Scribbling on the Wreck

Abstract

On the way to Cafayate, somewhere north of Tucumán, the ruined citadel of the Quilmes Indians allows me the leisure of pausing. Perched on the pinnacle of what was once the fortress of a mighty nation, I admire the heights that I have scaled; I stretch my gaze over the horizon; I try to imagine life as it might have been before time swept it all away. Nonetheless, these are not free thoughts, unshackled from any earlier logic. After all, the guidebook has intervened far before my arrival, alerting me to the story of the rise and fall of this once flourishing culture. The largest settlement in Argentina before the Conquest, the Quilmes first resisted the Inca empire and then, for 130 years, opposed the power of Spanish invaders. We know from the tour books that the Spaniards dragged the last Quilmes survivors on foot to Buenos Aires. Most perished in the march. We are also told that the ruins were rehabilitated during Videla’s military dictatorship (1976–1983). Who then can escape the irony of the junta’s gesture, staged in 1978, possibly its cruelest moment, of remembering its native peoples who, much like 30,000 citizens under military rule, had also been disappeared? This is an all-too familiar narrative that runs from Wounded Knee to Tierra del Fuego: first we kill indigenous peoples and later we return as tourists to celebrate their achievements.

Like ossuaries, ruins prove the end of nationalisms and frontiers to which we so laboriously adhere.

—Luisa Futoransky