjectivity produced by these peoples contradictory immersion within the Argentinean nation-state. And, as was soon apparent, this practice implied a preoccupation with the materiality of the ID papers that was strongly informed by their memory of having been deprived of documentos for decades. This attitude, even though not uncommon among young people, was particularly clear among the men and women who had been most directly affected by past experiences of

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 162176, ISSN 0094-0496, electronic ISSN 1548-1425. C 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/ rights.htm.

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undocumentation and who at the time of my eldwork were over 40 years of age. In this article, I examine how that past estrangement from citizenship rights and their physical signier, ID papers, has made many Toba and Wich adults value documentos to the point of seeing them as objects whose potency emanates from their materiality rather than from social relations and conventions. In doing so, I hope to show how people create a peculiar form of fetishization that, nevertheless, on some occasions, includes interpretations that capture the power dynamics involved in state documentation. As many authors have observed, state formations have for centuries relied on written documents as central technologies of power, whether in the form of legal titles, letters, laws, censuses, surveys, or forms of personal identication (Caplan and Torpey 2001; Clanchy 1979; Cohn 1990; Cohn and Dirks 1988; Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Noiriel 2001; Scott 1998; Torpey 2000; Wogan 2004). James Scott (1998:71), in particular, has analyzed how individual forms of identication are based on mechanisms of legibility and visibilization that maximize the reach of state surveillance. The controlling aspects of bureaucratic documentation were particularly graphic in cases such as Nazi Germany and Rwanda under the Hutu Power government, in which the distribution of cards according to racial or ethnic criteria facilitated the implementation of large-scale genocides (Longman 2001; Mamdani 2001). Yet, although identity documentation undeniably creates visible and, hence, more manageable subjects, this process also has potentially empowering aspects based on the generalization of social and political rights. As Jane Caplan and John Torpey (2001:6) note, identication and recognition are prerequisites for many claims against state agencies. This means that the tension between empowerment and control is central to understanding the type of identities created by the generalization of ID papers (see Caplan and Torpey 2001; Noiriel 2001). This tension, in turn, relates to a central paradox of modern citizenship: that the state endows its citizens with rights so that those citizens are protected from the state (Hall and Held 1989). In these pages, I draw on this tension between control and empowerment to explore the relationship between state documentation and subjectivity; and I do so negatively: that is, by examining the experience of people who for a long time were noncitizens and felt deeply marginalized by their lack of ID papers. This estrangement, I argue, can be examined through the conceptual lens of what several authors have called state fetishism (Abrams 1988; Coronil 1996; Taussig 1992, 1997). This perspective implies moving away from the Weberian paradigm of the state as the pinnacle of bureaucratic rationality and exploring, rather, state forms culturally and cultural forms as state-regulated (Corrigan and Sayer 1985:3), in particular, the ways in which magic, reication, and power are implicated in the constitution

of reality under conditions of domination (Benjamin 1978; Buck-Morss 1989; Taussig 1992; see also Amariglio and Callari 1993; Pietz 1993). Philip Abrams, for instance, has analyzed how the state is conceived of as a separate and autonomous entity that is really there and is really powerful (1988:63, 68). This idea of the state as a distinct thing, Abrams argues, is a ction that is at the basis of the very real power of the myriad social relations, practices, and discourses that are referred to as the state. In this article, I am interested in how this fetishization shapes yet another type of reication, that of the products of state power: in this case, ID papers. In his famous opening chapter of Capital, Karl Marx (1977:164165) analyzed commodity fetishism as the reication of the commodity as an entity with a power and value of its own, severed from the labor and the social relations of production that created it. This fetishism, Marx argued, is ultimately grounded in the alienation of workers from the products of their labor, which are appropriated by the bourgeoisie and, hence, physically and ideologically separated from direct producers. In these pages, I argue that Toba and Wich views of ID documents imply a similar type of fetishization, one that depends not on commodity production but on the power of the state. This requires exploring not just the similarities but also the differences between commodity and ID-paper fetishisms. A rst, notable difference is that Marx analyzed commodity fetishism as a widespread ideological formation that is central to bourgeois forms of domination and legitimization and engulfs members of different social classes. IDcard fetishization, in contrast, is not necessarily widespread. Social actors who have not been subject to deep forms of marginalization often use state documents as symbols of citizenship without necessarily fetishizing them. In the Chaco, however, many indigenous people view ID papers not simply as symbols but as something else: as potent objects that in and of themselves can shape the outcome of social processes. Analyzing why this is the case takes me to another signicant contrast between ID-card and commodity fetishism. ID papers are in principle neither commodities (i.e., objects with use value and an exchange value) nor the product of indigenous labor, and, hence, the estrangement associated with them does not result from alienated labor but from a distinct separation, that between citizens and noncitizens. Toba and Wich views of documents, in short, are to a great extent the result of these peoples past, profound alienation from state-granted citizenship rights. A nal, equally important difference is worth noting. Whereas in commodity fetishism the link between the commodity and its producer tends to be erased, the fetishization of ID papers depends, at least to a certain degree, on keeping a connection between these objects and the state. In short, whereas commodity fetishism creates the appearance

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of potent, free-oating objects detached from labor, IDpaper fetishism creates the appearance of potent objects ultimately anchored in state production. Why, then, is the concept of fetishism still relevant to account for this process? First, because, as I aim to show, in the Chaco this connection is grounded in the idea of the state as a powerful entity rather than in the social relations and actors behind its conguration. Second, because this connection between the state and ID documents is still marked by perceptions of a subsequent separation. The power of ID papers, in other words, is conceived of as a quality that, even though originally granted by the state, has been incorporated by the substance of the object, in which it acquires a dynamic and force of its own, relatively detached from its original conditions of production. This, William Pietz (1993:147) has observed, is the primary quality of the fetish: the absorption of value created by social relations into the materiality of the object. In this article, I examine this fetishization of ID documents by drawing on historical research and my eldwork among the Toba and the Wich who live in the northwest part of the province of Formosa, near the marshlands formed by the Pilcomayo River. Despite cultural differences that I do not aim to examine here, both groups have shared a similar historical experience of violence by the army, land encroachment by criollo settlers, wage labor on sugar plantations, Anglican missionization, and prolonged marginalization from political rights. Their current forms of livelihood are also similar. Living for the most part in small villages scattered in a forested landscape, most people rely on shing, gathering wild fruits and honey, hunting, horticulture, and seasonal wage labor. In some villages, several people also hold publicsector jobs and have pensions (see Gordillo 2004; Mendoza 2002).2 Because of these commonalities, I analyze the historical and social threads weaving through the experience of both groups. In the rst section, I examine the hegemonic practices that, at the turn of the 20th century, constituted Argentinean citizenship and, for several decades, deemed indigenous groups external to it. Then I analyze how indigenous peoples rst interactions with written forms of documentation in the Chaco were closely tied to state violence, focusing especially on their use of written texts as attempts to protect themselves from the army. This experience, I show next, shaped current Toba and Wich views of the power of ID papers to deect violence. Drawing on memories of experiences of wage labor at sugar plantations, in the following segment I analyze how, for many people, their lack of state documentation became not only the emblem but also the cause of their poverty and political marginalization. The nal section focuses on the social and cultural recongurations linked to the granting of ID documents to the Toba and Wich in the late 1960s, which gradually immersed state documents in commodied relations of political patron-

age and fostered the production of new, nationally based identities.

Rebellious Argentineans: Savagery and citizenship

Numerous authors have stressed that the seemingly egalitarian ideology of citizenship is based on manifold exclusionary practices: that is, that, by incorporating some groups, citizenship has historically disenfranchised others (women, minorities, and the working class) and that the scope and eventual expansion of its membership is only the outcome of long struggles by subaltern groups (Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Flores 1997; Hall and Held 1989; Rosaldo 1997; Wallerstein 2003). Likewise, as in Europe and North America, the hegemonic ideal Argentinean citizen of the late 19th century was white, male, literate, and owned property.3 Back then, the forging of new conceptions of citizenship and the drawing of new lines of inclusion and exclusion were part of a twofold movement: the assault on the last indigenous strongholds in Argentinean territory and the rise of European immigration. In the 1870s and 1880s, military campaigns to the Pampas and Patagonia (in the center and south of the country) and the Gran Chaco (in the north) incorporated these regions within expanding capitalist frontiers and defeated previously autonomous indigenous groups. The parallel inux of millions of European immigrants rapidly changed the nations urban and rural landscapes and fostered ofcial discourses about a new, modern Argentina leaving its prior backwardness and barbarism behind. This process triggered intense debates as to the status of actors originally deemed external to the nation: foreigners and indios (Indians). The perceived threat posed by the anarchist and socialist ideologies brought by European workers, for instance, made congress pass laws such as the 1902 Ley de Residencia (Residency Law) that differentiated unwanted elements subject to deportation from those worthy of becoming citizens (see Lenton 1999:1213). Despite these restrictions, most immigrants arriving on Argentinean shores possessed a Europeanness that made them potentially acceptable citizens. The status of indigenous people was entirely different. The 1853 constitution had clearly placed them outside of the nation. One of the stated attributions of congress, for instance, was to negotiate treaties with indigenous groups and promote their conversion to Catholicism. Yet a few decades later, the violent expansion of state sovereignty onto indigenous territories placed these populations in a contradictory position. As Diana Lenton (1999:20) has observed, these people had been born in territories located within the national borders, fullling the principle of ius soli (right of the land); yet their attributed savagery made them incompatible with the hegemonic model of citizenship. In the 1880s, this ambiguity emerged in parliamentary debates. Without reaching an agreement, members of

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Figure 1. Argentinean Chaco and groups mentioned in the article.

congress debated whether indios should be considered second class citizens, underage citizens, nationals but not citizens, or rebellious Argentineans (Lenton 1999:21). This legal ambiguity lingered for decades. As in Brazil (see Ramos 1998), indigenous people were rst given the status of menores (minors) because of the widespread perception that they were childlike creatures unable to comprehend legal codes and, therefore, in need of state protection.4 In the 1910s, the federal government placed them under the tutelage of an ad hoc commission (Comisi on Honoraria de

Reducciones de Indios) with the aim of facilitating their conversion to work habits, but this commission had a direct inuence only on state-run settlements in the eastern Chaco such as Napalp and Bartolom e de las Casas (Arengo 1996). In the rest of the eastern Chaco, massive land expropriations were immersing indigenous people within a capitalist political economy without a fac ade of state paternalism, and many people were forced to rely on wage labor or to become smallscale farmers. In the western Chaco, the semiarid landscape did not attract direct capitalist investment and most tracts

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of land remained government property. Hence, the western Toba and the Wich retained relative control over parts of their territories and access to the Pilcomayo River but began to be recruited as seasonal wage laborers by sugar plantations located several hundred kilometers to the west, at the foot of the Andes (see Figure 1). In short, that the citizenship status of these groups remained unresolved did not hinder their immersion within the expanding capitalist frontiers of the Argentinean nation-state. In some areas of the Chaco, and despite this apparent incorporation, occasional expressions of armed resistance contributed to reproducing the ofcial view that indigenous groups were still uncivilized and placed outside the national body politic. In the area of the Pilcomayo River, this situation continued to fuel indiscriminate forms of state violence that persisted throughout the 1920s and 1930s, primarily against the Pilag a but also the Wich and the western Toba. Those experiences would profoundly shape indigenous views of the power of written texts, in particular, state-produced ID cards.

Thats why they killed us: State violence and the power of written documents
In the early 20th century, the beginning of colonization by criollo settlers in the Chaco interior and the gradual advance of state institutions imposed constraints on the mobility of indigenous groups. Local authorities and the military viewed Indians on the move with suspicion and often demanded that they produce a written document that would testify to their buen comportamiento (good behavior). In contrast to Andean indigenous groups that had interacted with bureaucratic documents for centuries following their early subjugation to Spanish rule (Abercrombie 1998; Mignolo 1992; Rappaport 1994; Wogan 2004), until the early 1900s the Chaco groups had dealt with written texts only occasionally. The encroachment by the army changed this and forced these groups to begin relying on certicates of good behavior to navigate a violent political landscape. The potency with which they would imbue these texts was closely related to their view of the written word as an emblem of the power of the actors that had conquered the region. Throughout most of the 20th century, at least until the 1970s, most western Toba and Wich were illiterate and depended on other actors to decipher the content of documents, and this increased the estrangement many felt toward them. Yet, as I shall discuss, the fetishization of these objects was not simply the product of illiteracy or ignorance of how they really worked; rather, it drew heavily on the use military ofcers made of these documents to measure the reliability of Indians and, hence, to base their decision to unleash violence. Initially, most documents circulating on the Chaco frontiers were handwritten by state ofcials. These notes were called pasaportes (passports), a term common at the time

in Europe to refer to the internal passes used to regulate the movement of particular subjects (see Torpey 2000:165). In August 1899, for instance, a cacique (headman) of the eastern Toba named Caballero met with the governor of Formosa and received from him a handwritten passport that read: On this day, cacique Caballero returns to the interior of the territory. It is recommended that all transit authorities treat him with all the due considerations that un cacique amigo [a friendly cacique] who is respectful of the laws and authorities of the nation is entitled to. It is recommended that the same treatment is given to the Indians who accompany him (Wright 2003:146). These documents were remarkable for various reasons. First, they were highly individualized. As Caplan and Torpey (2001:8) have observed, despite being records of uniqueness, ID documents are elements in a classifying series that reduces individuality. The passports produced on the Chaco frontiers, however, were not units in a homogenous series; they were ad hoc products that strongly individualized both the author and the recipient. The one received by cacique Caballero was granted not by an anonymous state bureaucrat but by an inuential public gure. And this individuality was, indeed, crucial for its validity vis` -vis military and police authorities. A further component a of these passports was that their holders, being illiterate, could not read their content and depended on ofcials to read it out loud to them. More importantly, the meaning of these pieces of paper became clear to their holders especially through the outcomes they effected: that, when handed over to local authorities, they had the remarkable capacity to deter violence and ease movement restrictions. This added to the power that some indigenous groups would project onto them, as I subsequently show. These passports were signicant for a third reason. They were handwritten by citizens and foreign nationals who had a certain clout in the area but were not directly associated with state agencies: landowners, merchants, explorers, and missionaries. In other words, the relative weakness of state institutions in the Chaco interior at the turn of the 20th century highlighted the power of nonindigenous local actors to create private forms of documentation that were, nevertheless, legitimate in the eyes of government agents. This practice was remarkable because it countered a central principle of modern bureaucratic documentation: that state agencies monopolize the control over legitimate means of movement (Torpey 2000). Despite their private nature, these certicates were effective in halting army ofcers who were ready to unleash havoc on indigenous groups. In January 1899, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Bouchard was leading a military campaign against Pilag a villages on the Pilcomayo. As Pablo Wright (2003:146) has noted, the troops were about to attack a hamlet when a cacique rushed toward Bouchard waiving un papel, a piece of paper. It was a certicate of good conduct written by a well-known merchant. Bouchard read the certicate, gave it back to the cacique, and made

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his troops withdraw. A handwritten piece of paper that the Pilag a were carrying with them but could not read halted what otherwise could have been a massacre. Owing to the protection granted by these certicates, indigenous leaders were very keen to obtain them from any inuential white person. In 1903, a well-off cattle rancher named Domingo Astrada led an expedition on horseback down the Pilcomayo River and encountered several groups that had recently been attacked by the army. Astrada wrote in his diary after meeting with a group of Wich headmen: They ask me for a papelito [a little piece of paper], a papelito that says they are nice and friends of the Christians. I give it to them, one to each cacique (1906:109). These requests illustrate that Wich leaders were aware that little pieces of paper that included a handwritten text by a white explorer could have a notable effect on the military. Yet the power of these documents was beyond their control and forced them to remain dependent on men who dominated the craft of writing, in this case, a wealthy civilian explorer. When indigenous groups could not obtain these ad hoc certicates of good conduct, they often tried to obtain any piece of paper that could be read as their equivalent. They soon learned that records documenting their engagement in wage labor had a similar effect. Unlike the certicates examined above, these papers symbolized a new class status and, therefore, a willingness to comply with a new balance of power that was based on the subordination of their labor. This is why military ofcers viewed work certicates as a measurement of reliability and goodwill. By the early 20th century, most groups of the Pilcomayo were migrating to work on the ingenios (sugar plantations) located farther to the west, near the Andes. On returning to the Chaco, many of them kept notes or receipts related to their labor experience and were anxious to show them to explorers and military ofcers. On July 2, 1903, two weeks after beginning his expedition to the Pilcomayo, Astrada wrote in his diary, A group of 50 painted and armed Indians appeared on the road and marched toward us. An old Indian with lively eyes moved forward and showing a piece of paper in his hand asked for the patr on [boss]. I took it and read it: it was a certicate from an ingenio in Jujuy, granted to the cacique Colorado and his people and where it says that these Indians have worked there the previous year showing good behavior. [1906:105] The following year, the Formosa governor Lucas Luna Olmos (1905:35, 46, 49) explored the lower course of the Pilcomayo and was also struck by the regularity and insistence with which Toba and Pilag a groups showed him their labor certicates. In all cases, people produced these papers without him ever asking for them. Luna Olmos (1905:46) wrote that those certicates were so highly valued that men kept them carefully wrapped inside bamboo cylinders, a practice also observed among Wich groups on the Bermejo River (del

Nieto 1969:65). These actions underscore that these indigenous men were acutely aware that military ofcers, ofcials, and explorers valued wage labor as a civilizing experience and that they respected the power of the plantation owners. The display of labor certicates was also a way for these men to state that, by virtue of their new class status, they were now part of the same social system the military claimed to defend. In contrast to what would happen decades later, at the beginning of the 20th century indigenous people did not seem to have used these texts to assert membership in a nationally dened, Argentinean, community. The meanings of these certicates were grounded in more pragmatic attempts by Toba, Wich , and Pilag a to deect perceptions about a threatening savagery and to reposition themselves as trustworthy vis-` a-vis state ofcials and the military. Yet, even if free of national markers, in displaying those texts these people attempted to claim belonging, as well-behaved workers, in a political community that went beyond their ethnicized subject position as Indians. These accounts are important because they shed light on the role of violence in the conguration of the ctions and realities of these documents power. It was because of the violence that was being unleashed on indigenous groups that these notes power became so unequivocally real. This was violence mediated by a written message that had the capacity to prove what indios obviously could not: their innocence. These examples show that Toba, Wich , and Pilag a saw these certicates as talismans of sorts that helped them navigate an unpredictable, violent political landscape. Another point is worth noting. These objects also destabilized the view of the state as a homogenous and allencompassing entity, for they drew their power from private actors not directly involved with state institutions. In a context in which state power was still not consolidated in the region, these myriad notes and receipts temporarily countered the fetishization of state documents that was to become prevalent in the following decades. There was, nonetheless, a catch to this process. Those who legitimized these notes power were still the armed agents of the state, and those who had the authority to pen the texts were actors deemed respectable according to state-sanctioned notions of belonging in a civilized moral community. By the same token, indigenous people could not produce those notes themselves, even if they had known the craft of writing, because despite their role as seasonal laborers, they were still considered alien to that community. For these reasons, indigenous peoples strategies in deploying these private texts faced the challenge of countering hegemonic practices that ground citizenship in rights granted by the state. Further, the improvised attempts by indigenous groups to certify in writing their trustworthiness and goodwill revealed not just their agency but also the fragility of their status. This was apparent in the many cases in which waving a piece of paper in front of soldiers

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was not enough to halt violence. In 1935, British missionaries founded an Anglican station among the Pilag a, partially as an attempt to protect them from indiscriminate attacks by the army. Two years later, one of the missionaries, Alfred Tebboth, met with the captain from a nearby fort and reached an agreement on the terms of Pilag a mobility. Tebboth wrote, The captain said he would allow them to hunt in this area provided they had a note from me saying that they were mission Indians and not some of the wilder variety. The Indians were very pleased at this. . . . When they left they carried a note from me saying that they were nine mission Indians of good behaviour and that any complaints should be notied to me. This passport would have been one of the most guarded possessions. [Makower 1989:111112] These men departed on their hunting trip carrying Tebboths note but, shortly after, were captured by an army patrol. The soldiers disarmed them and executed seven of them on the spot. The ofcer in charge claimed that he never saw the note and that he had thought the hunters were savage Indians. The two Pilag a who managed to escape, however, argued that the ofcer did see the passport but tossed it aside (South American Missionary Society 1937:48). As this example shows, the ad hoc nature of these sorts of documentsthat they were not units in a series standardized by the stateposed clear limits to their dissuasive power. In this case, violence pierced through the certicates seeming potency and brought to light the crude fact that these Pilag a men were noncitizens and, hence, more vulnerable to indiscriminate violence. This massacre also shows that the force of written documents does not emanate from their material qualities as things but from the social relations involved in their production. In this case, the civilizing authority of the foreign national (a British missionary) who penned the note was not strong enough to deter the execution of wild Indians. And this shows that, despite the circulation of multiple forms of privately created notes, the documents that ultimately mattered in the eyes of soldiers and ofcers were those created by state agencies.5 Decades later, the legacy of these histories weighed heavily on the collective memory of the Toba and Wich living on the Pilcomayo. People had largely forgotten the details of the incidents analyzed above, yet most of them stressed the close link, passed on to them by their grandparents, between violence and the absence of written documents with which to stop it. As in any form of memory production, people interpreted those clashes by projecting onto the past their current experience of documentation, in which the production of ID cards is monopolized by state agencies. Consequently, during my eldwork, many Toba and Wich remembered state violence not only as the armys attempt to crush an armed resistance but also as the product

of their grandparents status as undocumented abor genes (indigenous people). First, many Toba and Wich argue that, without documentos, their ancestors were unable to complain to state ofcials and that this situation often made them vulnerable to attacks. In June 2000, I was at a Wich village talking with Luis, a man in his sixties. He remembered an incident that had taken place decades earlier, in which a criollo murdered a Wich man. We wanted to denounce the criollo to the police, he told me. But in those days we didnt have documentos. We wanted to denounce him but nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Thats why the criollos killed us at ease, because we couldnt denounce them, because we didnt have documentos. Luis interpreted the impunity of that murder primarily as the product of an absent object: documents. And he subsumed an unequal power relation involving policemen, criollos, and abor genes within the nonpresence of that object. More important, some people remember their lack of documents as an ontological condition that, in the eyes of state agents and settlers, deserved violent punishment. In other words, violence is remembered as the penalty inicted on those who fail to produce written proof of their reliability. Angelino, a Wich man from the same village as Luis, told me while remembering the ghting against the army and the settlers, We didnt have documentos, thats why they killed us. They have a law that says that those who dont have documentos are worth nothing; that theyre like animals, like rabbits. Thats why the criollos killed us. They killed us. Angelino felt that, back then, the abor genes were denied the most elementary human right, the right to live, because they were undocumented. Further, the lack of documentos reduced them to a subhuman condition that made their murder legal (They have a law that says . . . ). Even though, at least formally, human rights are above citizenship rights and from a legal standpoint the murder of a noncitizen is as punishable as the murder of a citizen, for indigenous people it was the reverse: Citizenship rights were above human rights, and state documentation provided an effective protection from murder. The incidents of violence examined earlier illustrate that this perception was not unfounded. On the one hand, Angelino accurately captured the negative dialectic dening modern citizenship: that it gains its meaning through the denial of social and political rights to noncitizens (a denial that, in this case, as on other neocolonial frontiers, legitimated the death of savage Indians). On the other hand, by invoking of power of documents to determine this course of events, Angelino was grounding violence in the constitutive force of things. These perceptions are informed by the collective memory of the violence that once swept through the region and also by the memory of the more recent effects that being undocumented had on men like Luis and Angelino in their youth. A distinctive feature of the Toba and Wich experience of ID papers is that, whereas in the 1940s and 1950s the

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hegemonic parameters of citizenship were being redrawn in the rest of Argentina, these peoples undocumented status and political marginalization lingered for a few more decades. This experience was particularly apparent at the sugar plantations where men, women, and children went to work every year until the late 1960s. My analysis now shifts to those places and to the counterpoint between that localized experience and the broader political changes then transforming the country.

We worked as if we were underage

In the late 1930s, the federal government took the rst timid steps toward providing indigenous people with documentation, but these plans were not fully implemented.6 The conservative regimes then ruling the country, which had close ties with the landed aristocracy that owned the ingenios, imposed signicant restrictions on the political and social rights of large segments of the population. In the early 1940s, these conditions triggered growing unrest and new forms of popular mobilization that contributed to the emergence of the Peronist movement. The rst two presidencies of Juan Domingo Per on (194655) expanded notions of nationality by incorporating previously marginalized sectors within public imaginaries. The Peronist government celebrated the descamisados (shirtless; a metaphor for the working class) and the cabecitas negras (little black heads, or mestizo populations of rural areas who migrated in large numbers to Buenos Aires). Both groups became new symbols of a nation that was, at last, coming to terms with its silenced majorities. As part of this process, and responding to growing political pressure by indigenous groups, in 1947 Per ons government nally granted abor genes ofcial recognition as citizens and began documentation campaigns in several parts of the country. Shortly after, women gained voting rights. In just a few years, the dominant parameters of Argentinean citizenship had been signicantly expanded. Most Toba and Wich , however, remember the rst distribution of documents of the late 1940s as a relatively distant process that did not involve them. The very few people who received ID papers in those days remember their distribution as the outcome of Per ons personal indignation at the status of abor genes, as if they needed to emphasize that after decades of neglect, the president of the nation himself (and not just a faceless government agency) decided to take action. In 1995, Mateo, a Toba man in his seventies, told me about that event: When Per on came to the ingenio and learned that the people didnt have documentos, he said, Youre Argentinean! How come you dont have documentos? According to this account, the abor genes externality vis-` a-vis the nation suddenly became a disturbing bureaucratic anomaly that required correction. Despite Per ons alleged surprise and insistence that they were Argentinean like anyone else, not much changed for most Toba and Wich .

In the western Chaco, the documentation of the late 1940s had a limited reach, and the majority of the abor genes remained without ID papers for at least two more decades. Even though, from a legal standpoint, they had been declared citizens, what mattered to most Toba and Wich was that they were still deprived of the material objects that represented this status. In fact, it was at the sugar plantations that people felt particularly alienated from ID papers, as they regularly interacted with workers who did have documents. This estrangement was accentuated by their interaction with new systems of documentation, tied this time to labor discipline. As I have analyzed elsewhere (Gordillo 2004), at the plantations the abor genes of the Chaco became part of an ethnicized labor hierarchy that located them at the bottom of a heterogeneous labor force. Toba, Wich , Chorote, Nivacl e, and Pilag a men and women were employed to weed, clear patches of forest, plant cane, and chop rewood, and they lived in straw and cane-leaf huts they built in improvised camps. The seasonal cane cutters (peasants from the Argentinean highlands and Bolivia) and the permanent eld and factory workers (Guaran and criollos), in contrast, were relatively better-paid, skilled workers who were provided with housing. This labor experience immersed the Chaco groups in a documentation system that reinforced, once again, the importance of written papers. Yet the latter were not part of the optics of state power but of the plantations capitalist social relations, which produced records through which work was classied, measured, and paid. This required, rst, that each indigenous worker be named in Spanish. Scott (1998:6471) has examined the creation of last names as the historical result of state attempts to make subjects legible for tax purposes or conscription. Yet, in the western Chaco, making indigenous people legible was initially tied not to state practices but to a capitalist system of labor discipline. The selection of names was often the result of the whims of plantation employees, who either named workers after Argentinean historical gures (e.g., Larrea, Saavedra, Moreno, or Estrada) or did so following more pragmatic, depersonalizing criteria, such as the persons location in the queue (Primero, Segundo, or Tercero; i.e., First, Second, or Third).7 In cases such as these, naming was yet another way of reifying indigenous people as malleable objects subject to manipulation, whose new identity resulted from the mimetic imposition of the national history on them or from their reduction to quantiable markers. On other occasions, indigenous workers maneuvered vis-` a-vis these constraints and created Spanish phonetic versions of their indigenous names or chose to be named after their criollo neighbors in the Chaco. Yet, in all cases, they ended up with two personal names: an indigenous name and a rst and last name in Spanish.8 On the basis of this system of legibility, the administration opened a planilla (le) for each worker. At the end of

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each workday, foremen made sure the worker had completed the task of the day, made a mark in the planilla, and gave him or her a ration in cash. At the end of the harvest, people were paid according to what was written in their les, and this experience made the importance of the planillas all the more apparent. Because indigenous workers were illiterate and innumerate, they did not exactly know how much money they were owed and this situation made them particularly vulnerable to abuses. In 1914, an inspector of the Argentinean Department of Labor wrote about the nal payment at one of the largest sugar plantations: The employee who pays can write any type of sum, $12 or $96. The Indian will always pick up the receipt, with any type of amount written in it, because he does not know how to distinguish the numbers (Unsain 1914:71). This did not prevent people from having the impression they were making great gains, for they usually returned to the Chaco with horses and donkeys and loaded with clothes, utensils, and riding gear (Gordillo 2002, 2004). Peoples estrangement from these receipts and also their fascination with the commodities they granted contributed to the power projected onto these papers, which many Toba and Wich brought back to the Chaco and (especially in the early 20th century) showed to military ofcers and explorers as certicates of good behavior. Despite the signicance of these texts, interaction with documented workers who were above them in the labor hierarchy made many Toba and Wich aware that they lacked the most important of all certicates: the ID papers granted by the federal government. Because of this contrast, in the cane elds the fetishization of ID documents became particularly widespread and intense. Among the Toba, memories of the plantations often hinge on how their lack of papers affected them negatively in multiple ways. We worked as if we were underage, commented Mariano, a man in his fties, in a conversation he and I had in 1997. By summarizing how many Toba felt as undocumented workers, he also captured the status of nonadults that had been imposed on them earlier in the century. In contrast to this view of themselves, many Toba remember the cane cutters as bold, knowledgeable workers who regularly challenged the administration through the union; they often add that the abor genes did not join strikes because we didnt have documentos. Many Toba, in this regard, remember the lack of documentos as an ontological condition that conrmed their inferior social status and deprived them not just of the right to join the union but also of the right to protest; in short, they had the impression that their lack of documentation crippled their capacity to resist exploitation. In July 1996, Tom as, a Toba man in his fties, was remembering the ingenio and told me, We didnt have a delegate, we didnt have a lawyer, we didnt have a union. When the union protested, we the abor genes had nothing to do with it. The union was bold, of course, because they had documentos. We had nothing to do with it. We were poor; we

kept on working. We kept on working. I asked him why they did not join the union-led protest, and he replied, matter-offactly, Because we didnt have documentos. The cane cutters did. In Tom ass eyes, unionized workers challenged the administration, rst and foremost, because they had documentos, as if collective struggles were not the outcome of particular elds of force, political experiences, and relations of domination but the result of a formalized arrangement dictated by potent things: ID papers. When the Toba remember the cane cutters as workers who had documents, many specically refer to the Bolivians. Paradoxically, the latter, as foreign nationals, initially lacked Argentinean papers. But many Toba saw them as rich workers who, given their respectable position as cane cutters and their activism, must have had documentos. In other words, because many Toba presupposed that ID papers had the power to dictate the status of a social group, they assumed that those bold, well-paid workers could not but have them. Some people also considered that having those papers determined not only ones activism but also ones wealth. In the 1990s, Bolivian families that had worked at the ingenio opened several stores in the town of Ingeniero Ju arez, 60 kilometers south of the Toba villages. They were very successful, and in a few years dominated the local retail clothing business. Mariano told me about those retailers, drawing on his memory of the sugar plantations: The Bolivians had documentos, so they became rich. Now theyre selling clothes in Ju arez. . . . If back then we had documentos, we would have many things. Since we didnt have documentos, we have few things. For Mariano, having proper documentation was the main force behind the Bolivians wealth; by the same token, he saw the Tobas prolonged alienation from ID papers as the main factor explaining their current poverty.9 This contrast was particularly apparent to him because at one point both groups (Bolivians and Toba) worked in the same place sharing a similar class status. Implicit here is a view of state documents as objects comparable to a currency that grants material wealth to its holders, a point to which I return when analyzing the current use of ID papers in relations of political patronage. Drawing on similar perceptions, some Toba and Wich remember the poor sanitary and living conditions of their work camps as the product of their undocumented status. I asked Luis, a Wich man cited earlier, why many people fell ill at the ingenio. Because we didnt have documentos, he replied. Without documentos, you can do nothing. Thats the custom of this law. We didnt have documentos. They treated us like dogs. . . . You know that according to the law those who have no documentos cant denounce anything. And then we couldnt denounce them. We didnt have documentos. Once again, Luis read the lack of ID papers as a paralyzing experience (you can do nothing) sanctied by law. And this alienation not only excluded abor genes from health services but also hindered their capacity to complain.

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By repeating the phrase we didnt have documentos several times, he made clear that he regarded this alienation from a powerful object, the ID papers, as the dening factor in these experiences. The use of the past tense in these references to documents (we didnt have them) also highlights that Luis saw these experiences as part of the past. In the next section, I turn to the distribution of ID papers in northwest Formosa in the late 1960s and its impact on local political practices and forms of subjectivity.

Living with ID papers: Political patronage and nationality

The moment that most Toba and Wich in this region had long awaited nally arrived in 1968. By then, several leaders had been putting pressure on the Anglican missionaries to demand that ofcials distribute ID papers. One of the missionaries who began lobbying the government noted peoples high expectations about putting an end to their undocumented status. He also wrote that, on asking a Wich man what he desired most in life, the man replied, without hesitation, My documento (Leake 1968:10). The mediation of the Anglican Church eventually paid off. In June of 1968, the government organized a massive documentation campaign through which scores of ofcials visited outlying villages, recording individual identities, taking photos, and distributing ID papers. The men and women who received their papers then remember that moment as an exhilarating event that broke with decades of political estrangement. These documents marked an Argentinean citizenship free of cultural distinctions, for they did not specify the holders ethnicity but simply their name, date of birth, and gender; each also included a paramount visual symbol of modern individuality: the holders photo. These new signs of identity implied that people had to comply with new patterns of legibility. In 1999, a Toba man in his sixties named Benigno remembered, When they made the documentos we didnt know our dates of birth. They wrote a date in a book. They just calculated the year of birth. For me, they calculated 1936. This man made clear that documents required the production and invention of quantitative markers of personal identity originally alien to them, such as birth dates. ID papers also constructed new identities based on the Spanish names fashioned at the ingenios. Those names, used originally only in work les, became peoples visible, public names in relation to the state. Most Toba and Wich agree that people were more than eager to adapt to these requirements, which allowed them to afrm a previously denied identity as Argentinean. Further, for many people this nationality became almost synonymous with personhood. Among the Mapuche, the largest indigenous group in Patagonia, many currently remember that the ID papers made us people

(Briones 1993:81). Likewise, indigenous people in the Chaco often feel that documentation upgraded their status to that of legal personhood, putting an end to a condition that had made them as vulnerable as animals and that, in fact, many people viewed as a major force in the violence once unleashed on them. Paradoxically, the Toba and Wich of northwest Formosa were nally granted their ID documents by a military dictatorship that had taken power in the country two years earlier and was curbing the political rights of all citizens. This documentation campaign was tied to modernizing narratives that claimed that marginalized rural populations had to be incorporated into the nation; but it was also part of an attempt to expand the apparatus of state legibility and surveillance into sensitive border areas. Not surprisingly, one of the rst consequences of documentation was the enlistment of some young indigenous men in the servicio militar (military service). Until mandatory military service was abolished in Argentina in 1994, however, only a very low percentage of Toba and Wich from this region were ever enlisted. This is probably why most people currently remember military service as a relatively minor nuisance that was offset by the new type of collective recognition gained through documentation. Some Toba argue, with a degree of bitterness, that they could have received their papers earlier had some Anglican missionaries not opposed documentation on the grounds that men would be forced to serve in the military. This distribution of ID papers under a repressive regime meant that, in fact, for several years it was not part of a process of political empowerment. In 1973, democracy was briey restored and many Toba and Wich voted in national elections for the rst time (in most cases only vaguely aware of the factions luring their votes), but in 1976 a new and more repressive dictatorship took power. In remembering those days, however, most Toba and Wich do not make reference to the military regimes restrictions. In this region, overtly violent forms of repression were relatively rare, and people agree that, back then, they didnt know much about politics anyway. What mattered, most agree, was that they already had documents. This was not without practical signicance. First, the routine checkpoints imposed by the military or the police regularly involved the demand for ID papers. As earlier in the century, being able to produce written proof of documentation could affect the type of engagement one had with armed agents of the state. Second, men and women began using their papers to apply for forms of state assistance, such as pensions, or to receive health care at the regional hospital. Even though the migrations to the sugar plantations came to an end because of the mechanization of production, people began working on cotton and bean farms and carrying their ID documents with them. This certainly did not hinder exploitation, but it allowed them to register their personal identity in the farms system of payment and, on some

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occasions, gave them a visibility with which to contest abuses by ling complaints with the local police. Documents acquired new political meanings with the return of a democratically elected government in Argentina at the end of 1983, when party politics immersed Toba and Wich villages within new elds of negotiation and conict. Because voters must present their Documento Nacional de Identidad (DNI; National Identity Card) prior to voting, the card became a crucial marker of political agency. Whereas in previous years having ID papers meant people had joined a broader national community, in the second half of the 1980s it signaled their transformation into actors with a certain political clout, especially in a region where the majority of the population (and, hence, of the electorate) is indigenous. This process was also notable because it turned documentos into semicommodied tokens of political patronage, a phenomenon that added further potency to their materiality and also shaped the interpretations and memories presented above. At the time of elections, it is not unusual to see local candidates (indigenous and nonindigenous alike) touring villages and collecting the DNIs of their political clients in exchange for favors or merchandise (usually food). On election day, these candidates and their assistants give the DNIs back to their supporters near the voting sites, together with envelopes containing the right ballots to be deposited in the box. Many Toba and Wich are critical of these practices and point to their exploitative nature. But those who temporarily give up their documentation usually argue that they simply attempt to manipulate the competition among candidates to their advantage by selling their vote to the highest bidder. These practices are not unrelated to the view, examined earlier, that having documents can determine ones wealth. This case, nonetheless, also shows that what is commodied is the state authority embedded in the DNI, primarily the right to vote, rather than the papers themselves. The personal identity inscribed in the documento is not transferable and, therefore (unlike what happens with ordinary commodities), its holder ultimately retains possession over it. This commoditization of votes turns the DNI into a particularly valuable token, especially in a context of widespread poverty, for people can use it over and over to obtain some material benets without losing possession of it (at the cost, certainly, of reproducing their dependence on relations of patronage and empowering local politicians).10 Together with the inuence of the memories examined earlier, these factors make state documents among the most valuable objects any individual can possess. This explains why people take great care in protecting them from dust, rain, or insects by keeping them in plastic bags inside their homes.11 As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the imaginaries analyzed in these pages are particularly widespread among adults who are over 40 years of age. New generations of Toba and Wich that did not personally experience what their parents and grandparents went through are gradually

taking ID papers for granted as part of everyday political landscapes. Hence, among young people, documents are beginning to lose the aura that older people still attach to them, in the sense that their potency is less readily invoked to explain major aspects of a collective history. Most youths, nonetheless, know about the time when people didnt have documents. They are aware that obtaining the citizenship symbolized by the ID papers was for the abor genes a painful, prolonged crucible that constrained their lives in multiple ways; consequently, they do not take their nationality lightly. In contrast to other indigenous groups in Argentina (such as the Mapuche or the Guaran in Jujuy) in which some leaders articulate lukewarm connections to a nationally dened identity, most Toba and Wich young and oldoften claim a rm identity as Argentineans. They certainly know that their citizenship has not hindered forms of inequality and injustice and that they are as poor as they are aboriginal; but this ethnicized class identity is blended with a strong sense of national belonging that challenges Euro-Argentinean narratives about the whiteness of the nation.12 More importantly, it is an identity that many Toba and Wich feel they had to wrest from the actors that had deemed abor genes unt for it. Because of this, their national allegiance often adopts an assertive, defensive tone that is indicative of its past fragility. For many people, this historical tension between what was denied to them and what they have gained is condensed in the substance of their ID documents.

Conclusion
The histories, practices, and memories examined in this article take me full circle to the anecdote presented in the opening paragraphs. Many Toba and Wich are eager to show their ID papers to visitors because those documents were for a long time unreachable markers of national membership, their absence symbolizing the marginalization of indigenous groups from the body of the nation. Unlike what happened in the early 20th century, this keenness to display documents is not aimed at deecting threats of violence; yet it indicates that memories of violence and oppression still make many people feel that they have to prove their citizenship, as if their aboriginality made them potentially suspect of not being fully Argentinean. Even though most Toba and Wich have possessed ID documents for several decades and younger generations grew up in a context in which they can obtain them at birth, their collective memory is still shaped by past experiences of estrangement from the national community. This alienation created views of documents that are marked by one of the distinctive features of fetishism: the projection of the power created by historical relations onto the reied substance of objects. Michael Taussig has argued that the salient property of the fetish is to register the representation rather than the being represented, the mode of signication at the expense of the thing being signied (1997:94). In

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the Chaco, the fetishization of ID papers condenses this twofold process. Many people turn their documento into a representation of citizenship that, even though deriving its power from the state, gains a force of its own. And the mode of signication (the ID paper) acquires its potency at the expense of what is being signied, the web of relations and rights constitutive of national forms of membership. My analysis of the fetishization of ID papers should not be read as an attempt to downplay the very real effects that being undocumented has had on the Toba and Wich or, for that matter, that it currently has on millions of people worldwide. Being able to produce a state-sanctioned proof of identity does affect whether one can cross international borders, access social benets, or pass through a police checkpoint on the street. Yet the naturalization of those objects often makes one forget that passports, green cards, or drivers licenses are worthless without the social relations that produce them and give meaning to them as symbols of something else. The power that people invest in those documents lies there, in those relations and conventions, rather than in their physical materiality. Certainly, many people worldwide are aware of these conventions. As I argued at the beginning of this article, fetishism is not the natural, inevitable outcome of state documentation. What has made many Toba and Wich adults see ID papers not only as symbols but also as fetishized objects were the violent, exploitative conditions in which these people were incorporated into the nation-state and, simultaneously, denied membership in it. It was this particularly profound estrangement that made many people view ID documents, the ultimate emblem of what they were being alienated from, as objects that had the power to dictate major events in their history. This experience, in turn, was also molded by views of the state as the thinglike entity that originally projected its potency onto the papers. The reication of ID documents, in short, is not disconnected from state fetishism and is partially shaped by it. In critical social theory, the concept of fetishism is closely tied to notions of ideological mystication: that is, it implies that reication obscures the historical nature of the products of social action and blurs recognition that the physical materiality of things has nothing to do with their value (Pietz 1993:147). These ideological aspects are certainly at play in Toba and Wich views of ID papers, especially when these people downplay the agency of social actors (including their own) in explaining violence, poverty, or political struggles. Yet this does not necessarily make these views expressions of a false consciousness that fails to grasp the real workings of state documentation. These perceptions contain elements of a critical awareness of the intricate connection between documentation and domination. In the early 20th century, the circulation of myriad private notes, in fact, temporarily destabilized the reication of the state as the unied source of that power. Indigenous people quickly

learned about the conventions used to measure their reliability through written texts and manipulated the latter accordingly, even if under adverse conditions and even if what ultimately made those papers effective was their recognition by the militaryand, hence, by armed state agentsas legitimate. More recently, many Toba and Wich have also shown a critical awareness of the power embedded in modern forms of bureaucracy. As Peter Wogan has argued in the case of Ecuador, the attribution of potency to written texts by indigenous people shows that, in fact, they do understand the way writing works: they understand that documentation is intimately connected with power; [and] not just . . . with power, but with exploitative power (2004:38). The same can be said about the Chaco case, in which the preoccupation with the materiality of ID papers ultimately signals that people did learn that state agencies evaluated national membership through them. In this article, I have situated part of my argument within discussions on state legibility. Yet to contend that individual documentation made the Toba and Wich more legible and, hence, more subject to state domination would be to make an obvious but ultimately misleading point. These people know all too well that they were targets of violence and labor overexploitation especially when they were not legible as citizens. And they learned that documents that made them look reliable and visible often provided them with the little protection they could get from those forces. Throughout much of the 20th century, indigenous people regarded the most important of those papers, state-issued ID documents, as elusive objects that state agents kept away from them. For that reason, by unwrapping those plastic bags and showing their documentos to visitors, many Toba and Wich make a statement about the way in which past absences have been materialized in the present. In a brief gesture, they conjure up the ghosts of the past and say, We are Argentinean.

Notes
Acknowledgments. I presented earlier versions of this article at the 102nd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago, November 2003; at the conference Mestizaje in the Americas at Casa de Vel azquez in Madrid in December 2003; and in the Anthropology and Sociology Graduate Student Conference at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in March 2004. I am grateful to Maya Parson and Guillaume Boccara for inviting me (respectively) to Chicago and Madrid and to Matthew Gutmann and Enrique Mayer for their comments as discussants. I am also greatly indebted to the three anonymous reviewers for American Ethnologist and to my UBC colleagues Carole Blackburn, Vinay Kamat, Andrew Martindale, Pat Moore, Anand Pandian, John Torpey, and Felice Wyndham for their careful, challenging observations during the nal but very signicant round of revisions. I gathered the ethnographic material included in this article on different trips to the Chaco between the mid-1990s and 2003, mostly among the western Toba. My eldwork among the Wich took place in a nearby

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village in June 2000 and June 2003. Fieldwork was funded in the late 1990s by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and in 2003 by a Hampton Social Science Large Grant from the University of British Columbia. 1. Most of these displays (at least in front of me) involved Toba men, primarily because it was men who hosted my visits in their homes. During my eldwork, nonetheless, I noticed that this preoccupation with the materiality of ID papers also characterized women. 2. These similarities set these groups apart from Toba and Wich in other areas of the Argentinean Chaco, who were either fully proletarianized (as some eastern Toba and some Wich in Salta) or became small farmers (as many eastern Toba). On these other groups, see Miller 1979, Carrasco and Briones 1996, and Wright 2003, among others. In the remainder of the article (except when mentioned otherwise), all references about the Toba and Wich are to people living in northwest Formosa. 3. For a long time, the government restricted political rights to people living in provincias (provinces), the regions rst settled by the Spanish. In the territorios nacionales (national territories) which comprised areas recently incorporated within the reach of state sovereignty, such as Chaco and Formosamales did not have the right to vote. In Formosa, this situation changed when the territory became a province in 1955. 4. Several state ofcials had put forward unsuccessful attempts to create a Patronato Nacional de Indios, a national institute for the tutelage of Indians inspired by patronatos (orphanages; Beck 1994:87). 5. Whether the presence of a state-produced document in the hands of the Pilag a hunters would have changed the outcome of this encounter is impossible to know. Yet one can relatively safely conclude that, in the eyes of those soldiers, the handwritten note from the missionary did not carry much weight because of its private nature. 6. In 1937, President Agust n Justo announced the creation of the ofces of the Registro Civil (Civilian Registry) in Napalp and Bartolom e de las Casas in order to give a civil status to the ind genas [indigenes] and lead them into the legal practices of civilized life (Lenton 1999:23). In 1940, the government created the Consejo Agrario Nacional (Agrarian National Council) with the aim of setting up a national registry of indigenous people. These policies, however, did not materialize. 7. Currently, these last names are especially common among the Guaran (formerly known as Chiriguano) who currently live near the plantations in Jujuy and Salta. 8. For decades, most indigenous people used each name in different settings: the indigenous name in interactions with people from their own ethnic group and the Spanish name in dealings with foremen, ofcials, settlers, and members of other indigenous groups. Among new generations, the tendency to use the Spanish name as the main name is growing, even in interactions with relatives and neighbors. 9. Certainly, not all blame their poverty on their past undocumented status. As I have analyzed elsewhere (Gordillo 2002, 2004), local explanations of poverty and wealth are diverse and contradictory and also include self-deprecating references to the abor genes ignorance and allusions to the relations of domination historically imposed on them by the rich. 10. A further, albeit different aspect in the commoditization of ID papers is that, except when government agencies organize documentation campaigns free of charge, people have to pay for the documents photos, and this hinders their capacity to readily obtain documentation for their children. On countless occasions during my eldwork, people asked me whether my camera took the

type of pictures (four by four cm) required for the DNI and were disappointed to hear that it did not. These commodied dimensions point, on the one hand, to the constraints that keep some people from accessing ID papers (i.e., the cost of photos), and on the other hand, to aspects of that commoditization that may temporarily, if frailly, empower them (i.e., using their papers to obtain favors or goods from political candidates). 11. The preoccupation with documentation has also shaped Toba and Wich views of documents that are not state related but associated with religious institutions. In addition to showing me their ID papers, some people also displayed ID cards or certicates issued by the Anglican Church or the Iglesia Evang elica Unida (Evangelical United Church, a Pentecostal indigenous church), again, for no other apparent reason than making me see they had them. Elmer Miller (1979:147148) noted that, in the eastern Chaco, one of the main concerns of Toba Pentecostal leaders in the 1950s was to obtain the chero, the document through which the government authorized non-Catholic religious organizations to hold their public meetings. The preoccupation with legal documents and, in general, with the power of the written word has also shaped views of the healing power of religious texts. Among the western Toba, at the services of the Iglesia Unida and at some Anglican healing sessions, some men heal patients by rubbing the open text of the Bible over the aficted body part. These practices do not involve the use of ID papers, an indication that the power of the latter is not associated with healing potency. 12. The ongoing low-intensity conict between the Argentinean and Paraguayan governments involving the irregular ow of the Pilcomayo River, for instance, often makes ordinary Toba and Wich adopt an anti-Paraguayan rhetoric based on nationalist sentiments about the river being stolen from Argentina (Gordillo and Leguizam on 2002).

References cited
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accepted November 7, 2005 final version submitted November 7, 2005 Gast on Gordillo Department of Anthropology and Sociology University of British Columbia 6303 NW Marine Drive Vancouver BC V6T 1Z1 Canada gordillo@interchange.ubc.ca

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