Learning Indigenous Languages in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Abstract

This chapter discusses Indigenous language programs in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Specifically, it explores how participants in these programs understand themselves to be defending and recuperating Argentina’s linguistic and cultural diversity. It discusses how Argentina’s nation-building project produced a highly racialized national identity that constructs the national subject as the descendant of European immigrants. It shows how this construction of national identity shapes participants’ decisions to learn Indigenous languages, whether or not they have direct heritage connections. It argues that, for them, learning an Indigenous language is part of a larger project of reimaging Argentine national identity as culturally diverse and Latin American, rather than exceptionally white and European. It examines how participants are mobilized by a particular understanding of “interculturality” as a vehicle for social transformation. Finally, it argues that this reimaging involves a geographic re-centering of indigeneity from the margins of the nation to the heart of Buenos Aires.