Aconcagua: The Invention of Mountaineering on America’s Highest Peak

3. Indigenous Identities: The Mummy, the Mountaineer, and Re-ethnification

63 chapter three Indigenous Identities The Mummy, the Mountaineer, and Re-ethnification Aconcagua (6,962) With its almost 7,000 meters, is the highest summit in the western hemisphere. It is situated 240 km. west from Mendoza city, 600 km. east from Santiago de Chile and 1,300 km. from Buenos Aires. This peak was considered a sacred sanctuary by the Incas; it was there that they offered sacrifices to their deities. (In 1985 a momified [sic] body of an Incan child was found by an expedition at more than 5,000 mts. high, it contained golden ritual objects 500 yrs. old.) —constelaciones agency The Mendoza poster cited above pointedly situates Aconcagua for mountaineers journeying from afar by pinpointing both its distance from Argentine and Chilean cities and from Anglo-European tradition.1 Highlighting the Incan ties to Aconcagua rather than some other mountaineering fact to sell adventure rearticulates a long-standing discursive economy in which a premodern image of “the Andes” is exported to satisfy North American and European expectations and desires of pre-Columbian empires and exotic difference. Accordingly, both kilometers and the Incan mummy serve as coordinates of distance to chart Aconcagua on the map of international mountaineering. This selling of Aconcagua in terms of ethnic and temporal distance relies on a virtual re-indigenization of the high mountain region, which for nearly four hundred years has not been home to its original native peoples and communities. However, there has also been another kind of re-indigenization taking place in the region. The boom in Mendoza’s mountaineering industry since the mid-1980s coincides with a national “ethnic reemergence” (Gordillo and Hirsch 2003, 5–6) that has both informed and contested 64 • Chapter 3 the representations of indigeneity in the Aconcagua zone. A legal and cultural movement of re-ethnification emerged in the Uspallata Valley, near the Aconcagua Provincial Park, in the mid-1990s, when the commune of Guaytamari gained official recognition as a Huarpe community and began developing a heritage industry to chronicle and display both preand post-Incan occupation of the area. The resurgence of local indigenous identities in the alta montaña, along with their own touristic projects, complicates the ways in which the area’s indigenous past and present are read. The very presence of a modern-day Huarpe commune challenges the privileging, by governmental tourist projects and, especially, by mountaineering , of the Incan heritage of the region to characterize the indigenous nature of the area. The uneasy coexistence of mountaineering rhetoric and practices and Guaytamari’s undertakings in the high mountain zone speak to tensions in contemporary Argentina’s self-identification, that is, its coming to terms with a past founded on the myth of a white European homogeneity and a present being forged by an ethnically diverse society (Gordillo and Hirsch 2003; Quijada 2004, 425–430). Moreover, the dynamics of mountain tourism that contextualize the process of re-indigenization in the Aconcagua zone serve to exemplify the ways in which the business of tourism intervenes and mediates in the political, social, and cultural negotiations of national and ethnic identity construction. Indigenous Aconcagua The equating of the mountain with a premodern indigenous past in order to imbue it with an exotic, “other worldly” spirituality encourages the understanding of mountaineering as an activity that allows its practitioners to transcend the mundane and the ordinary of the world below. The indigenous on Aconcagua, a mountaineering site, is not visibly or physically manifested through the presence of bodies, ceremonies, practices, or language use. Rather it is imagined and elicited through textual, linguistic, and topographical cues primed for tourist consumption. It is drawn from the texts and images in pamphlets and posters and on websites that are produced by Mendocino mountaineering service agencies and by international groups and individuals. These varied media narrate accounts of the Incan presence on the mountain, as well as the etymologies of its name, in order to create a dislocated and fragmented indigenous history that reconstructs Aconcagua’s indigeneity as virtual and intangible. Indigenous Identities • 65 Most salient in mountaineering’s emphasis on the indigenous characteristics of Aconcagua is indeed the discussion of its name, clearly an indigenous term, whose origin and meaning are contested. Some sources claim it is a Mapuche term meaning “from the other side,” corresponding to the Aconcagua River in Chile. However, many Mendocino mountaineering agencies, both online and in print, explain that the roots...